BUM IS NO BEGGAR : How Are You Going to Keep Him Down on the Farm After He’s Seen Houston and the NFL World? It’s Easy

Thirty-one miles straight south of the Astrodome, where the Houston Oilers are playing football on this day, O. A. (Bum) Phillips has been building an oat bin since sunup.

With the help of three neighbors, he will have it nicely pounded into place before supper time.

“Man who cain’t build an oat bin in a day should find some other way to make a livin’,” he says.

Phillips, 63, used to spend his Sundays at the Astrodome, where he coached the Oilers for six years.

He’s the only winner they’ve had there in the last quarter century.

He hasn’t seen them play, though, since they fired him in 1980, except once, when he was coaching the New Orleans Saints.

And he hasn’t seen a football game, anywhere, since he quit the Saints just a year ago. There was then a month remaining of the 37th and last season that Phillips spent in football.

“It ain’t that I hate football,” he says. “It ain’t that at all. I love football more than anythin’ else in this world except horses and my wife. But I’m too busy nowadays for football.

“Maybe there’s times I see the second half of the Monday night game. But since I got this place five months ago, I been workin’ seven, eight, nine days a week, and lovin’ it all.”

This place is the 2,000-acre Oak Tree Ranch, which he has leased from an oil-rich friend. The lease will take him into the 1990s and, he trusts, beyond.

Phillips put in many long days searching for such a place, and when he found it, he says, he knew instinctively that this is where he wants to spend the rest of his life.

About halfway between Houston and the Gulf of Mexico, the ranch steams and shimmers in the humidity of some of the hottest, flattest land south of North Dakota.

There are 550 Phillips cows, a dozen horses, and thousands of low-growing oak trees on the property, plus three little ranch houses and 10 or 12 barns, sheds and other buildings. The help lives on the ranch. Phillips lives with his wife 19 miles up the Houston road in Dewalt, an old Houston suburb.

“This is one of the only two things I ever wanted to do,” says the man called Bum, the name he’s gone by since the 1920s, when a baby sister couldn’t pronounce brother. “This and coachin’ football. No fishin’ for me. No golfin’. Just horses, football, and, when I let up a bit, dominoes.”

Ranching can be a lonely life, and he does miss the kind of people one gets to know as a famous football coach.

“The day I took over the New Orleans Saints (in 1981) was one of the most excitin’ days of my life,” he says. “They had 1,500 people at a booster luncheon, and every last one of them wanted to be my friend.”

One was the priest who delivered the invocation that is an invariable component of football in the South, at games, luncheons, whatever.

“It was a powerful prayer,” Phillips remembers. “The priest said: ‘Oh, Lord, when Israel was in trouble, you sent them three wise men from the East. I hope you know what you’re doing now, dear Lord, sending us one Bum from the West.’ ”

Phillips grins a little, thinking about it.

But instead of the dais on which he once sat as the toast of New Orleans, Bum Phillips is sitting on a tractor today in a desolate Texas field.

He looks much as he did in, say, Pittsburgh a decade ago, when the Oilers were playing there in a series of memorable games.

The big face is a little fuller and older now, and there’s a bit more to the stomach than there used to be. But the big Texas Stetson could be the one he used to wear on the sidelines at Three Rivers Stadium. The jeans could also be the same. And the old cowboy boots are doubtless the same.

The only thing really new, or newer, is the white shirt with the modest inscription on one sleeve, “New Orleans Saints.”

He wouldn’t have worn that at the heart-stopping Steeler-Oiler games of the 1970s, when, as he said then, “The road to the Super Bowl runs through Pittsburgh.”

Then as now, Houston and Pittsburgh played in the same division, and it was Phillips’ misfortune to come up with his best teams in the years when the Steelers were a shade better and going to the Super Bowl all the time.

Phillips had running back Earl Campbell at his peak when the Steelers had quarterback Terry Bradshaw at his, and each year, for four years consecutively, they split their home-and-home series.

In championship games, though, as football fans know, the great passer beats the great runner almost every time. For Phillips, the road to the Super Bowl always stopped in Pittsburgh.

“You got to remember that a lot of fellers never got that far,” he says, with a touch of pride.

The pride is well founded. Phillips was well thought of, and well rewarded, in the National Football League. He was working for $600,000 a year in New Orleans when, with four games left, he stepped down 51 weeks ago.

The day he left, the Saints, bound by a long-term contract, owed him another $1,350,000 for 1985-6-7, every dollar guaranteed.

“I walked out on all of it,” Phillips says. “I walked away from a million, three-hundred fifty thousand. When I told (club owner) Tom Benson that I was leavin’, I told him he didn’t owe me a penny. I don’t think Tom would’ve fired me, ever, but even if he had, I wouldn’t’ve let him pay me. Way I see it, a man don’t earn it, it don’t belong to him.”

In 1975, Phillips says, he told Oiler owner Bud Adams the same thing. “When he hired me, I said, ‘Someday you’ll fire me, Mr. Adams, but don’t worry about it, you won’t owe me a damn penny.’ ”

In 1980, unaccountably, Adams did fire Phillips after Bum had led the Oilers to consecutive 11-5 seasons following a 10-6 season. Without Phillips, the Oilers slumped instantly, and in no time they were down to 2-14 and 3-13. So far this season, they are 2-9.

“I only said one thing when Bud Adams fired me,” Phillips recalls. “I thanked him for seven years and told him, ‘We’re even.’

“I’ve always said there’s only two kinds of coaches--them that’s been fired, and them that’s goin’ to get fired.”

Phillips’ final season a year ago was a painful one. He departed with a 4-8 record. His son Wade, who took over, finished 1-3. Together they were an unimpressive 5-11.

“I’d already decided (before the season) to make (1985) my last year in football,” says Bum, who was a college lineman at Stephen F. Austin 40-odd years ago. “When it got to where I couldn’t get to .500 I thought somebody else should take a shot.

“Sure, I could’ve used the million dollars, but I wasn’t desperate. This is a league that has a great retirement plan for coaches.

“When you coach as long as I did (15 years in the NFL) and if you make as much as I did in your last five years, you earn the maximum, and the maximum ain’t bad.

“Under their retirement plan, they’ll be payin’ me $90,000 a year for the rest of my life.

“Man cain’t make it on $90,000, his livin’ expenses are too high.”

The difference between Phillips’ town and some of the other little towns on the flatlands along the gulf is that Rosharon has a stop-and-go light, reportedly the envy of Sandy Point, and even Guy, Tex.

Although no other vehicle is anywhere in sight, Phillips waits for the green light before turning left and heading north. He’s driving a late-model red pickup truck that boasts many of the comforts of civilization, things like power windows and a cassette player.

Carrying his music with him, Phillips puts on a country tape. He never listens to the radio.

“I don’t need the news,” he remarks idly, turning the volume down a bit. “If they have a war, I figure someone will tell me.”

As usual, Phillips will be in the truck for 19 minutes on his way to Dewalt, the suburb where he built his house on a 10-acre lakeside plot in 1979-80. He shows a visitor the little private lake first.

“I built it and stocked it (with fish) before I built the house,” he says. “The lake and the land took my last $50,000. I had to save up a while for the house. Then I got fired (by the Oilers) four days before I moved in.”

The demands of ranching leave him only a few hours here each day. The dedicated angler in the Phillips family is Bum’s wife, Helen. Because it’s a 12- or 15-minute walk around their lake, she uses a motorized golf cart equipped with a bait tank.

“She fishes from the cart all the time, but she’s no good at untangling lines,” says Bum. “So I go along with her when I can, and watch her fish. I like that, ‘cause she’s a fine-looking woman. ‘Course, I wouldn’t’ve married any other kind.”

Inside the spreading ranch-type house there’s a pleasing view of Lake Phillips from a living room about the size of the main dining room in a hotel.

A long, curving bar seats 26, including, sometimes, the seven grandchildren. A domino table has a place of honor in front of the picture windows.

“This year is the first time I ever had time to play in the Texas state domino tournament,” Phillips says. “But I ain’t goin’ to enter that again. They won’t let you talk in them tournaments. You cain’t say a word--and bee-essin’ is half the fun of dominoes.”

An oversized TV screen has been placed near Phillips’ domino table, and nearby there are overstuffed chairs. A TV satellite dish is outside.

“My wife sees all the (Philadelphia) Eagle games,” Bum says. “Our son (Wade) is the defensive coordinator for Buddy Ryan.”

Four of the five Phillips daughters are married. A small bumper sticker on Bum’s pickup truck discloses the whereabouts of No. 5, Kim Ann, who is 20. The sticker reads, “I am a TAM Dad.” TAM is Texas A&M.;

At home, after parking his truck next to his wife’s Mercedes, Phillips always inspects the orchard that shades his house--the pear, peach, plum, fig and pecan trees he planted 15 years ago.

“A squirrel got all the pecans again this year,” he says sadly. “Feller told me he’d loan me a gun to shoot the squirrel with, but after thinkin’ it over, I said, ‘No, thanks.’ I told him that I’d go to the store and buy my pecans again. That way I’ll have some pecans and the squirrel both.”

Phillips says he isn’t much of a hunter. Even as a boy, he didn’t care for it. “I was always too busy playin’ dominoes,” he says.

He was born into a large family in Beaumont, where his father, an auto mechanic, ran a dairy on the side.

Bum didn’t care for dairy farming, either.

“Ain’t much fun milkin’ cows 367 days a year, twice a day,” he says. “Way it is now, my calves nurse ‘em.”

From the first, Phillips took after his grandfathers, who had lived on giant Texas ranches. A century ago, one grandfather was a cattle driver on the old Chisholm Trail, which ran from San Antonio to the railhead in Abilene, Kan.

“Them were the days,” says Phillips.

As a rancher now himself, he seems to relish each long day as much as he did the long days of a football coach. He is beginning to suspect, however, that his wife prefers football to horses.

“I heard her on the phone one night,” he says. “She was talkin’ about the old days in New Orleans, an’ she was sayin’, ‘The only place I ever went was a football game. And now he don’t even take me there.’ ”

The one restaurant in Rosharon is more like a small coffee shop, with a few wooden tables set out here and there. After ordering a hamburger, Phillips leans back as a young stranger carrying a camera walks up.

“Recognized you the minute you come in,” the young man drawls. “And I’d sure love to have your picture. Mind if this here guy takes you and I together?”

“My pleasure,” says Phillips, posing cheerfully.

He continues to sign a lot of autographs, too, these days. He is still a favorite of fans, reporters and football players.

This suggests a comparison with John Robinson of the Rams.

Both have always been noted motivators and both have distinguished themselves as running-play coaches. Neither has ever had a pass offense.

Robinson will forever be identified with Eric Dickerson, Phillips with Earl Campbell.

But Campbell, who was the making of Phillips in Texas, broke him at New Orleans.

Their friendship still flourishes, though. Campbell, who retired from football a very rich man, boards his horse at Phillips’ ranch.

“Last year, Earl asked me if he could keep it here two days,” Phillips says. “Well, that ol’ horse is still here. My barn, my feed.

“There’s no one I like any better than Earl, but confidentially, he’s a little close with his loose change. I never worried about Earl on drugs. You have to buy it, and he ain’t goin’ to buy it.”

The economics of ranching are such that Campbell’s money wouldn’t help much even if he paid his way at Oak Tree.

“This ain’t a big-money business,” Phillips says. “Everybody goes broke ranchin’, eventually. The good thing about it is that if you play your dominoes right, it takes longer to go broke on a ranch than almost anywheres else.”

Here, he leases the land, instead of buying it, to stretch his cash reserves.

“There’s just no way to come out even these days raisin’ cattle on your own land,” he says. “You cain’t make the interest payments and come out.”

If there’s no money in it, why do it?

Phillips thinks about this for an instant, then says: “I like to fool with horses, and watch things grow. On a ranch, you can see what you’re accomplishin’. It’s like coachin’ football--everythin’ sets right out there in front of you.

“For fun I like to ride cuttin’ horses. I raise ‘em and train ‘em and ride ‘em, and you cain’t do that in town.”

And what are cutting horses?

“You and your horse cut a calf out of a herd,” Phillips says. “In a cuttin’ horse contest, you got 2 1/2 minutes to do your thing--make your horse behave just right while he’s goin’ after the calf. It’s a great sport.”

In this weather?

“This is beautiful weather,” Phillips says. “I cain’t stand snow and sleet and ice. They remind me of Pittsburgh.”

As in, the road to the Super Bowl runs through . . .

In particular, the neighbors are a joy in Texas ranch country, Phillips says. Neighbors, among other things, are the south Texas labor force. They come from miles around to help one another build, say, a new barn.

“Man here cain’t afford to hire much help,” he says. “So we scratch each other’s back. Take this here oat bin. Three neighbors and me put it up in 10 hours.

“ ‘Course, only two of us were doin’ much work. Two of us were laughin’ an’ tellin’ jokes and drinkin’ a hell of a lot of beer.”