You shouldn't be surprised that the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry is coming to an end, at least for now, after the game Thanksgiving night in College Station.

After all, it happens this time every century.

The first great interruption occurred on Nov. 14, 1911, the day after Texas battled to a 6-0 victory over A&M at Houston's West End Park while their fans - well, they just battled.

It was a time when Varsity (Texas) and College (A&M) would on occasion play twice a year at Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, which from 1908 through 1911 hosted the teams as part of the cotton industry-themed Carnival known as Not-Su-Oh - Houston spelled backward.

Conflict from the start

From the beginning, the games at West End Park, the city's baseball park at Andrews and Heiner streets, were fraught with conflict. In 1908, A&M students took offense to Texas students carrying broomsticks as if they were rifles, and a Texas student was stabbed.

But the real shakeup came when A&M, which was 1-13-2 against Texas from 1894 through 1908, won three in a row in 1909 and 1910 under coach Charles Barthold "Uncle Charley" Moran. Moran played for the St. Louis Cardinals and was an assistant to Pop Warner at Carlisle during the Jim Thorpe era. He came in 1909 to A&M and declared, "I didn't come here to lose."

Most of the time, he didn't. The Farmers twice beat Texas in 1909, including a 23-0 win in Houston, and won in 1910 in Houston, 14-8.

But it was how Moran assembled and motivated his teams that ruffled feathers in Austin and created admirers in College Station.

"He had more to do with developing the well-known Aggie Spirit than any other one person," wrote A&M player Caesar "Dutch" Hohn.

"He could chew out every cadet in the Corps ... if they'd failed to live up to what he expected of them. He'd just as quickly take the side of the Corps against the faculty, if he thought that action was called for."

In a sport where eligibility rules were loosely written and indifferently enforced, Moran imported players from Carlisle, Baylor, Sewanee, Georgia Tech and LSU. In 1909 he brought in Ted Nesser, one of the era's top players, from the professional Massillon (Ohio) Tigers, introducing him as "Mr. Ford."

When players looked askance, Hohn said Moran replied, "He's as much a student as some of you are."

Varsity fans also grumbled that Moran taught "slugging," the era's description of dirty football, and chanted, "To hell, to hell, with Charley Moran and all his dirty crew. If you don't like the words to this song, to hell, to hell with you."

Holm countered, "He taught rough football but I never knew it to be dirty. He taught winning football."

When the teams met Nov. 13, 1911, at West End Park, Texas lost lineman Marlon Harold to a broken leg on the first play. But in the second period, A&M halfback A.R. Bateman fumbled at the College 15-yard line and Texas halfback Arnold Kirkpatrick returned it for a touchdown.

Earth-shaking victory

Kirkpatrick's five-point TD, plus the extra point, accounted for the scoring in a 6-0 Texas win that was sufficiently shocking, the Chronicle wrote, to "shake every office building in Houston."

Afterward, some of the 10,000 fans in attendance were said to have ripped their way through a picket fence to commence fisticuffs. Kern Tips described it in his book Football Texas Style as "a dilly of a donnybrook," and Texas football historian Lou Maysel wrote, "It was unsafe in downtown Houston for anyone wearing Texas colors as bands of A&M students roamed the streets."

The next day, W.T. Mather, chairman of the UT athletic council, wrote his A&M counterpart, "I beg to inform you that the athletic council of the University of Texas has decided not to enter any athletic relations with the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for the year 1912."

From there, the dispute played out in the media, as it would do a century later with A&M's decision to leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference.

Texas team manager Stephen F. Pinckney told the Austin American-Statesman that A&M "has earned a reputation for rotten athletics. … They admit trying to injure some of our men."

"I never played in so dirty a game in my life," said Texas lineman Marshall Ramsdell. "… (A&M players) use brute force and break legs and arms and heads by slugging if necessary."

The Bryan Eagle responded with the headline "Varsity Curses Sent Home to Roost/Slanderous Charges of Texas University Athletic Authorities Refuted by Positive and Incontestable Evidence."

"The football team, the student body, the athletic council, the faculty and the alumni association have found nothing wrong in Mr. Moran's systems or tactics," wrote J.B. Bagley, A&M athletic council president.

And so the teams parted. Texas lost just two games over the next three years and was unbeaten in 1914. A&M in 1912, with what was considered Moran's best team, outscored opponents 366-25, but the lost revenue from the Texas game, Hohn wrote, "all but sent our athletic department into bankruptcy."

Quietly, former A&M players Hal Moseley and Joe Utay began talks with Texas, which in 1913 hired Theo Bellmont from his job as secretary of the Houston YMCA to be athletic director, to revive the series.

On Nov. 30, 1914, the schools agreed to play again in 1915. A few days later, Moran resigned, citing "immediate pressure of other business" in his home state of Kentucky.

Parting wish

He received a full dress parade from the Corps and was made an honorary member of the Class of 1913. As A&M prepared to play Texas in 1915, he wrote each player a letter that concluded, "If you still love me and think anything of me, then beat Texas."

They complied, winning 13-0 in the first A&M-Texas game at College Station, and the A&M athletic department recorded a net profit of $3,429.07 - roughly the amount that Texas, with its $152 million athletic budget spends every 15 minutes these days.

Moran became coach at Centre College and in 1921 led the "Praying Colonels" to a 6-0 upset over Harvard. Later that season, he brought the Colonels to Dallas for the Dixie Classic against A&M - the game in which E. King Gill became the original 12th man.

As for Bellmont, in addition to his work as one of the founding fathers of the Southwest Conference, he helped launch the Texas-Oklahoma game in Dallas and created the "blanket tax" student funding model for Texas athletics.

He also presided over construction of Memorial Stadium, which includes an office complex named in his honor, and spent his later years discussing the traditions of Texas football with family members, including his grandson, Ted "Buzz" Bellmont of Houston.

"Pop would not be happy with this," he said. "It's a great loss for both schools."

david.barron@chron.com