By the time he'd won three state football titles in a row at a couple of different stops, a Texas high school record for excellence in wanderlust, Chuck Curtis was just 29 and already wondering what to do with the rest of his life.

He'd never been anything but a head coach at Holliday, Jacksboro and Garland, and even though he craved a college job, he wasn't waiting 10 years on someone else's staff.

Either he'd get what he wanted, and soon, or he'd get out.

When a desperate Hayden Fry hired him early in 1965, Curtis figured he'd put in a year or two at SMU. Most of the Mustangs' unhappy boosters thought Fry had made the mistake of hiring his successor.

Curtis' first assignment: Bring back Jerry LeVias from Beaumont.

Complicating matters was the so-called "gentlemen's agreement" among Southwest Conference coaches that they wouldn't recruit blacks. Fry and Curtis broke ranks, which took some getting used to. First time the tall, rangy Curtis showed up on the LeVias' front porch in his Stetson, the neighbors thought the sheriff had come to arrest Jerry.

Curtis lived up to the image, particularly when it came to getting his man. UCLA's Tommy Prothro learned firsthand while trying to intercept LeVias on the way to the team bus after the '65 Big 33 All-Star game in Hershey, Pa.

The more LeVias resisted, the more Prothro persisted until Curtis intervened.

Grabbing Prothro and shaking him, Curtis told the flabbergasted UCLA coach that LeVias was "signed, sealed and I plan to deliver him to SMU."

Curtis then shoved Prothro, who was not a small man, into an unforgiving fence. National headlines sprang from the fracas, which eventually became a punch line at SMU.

Or as Fry once put it, "Coach Prothro still had the imprint of the chain-link fence on his suit when he left."

The rest of Curtis' time on the Hilltop wasn't nearly as much fun. Two games into the '65 season, Fry announced he'd put in a new offense without his quarterback coach's help. Demoted to receivers coach and scout, Curtis hung around another season before quitting for the car business.

The conflict of two larger-than-life personalities on the same staff was simply too great. Curtis had come close to getting the job that went to Jim Mackenzie at Oklahoma, but not close enough. The clock on his ambitions was running.

Over the next 20 years, he drifted in and out of coaching, including a stop as head coach at UT-Arlington. He was heading into his third season when the school pulled the program out from under him.

Before his death last week at 80, he'd lived a long, colorful life that left a few questions unanswered, including what might have been.

Expressing regrets once, he confessed he'd been too impatient. Instead of going to SMU in '65, he told a sportswriter, he probably should have taken the job at Odessa Permian, a football program just taking flight.

"If they could have overcome my coaching," Curtis said, "that would have been four straight titles.

"Pretty good talking point."

A LA CARTE

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Twitter: @KSherringtonDMN