Gary Shaw’s Meat on the Hoof is not a traditional “inside the team” chronicle. It doesn’t follow the highs and lows of a football year. Instead, it’s a scathing, often painful memoir of life inside one of college football’s great programs — the University of Texas in the late 1960s — and an unflinching examination of what Shaw saw as its callous treatment of players.
Shaw, a scholarship athlete who played defensive back for the Longhorns, presents the program not as a family or fraternity but as a machine: efficient, impersonal and ruthless. The title says it all — players were just “meat on the hoof,” livestock waiting to be judged, used, or discarded. If you could help the team win, you were in. If not, you were out — and often out on your own, with little support or sympathy.
Though the events take place over several years, the book feels claustrophobically focused on life inside the program: gruelling practices, relentless mental pressure, and a culture in which humiliation was a standard coaching tactic. Shaw describes a system in which young men are broken down physically and psychologically, supposedly for their own good, but often simply to weed out those deemed weak.
This is not a flattering portrait of Coach Darrell Royal or his staff. Shaw portrays Royal as distant and the coaching philosophy as militaristic, more interested in obedience than development. It’s not hard to see why the book was effectively blacklisted by the Texas football community on publication.
Title: Meat on the Hoof
Author: Gary Shaw
First published: St Martin’s Press, 1972
Buy the Book: Out of print, available secondhand
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Some of Shaw’s teammates suggested that he exaggerated his stories about the team, others simply denied that there was anything wrong with the treatment he considered brutal. Others, however, agreed that his portrayal was accurate.
What is unarguable is that Meat on the Hoof strips away the romanticism that so often surrounds college football and forces readers to consider what life is really like for the players — especially those who don’t become stars.
If you’re looking for strategy breakdowns or game-by-game analysis, look elsewhere. But if you want a powerful, first-person account of what happens behind closed doors at a powerhouse program — and how easily players can be ground down by the system — this is essential reading.
THE AUTHOR
Meat on the Hoof was Gary Shaw’s only book. He struggled with mental health issues later in life and was homeless for 10 years in the 1980s. He died in 1999.
EXCERPTS
“To attack football is to attack the major exhibit of the masculine view of the world; it would be much more strongly resisted than an attack on the church or most other American institutions.”
“Something seems inherently wrong when a game meant for fun is played only through external motivation.”
REVIEWS
“That winnowing process was, at least back in those days, the result of a simple numbers game. Texas, per SWC rules, could give out 100 football scholarships. A class like Shaw’s would have 45 freshman, of whom 40 would be redshirted. Obviously Texas couldn’t recruit and keep 45 players every year with a 100-scholarship limitation. To make room for the new meat, the Texas coaches essentially conducted psychological (and physical) warfare on the players, turning football into a struggle of persistence and will over body. The winners were those who could sublimate physical pain and continue to perform, and the healthy. The losers were those whose desire or physical ability didn’t measure up to the coaches’ standards, and the injured.”
Tom Gower, Reading and Thinking Football
“Shaw, a reserve left tackle who started playing for Royal in 1963, wrote about brutal practices, indifferent medical attention for the subs, hazing, racism, grade tampering and cheating on NCAA scholarship rules. Royal comes off especially bad, like a sadistic drill sergeant who has the luxury of dispatching minions (assistant coaches) to carry out his wishes.”
Jeff Merron, ESPN
BUY THE BOOK
Out of print, available secondhand
