My Night with Bevo
The epiphany came on the night before Thanksgiving Day in 1972. It happened the moment the Union Pacific train blazed past the Ruggirello Farm in Mumford, rocking the brick house like a cradle. Matt Ruggirello’s eyes shot open, sleeping in his childhood bed, home from college for the holidays.
“We’re gonna steal Bevo,” he whispered to himself.
Bevo, the mascot of all Texas Longhorn athletics. To some, the most beloved mascot in the state. To others, the most hated. That week, with the annual Texas-Texas A&M football game being played, the aging bull would have security rivaling that of the governor, maybe even the president. For the Aggies, stealing Bevo was the greatest hijinks imaginable. For the Longhorns, their worst nightmare.
No one thought twice about the Rice Owls.
“You wanna do what?” James Chauncey asked over the phone.
“We’re going to steal Bevo,” Matt said. “Next year, right before Rice’s game with Texas. What do you think?”
“I think you’re nuts.”
Some said Bevo brought good fortune to whichever team succeeded in his kidnapping. That same good fortune was said to fall on the Longhorns if they caught any thieves in the act. As far as Matt knew, nobody from Rice had ever attempted it.
“Oh, don’t be like that. It’s going to be senior year. We’ve done all our studies, we need to make some memories.”
“Not all of us got into med school early. Me and the others could get kicked off the team if we get caught. We could get kicked off even if we get away with it.”
Matt Ruggirello had not rested on his National Merit Scholar status when he got to Rice. He quickly became one of the university’s top students and extensively prepared for his post-grad life, yet he was never at home with the bookish intellectuals. His friend group consisted of seven-foot giants that played on the Rice Owls basketball team. Men like James Chauncey, Charlie Stephens, and Ethan Edwards, all of whom came to the school with championship expectations but always fell short.
Matt had served as the team manager for two years but had gained their friendship through his voracious sports knowledge. Matt was the type of person who memorized baseball lineups from the 1950s. Yet while they shared this connection through sports, none of the giants were country boys.
“What the hell are we gonna do with a longhorn?” Chauncey asked over the phone.
“Don’t worry about that. All we’ve got to do is get it in a trailer and hand it over to the pep squad,” Matt said. “It’ll be wild. Do you think we can convince the others?”
Chauncey breathed a heavy sigh into the receiver.
“They might come around.”
…
Matt was the first to break from the Ruggirello family’s A&M lineage. The Ruggirellos had produced four generations of A&M graduates who made their living farming in the Brazos River Bottom, that oasis of cotton between Hearne and College Station. Even so, a part of Matt’s heart still resided with the Aggies. Football at Rice was never something to cheer about, nothing like how thousands of Aggies crowded every A&M home game. Still, they would always be his family’s team. As long as Matt had the Aggies, he would always have a connection to his family, and vice versa.
For that reason, he felt a fair amount of pride as he and his friends drove up Highway 290 towards Austin. The trio of basketball giants had listened to Matt’s plan for over a year. Having found the location of the farm where Bevo was kept, they were going to drive to the field and load the longhorn into a trailer Matt had brought from the Ruggirello Farm. Chauncey, Stephens, and Edwards were skeptical, but ended up going along with the plot after any dates the boys had fell through. It helped that Matt brought along a couple packs of Lone Star and 8-track tapes of Motown Records to entertain them on the drive.
The night was October 25, 1973, two nights before Rice would travel to Texas Memorial Stadium to play the Longhorns. The farm was an unassuming patch of land in southern Travis County with a single farm-to-market road bordering the property. Matt drove past it three times to survey the area, then the boys went to eat lunch.
There were about thirty head of cattle in the lot. Five of them were heifers with spots in the fur, but the rest were all that iconic burnt orange, the colors of the University of Texas. Yet there was no mistaking the pride and joy of the university. His massive stomach swayed with each step, all the other cattle stayed a safe distance from the massive horns. The horns almost seemed to weigh Bevo down. What relief he would get from having them sawed off? Matt thought.
Regardless, Matt’s predictions had proved right. There was no security or extra guards on watch duty, let alone any guards at all. Still, they waited for the cover of dark to get to work.
There was no debate about who was to go into the paddock.
“You’re the cowpoke,” Chauncey said over lunch. “Ain’t none of us know how to wrangle a cow. You’re going in.”
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After parking their truck on the side of the road, Matt stepped out of the passenger seat with a rope wrapped around his shoulder.
“Hang tight. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Matt found Bevo easily enough. The titular long horns gave him away. Sure enough, Matt’s presence didn’t disturb the herd of cattle. Bevo nodded his head at Matt once they locked eyes, but that was his only response. Bevo stood there, chewing on some grass, not a care in the world as Matt took his rope and wrapped it around his neck. It was then that Matt remembered this was the most pampered cow in Texas. As far as Bevo was concerned, Matt was just another person sent to take care of him.
This was going to be the easiest thing Matt ever did, or so he thought.
It had been a few minutes since a car raced by on the farm-to-market road. Then, a big black truck with overhead lights passed by. It never came to a halt or went into the pasture, but it drove at a slower pace than all the others. Perhaps it was coming by to check on the lot. Perhaps it was a random driver who got tired driving at night. But to the trio of basketball players sitting in Matt’s truck, they were certain he had seen what they were up to. They were certain they had been found out.
Matt watched as his friends disappeared down the road, leaving him with nothing but a three-ton cow roped around his hands.
…
“You better not to be getting up to any foolishness at that school,” Papa said to Matt during Thanksgiving.
“I keep everyone else out of trouble.”
“Makes me sad whenever I hear about boys going off to college and wasting away at parties.”
“You never got up to anything when you were in school?”
“No time for it. Had to finish school so I could do real work.”
The one thing Papa ever boasted about was his graduating from a five-year program in three years.
“I once knew a couple of cadets in school with me. It was before the UT game on Thanksgiving. They tried to steal that bull, that Bevo. But they got caught. They said they wanted to help the Aggies win. They wanted the spotlight is what they wanted. Anyone who tries to do that is just crying for attention. Well those two got the attention. Got expelled for it. You know where they are now?”
Matt shook his head.
“Railroad repairmen was the last thing I heard. Serves them right. Cadet training shaped every single one of us. To throw it away like that. Sickening.”
In Papa’s mind, there wasn’t anything worse than a T-Sip. Papa saw them as elitists. Children of businessmen and politicians, while A&M created workers. Yet for as much as he hated the school, and how much he moaned when Texas beat A&M in football, he did not give two cents about Bevo.
“Throwing away a future over one big, dumb bull.”
…
Matt thought about those words as he guided Bevo, and the herd that followed him, toward the nearby trees. If someone was keeping watch, Matt hoped the trees would give him cover. If not, they would still let him watch the road for when his friends came back, if they ever came back.
“Those sons of bitches,” Matt mumbled to himself.
Bevo mooed in what seemed like acknowledgement.
Had Bevo been a dog, no one would have thought twice about his actions. Yet the fact he was a three-ton bull made his lapdog-esque nature stand out.
Matt had shrugged off Papa’s words when he heard them a year ago. Papa always had something to say about what a person should or shouldn’t do with their life; shrugging those comments off was Matt’s natural reaction. All Matt wanted was a tinge of excitement. He had done his studies and made good on his scholarship. Now he wanted this. Yet at that moment, all he could think about were Papa’s words of warning.
Matt started to consider another scenario. Maybe this had been his friends’ plan all along. Dump him out in the fields and let him remember where he needs to be. Bevo wasn’t going to change the result of Saturday’s game, but that wasn’t even the point.
Matt was trying to put himself into a tradition he had no place in. No Rice student would ever try to follow his footsteps. None would think to. Yet if Matt was caught over the next few hours, he might be charged with attempted theft of state property. All it took was one hot shot deputy and Matt could say goodbye to his scholarships and grad school and the future he had earned. All over one dumb big bull.
Yet when the morning came and Bevo was still by his side, Matt appreciated the moment. He may have never left the lot, but he got to do something others only imagined doing. Even if that thing was spending the night with a manure-smelling bull.
