The Heisman winner, the 12th man and the great Texas A&M-Notre Dame towel heist of 1988

TIM BROWN IS part of an elite fraternity. He’s one of 10 men inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame with a Heisman Trophy. Warren Barhorst is part of a select group as well. He’s one of 90 people inducted into the Nationwide Insurance Hall of Fame.

The two could’ve crossed paths anywhere. But the most unlikely place might have been where they actually did meet: in the 1988 Cotton Bowl during the first-ever meeting between Texas A&M and Notre Dame.

Brown was Notre Dame’s seventh Heisman Trophy winner, a golden-domed superstar playing for one of the greatest programs in college football history, averaging 14.2 yards per touch receiving, rushing and returning kicks en route to 1,847 all-purpose yards in 1987.

Barhorst, too, represented his school, but he wasn’t the subject of any recruiting battles. Instead, he started his college career at Stephen F. Austin before transferring to Texas A&M, eventually trying out as a walk-on in hopes of one day living his dream of playing on Kyle Field.

Brown was a nationally coveted recruit. Barhorst was another dreamer at the school where a walk-on named E. King Gill suited up to help his team in another bowl game in Dallas in 1922, inspiring the 12th Man tradition in College Station, where students stand the entire game to represent their willingness to help their team, like Gill did during an injury-riddled Dixie Classic.

Brown was riding high coming into the game. But by the time the Cotton Bowl rolled around on Jan. 1, Barhorst, a senior, had just barely made it through his final season as a student and tackling dummy in practice.

“I’m getting tired, I’m beat up,” Barhorst said. “[I thought] ‘I’m going to quit football.’ And a guy named Dennis Mudd tells me, ‘Hell Barhorst, don’t quit. Someday you’ll make a play that could change your life.'”

Mudd, like Barhorst, was a member of Jackie Sherrill’s famed “12th Man” kickoff team, made up of all walk-ons who did nothing but cover kickoffs. Notre Dame had Rudy. The Aggies had an entire platoon of Rudys. The group, started in 1983 in Sherrill’s second year in College Station, was known for its reckless abandon. And all the focus leading up to the Cotton Bowl was on how they would fare against Brown.

“Being that I was born and raised here in Dallas, the Cotton Bowl was such a big game at that time, A&M was a pretty hot football team, it was really the showdown of all showdowns,” Brown tells the SEC Network in 2022 in “No Experience Required,” a documentary about the squad. “The legend of the 12th Man at that time, being that they were all walk-on football players, was amazing. I can remember because we watched those guys a lot on film getting ready for that game, and it was hard to believe that none of those kids were scholarship football players.”

It’s that contrast that made this game memorable. It was a place where a walk-on playing the last game of his football career could chase down a Heisman Trophy winner from one of the most decorated programs in history. It’s why Barhorst would become a cult legend at Texas A&M, and why he says that lesson of perseverance went on to propel him to a wildly successful career in business.

“That play was the most popular play in 12th Man history,” said Lyn McDonald, a former member of the walk-on kickoff team who is now a sports psychiatrist in San Antonio.

And what, exactly, did Barhorst do that became the most famous moment in the history of one of the most famous college football traditions?

He took Tim Brown’s towel.

WHEN THE AGGIES and Irish meet Aug. 31 for just the sixth time, Nana Boadi-Owusu, a walk-on from Arlington, Texas, will wear No. 12, a Texas A&M student running down the field on kickoffs. Just like in 1988, he’ll face perhaps the nation’s best kick returner, Jayden Harrison, a Marshall transfer who took two back for scores last season when he was the only FBS player to average more than 30 yards per return with at least 20 chances.

Boadi-Owusu will get the start in the 41st season of the tradition. There are several full-time students chosen as members of the 12th Man roster each year, each wearing No. 12, and it’s a big deal to the Aggies. Even in the NIL era, with every individual number available, 87% of jersey sales last week were for the No. 12, according to the school.

“Being able to represent that number is a big honor,” Boadi-Owusu said. “We’ve got 70,000 [students] backing us, and then Aggies all over the world.”

And none of this might have happened if it wasn’t for a cadet.

Starting in 1907, the Aggies built a giant bonfire on campus every season that was lit before the Texas game, signaling their “burning desire” to beat the Longhorns. In fall 1982, James Fuqua, a member of the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets, was at the bonfire site, pondering the football team’s future along with several other student leaders of the project.

After Tom Wilson was fired with a 17-17 record over his three full seasons, Texas A&M hired Sherrill, the brash young coach who had coached Dan Marino and went 33-1 in his final three seasons at Pitt, signing him to the first coaching contract in college football history that totaled more than $1 million.

“They paid a lot of money for him,” Fuqua said. “We wanted to know if he’s just going to be another coach passing through or going to be somebody who actually took on the spirit of the school?”

Good question, Fuqua’s friends said. Why don’t you go ask him?

“All of a sudden, this kid burst through the door,” Sherrill said. “He just walked by the secretary and walked into my office and said, ‘Do you want to be the Aggie coach? Or do you want to be just another Aggie coach?'”

“I told him, ‘Sure, I want to be the Aggie coach,'” Sherrill said. “He said, ‘Well, follow me.'”

Fuqua escorted the coach around campus, teaching a crash course in Aggie traditions. At the bonfire site, Sherrill was floored by the dedication of thousands of students working through the night. He became a regular. One night, the crane hoisted him up ostensibly to see the top of the log stack, but it instead left him dangling in the night sky for students to laugh at while the crane operator went to get a cup of coffee. When Sherrill returned to ground level, he was playing cards in a shack built by the students when a propane stove exploded. “And nobody flinched,” he said.

“You going to bid, or you going to play?” Fuqua recalls a voice asking Sherrill through the smoke. “At that point, Jackie thought we were crazy.”

Back in the office, Sherrill kicked around a wild idea with his staff. What if he took a group of these Corps guys and taught them to cover kickoffs? Surely he could find 10 good ones out of tens of thousands of devoted Aggies. His defensive coordinator, R.C. Slocum, couldn’t believe his ears.

“Are you sure you didn’t fall off that stack?” Slocum asked Sherrill.

Undeterred, Sherrill moved ahead with the idea, opening it up to all students, and placed an ad in The Battalion, the student newspaper.

“Persons interested in trying out for the Twelfth Man Kickoff Team need to report to the Kyle Field Dressing Room on Monday, Feb. 21, at 5 p.m. No prior experience required.” Two hundred and fifty-two students showed up.

BY 1987, THE 12th Man kickoff team was famous. National news did features on it. It landed a six-page Sports Illustrated spread before its debut, which came against Cal in its first kick return since The Play, when it scored while the band was on the field against Stanford. Three members of that first squad stopped Dwight Garner at the Cal 16-yard line, and Kyle Field went nuts.

Sherrill’s hope of uniting the football team and the nation’s largest student section had become a reality. Members of the kickoff team became stars on campus and at the Dixie Chicken. The scholarship players, who were initially annoyed at the try-hard nature of their 20 new teammates, came to respect that they went so hard as glorified blocking dummies in practice and still spent an extra hour each day just covering kicks.

The walk-on kickoff team handled duties at home games, because most teams didn’t bring entire squads of walk-ons on the road, so scholarship players would resume their roles at away games.

Eventually, the walk-ons started to travel, including for the big rivalry game against Texas. But Sports Illustrated did the math after the first season: The walk-ons allowed 13.1 yards per return at home. The varsity players gave up 18.8 on the road. “It’s kind of like you’re training the special ops to do one thing,” Sherrill said. “That’s what they were trained to do. And they were good.”

They faced dynamic players such as Texas’ Eric Metcalf, an All-American who went on to set the NFL record for the most kick returns for a touchdown with 12. Metcalf never had a return longer than 20 yards against them.

“Those guys competed every play,” Metcalf says in “No Experience Required.” “They kept me bottled up for four years.” The kickoff team was also good at getting under the skin of opponents. The players celebrated wildly after every tackle and waved white towels before kickoffs, which were — and still are — waved by fans in the stands.

Against Notre Dame in that Cotton Bowl, Chet Brooks knew they were the guys he needed. Brooks, a senior safety on the 1987 team, broke his leg in the Aggies’ 20-13 win over Texas in their regular-season finale. He was already a fan favorite for his style of play (“Chet would bring the wood,” his defensive coordinator, R.C. Slocum, said) and had coined the nickname for Slocum’s attacking defense: the “Wrecking Crew.”

On Jan. 1, 1988, Brooks was on crutches on the sideline of his final college football game, at the Cotton Bowl in his hometown. To make matters worse, it was his birthday.

Brooks played at Dallas Carter, a powerhouse program, while Brown was all-everything for a struggling Woodrow Wilson team across town that went just 4-25-1 in Brown’s three years as a starter. They never played against each other, but Brooks knew Brown’s history.

“He was one of those guys, man,” Brooks said. “That’s all you heard about was Tim Brown. He was the man coming out that year. His talent was undeniable.”

Now, returning as the Heisman Trophy winner, Brown was greeted as a hero.

“Everything was about how great Notre Dame was and all the billboards in town were, ‘Welcome home, Tim!'” Barhorst said. “We’re at a team lunch with both teams and Lou Holtz speaks and tells us how great Notre Dame is and the traditions and blah, blah, blah. We pretty much decided at that lunch we were going to kick their ass. This is our state, our town, and we’re treated like we’re the visiting team.”

They were already seething. And the 12th Man kickoff team was known for its desire to make its presence felt.

“They were going to sell out,” Slocum said. “There’s never been a kickoff team that covered any harder than those guys. There may have been some that had a few faster players, but in terms of effort of running down the field wide open, I’ve never seen a kickoff team that came down any harder, any more reckless than they did.”

But in this game, Sherrill hoped they’d keep it between the lines. He went to speak to the kickoff squad before the game.

“Hey guys, y’all are the banty roosters of college football,” Barhorst said Sherrill told them, asking them to tone it down. “I need a clean game today. We’re on national TV, you’re representing Texas A&M. I want you to play hard, but no fighting, none of your games.”

JUST TWO YEARS before, Texas A&M had earned its first Cotton Bowl berth since 1967. It broke through on the national stage, beating Auburn 36-16, including stopping that year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Bo Jackson, four straight times on the goal line to finish 10-2 and No. 6 nationally, its loftiest postseason ranking since Bear Bryant finished No. 5 in 1956.

But the Aggies still had won only 10 games four times in the program’s 83-year history. Another game against another Heisman winner would test A&M’s standing among the country’s top programs.

Brown appeared as good as advertised, returning the opening kickoff 37 yards (one of the longest ever given up at that point by the kickoff squad), and then catching 6 passes for 105 yards in the first half, including a 17-yard touchdown. But Slocum changed his defensive approach in the second half, and Brown did not catch any of the three passes targeted his way the rest of the game. By the third quarter, A&M led 28-10 and Brooks, who liked to jaw at opponents, could sense Brown’s frustration. He pointed out Brown’s monogrammed towel, made for him by teammate Cedric Figaro’s girlfriend, with the letter T and No. 81 on it.

“You got to have a towel, the long towel that comes out to your knee, absolutely,” Brown says in the documentary. “It’s old-fashioned, has no other value to your game at all. It’s all about how good do you look when you pass that mirror in the locker room? You give yourself a thumbs up, a thumbs down, and if you didn’t have a towel, you definitely got a thumbs down.”

Brooks pointed it out to Barhorst, telling him if they could get Brown’s towel, they’d send him over the edge.

“Something about that sweet towel, that’s what we called them. That’s your sweet towel. That’s what make you look sweet,” Brooks said, saying it’s the 1980s slang equivalent to “drip” now. “I didn’t realize he had his sweet towel encrusted with all kinds of jewelry and stuff. He had it really bedazzled out. I just knew taking his towel from him was going to piss him off and get him off his game. I told my guys, listen, it’s my birthday. Go get that sweet towel for me for my birthday present. And they lost their mind.”

Early in the fourth quarter, the Aggies got a chance to kick off leading 28-10 with 8:32 left.

“Now it’s the 12th Man, and boy do they want a piece of the Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Brown,” Brent Musberger said on the broadcast before a cut to an interview with kickoff team member John Burnett.

“Playing for A&M is something I dreamed about my whole life. In my last game of the season, having an opportunity — and all the other guys I know — to get a lick on the Heisman Trophy winner would just cap off the season for all of us.”

The kick is short. Brown catches it, heads to his left, then turns upfield and looks like he has an alley to break off a run. But then Barhorst comes in from Brown’s right, dives and drags him down. While they’re on the ground, Barhorst pulls the sweet towel loose.

“It took the guy two or three tugs,” Brown said after the game. “I mean, one guy was laying on me, holding me down and the other guy was tugging on it. But when he got it, I heard him say, ‘I got it!'”

Barhorst stuffs the towel down his pants to hide it. He gets up and starts jogging to the sideline, looking for Brooks. But Brown turns on his speed, heads straight for Barhorst, jumps on his back and takes him down. While on the ground, he rips the towel away.

Musberger, who misidentifies Barhorst as freshman William Thomas, who also wore No. 11, is still trying to figure out what’s going on. So are Holtz and Sherrill. But Barhorst and Brooks both know. “I’m thinking, ‘Holy s—, I’ve cleared both benches,'” Barhorst said. “I crawl out of my hands and knees and act like I don’t know what’s going on because I don’t want Coach Sherrill, in my last college game, screaming at me. I’ve started this fight on national TV. Luckily he was mad at Brown, not mad at me.”

Brooks, too, played dumb, limping away from the action.

“Soon as I saw Tim chasing him, I just started easing down to the other end, whistling,” Brooks said, laughing. “I wouldn’t have nothing to do with it.”

Brown, who was already dealing with a muscle issue in his back, did not get thrown out, but he did get a 15-yard penalty. He did not return, eventually leaving the game early and heading back to the locker room. The Aggies won the game 35-10.

“The last we saw Tim, he was walking up the ramp in the Cotton Bowl,” Sherrill said.

BARHORST FIRED UP the Aggies with his antics, but Musberger never called his name. The play is immortalized in a painting, called “Led By The Spirit” (a nod to the school song, “The Spirit of Aggieland”), but, in it, his name on his jersey is spelled B-A-R-N-H-O-R-S-T.

Years later, at a reunion for the 12th Man kickoff team, Barhorst’s own son was serving as the photographer at the event and asked an attendee for his favorite moment in the team’s history.

“When Bartowski took Tim Brown’s towel,” he said.

“But what that all tells you is that the 12th Man guys all played for the name on the front,” Barhorst said. “We weren’t really playing for the guy on the back. That’s really what drove us in those games playing at a level you weren’t really supposed to play at.”

Still, Barhorst said there isn’t a day that goes by that he isn’t asked about it, saying sometimes it’s five times a day.

Slocum has his own memento of the incident. He was a fan of Brown’s dating back to Brown’s time in high school in Dallas, when Slocum was his area recruiter and tried in vain to convince Brown to come to College Station, even sitting in the stands and attending Brown’s high school basketball games.

First, he had to find a way to stop Brown, and did. Then, just 10 days after the fracas, he was one of Brown’s coaches. Sherrill and Slocum served as coaches in the Japan Bowl, a college all-star game in Tokyo, and Brown was on their team. Slocum arrived back in Texas with an ironic souvenir.

“I got a towel that he gave me over there,” Slocum said, describing a long white linen with Japanese writing on it above gold stitching that says “TIM BROWN, UNIV. OF NOTRE DAME, JAPAN BOWL.” A sweet towel.

It hangs in a frame on the wall of Slocum’s house in College Station all these years later, which even came as a surprise to Brown.

“Wow!” Brown wrote via email, his only response to questions for this story. “I have more questions than I do answers. Maybe Coach can fill in the blanks.”

It’s a bit of a mystery to Slocum, too.

“I don’t know how I got it, either,” Slocum said, laughing. “We joked about the Cotton Bowl towel over there. I spent a week with him. We had a great time.”

In the frame, Slocum also stuck a card he got later, from a 1991 set of cards that had a “Heisman Hero” series. Brown’s card is autographed, with the inscription, “To Texas A&M and the 12th Man.”

The programs went in different directions the next season. Sherrill resigned following a 7-5 record amid an NCAA investigation into improper benefits, opting to step aside as to not be a distraction, with Slocum replacing him. Brown was drafted with the sixth overall pick of the 1988 NFL draft, and Notre Dame figured out how to replace him with a freshman receiver named Rocket Ismail who led the country in kickoff returns, as Holtz led the Irish to a 12-0 season and a national championship. Holtz exacted his revenge on the Aggies in consecutive years, beating them in the 1993 and 1994 Cotton Bowls.

The all-walk-on kickoff team survived until 1990, when Texas Tech’s Rodney Blackshear scored on a return for the first time in seven seasons, and Slocum opted to keep just one representative, wearing No. 12, alongside a cast of scholarship players without having to practice with two separate kickoff coverage teams any longer.

“The concept is great to represent the student body,” Slocum said. “We’re going to give that guy No. 12, and he’s going to represent the student body and we’ll take him wherever we go: home, away, bowl game, whatever. We’ll have the 12th Man with us.”

The tradition continues, with Mike Elko taking over as the seventh coach since Sherrill to keep it alive.

Boadi-Owusu, an engineering major, fell in love with Kyle Field on a campus visit while his parents, immigrants from Ghana, were driving his family on a visit to NASA near Houston. Boadi-Owusu said he felt a connection with Kyle Field when he saw it and hoped one day to return. “It hasn’t really hit me yet that I’m the 12th Man,” Boadi-Owusu said. “When I put on that jersey and I see myself in the mirror, then I get to come out to over 100,0000 people in Kyle, I think that’s what was going to hit me like, ‘Oh yeah, this is real life.’ It’s just going to be so surreal.”

McDonald, the sports psychologist, said the 12th Man tradition lives on because of the contrast in their roles to those of highly recruited scholarship players. “Fans see a kickoff as a mundane process and a boring play, but it was kind of our life,” he said. “It was an event. It’s about being an underdog … and kicking ass when people think you can’t.”

Thanks to a series of events, including a confident cadet, a coach who became the Aggie coach, an injured player with a birthday wish and a scrappy walk-on who would become a cult hero, the 12th Man has endured as one of the best traditions in college football.

“I wish I’d been smart enough to have known how important it was to the student body and to the old Ags,” Sherrill said. “Today I do, but when I did it back then, I didn’t know how important it was.”

McDonald proudly displays the evidence of his shining moment as a 12th Man, a photo on his wall of his one appearance in a college football game, running down during an eventual touchback against SMU in which he swears he “leveled people left and right.” He got his one play, too.

Boadi-Owusu will get his chance against Notre Dame. And you never know. One play could change his life.