Kevin Sherrington

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Growing up in Dallas in the '20s and '30s, the hard-living son of a fiery Baptist preacher, Joe Boyd couldn't save himself, much less anyone else.

He ran with one of the city's street gangs, which authorities curiously coordinated into football teams. The results weren't exactly YMCA material. Players managed to hold off drinking until halftime, and from there the riots resumed.

Boyd was so troubled as a teenager, he once even challenged his father to a fight. He quickly found himself on the floor, a foot on his neck, his father flailing at him wildly with the buckle on a belt.

"You're killing him!" the boy's mother shrieked.

"I'm trying to," the father said, "but he won't die!"

After graduating from Crozier Tech, where he was all-city, Boyd shopped around until Texas A&M offered a tryout.

He not only made the team, he was twice an All-Southwest Conference tackle and an All-American his senior year.

He starred on A&M's 1939 national title team, was written up by Grantland Rice, served as a road grader for "Jarrin' " John Kimbrough and worked the front lines of a defense that yielded only 31 points on its way to the Sugar Bowl.

Texas A&M photo

Joe Boyd, an All-America tackle on Texas A&M's 1939 national title team, was a hard drinker in his youth before devoting his life to preaching.

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How hard-edged was Boyd? Doctors told him before the '39 season that he'd broken his neck. He knew something was wrong because he couldn't walk straight.

"I guess I was just a tough old bird," he once told the authors of The 1939 Texas Aggies.

Before each game Boyd's senior year, a masseuse worked his neck over. The rest of the time, Boyd self-medicated.

Roy Bucek, a sophomore on the '39 team, recalls once having to sit up all night with Boyd as he slept off a bender.

Or as Bucek, now 89 and living in Schulenburg, Texas, puts it, "I was assigned to see to it he didn't die."

Boyd didn't die, but he sure came close. He was working at a Galveston shipyard when a storm pulled a roof down on his head. Later, after leaving a poker game at 2 in the morning, he lost control of his car.

The near-misses made an impact on Boyd. He climbed out of the wreck on his hands and knees. When he got home, he called a preacher.

Boyd quit the shipyards immediately. Bought a school bus and a tent and hit the road.

Over the next six decades, he traveled worldwide preaching the gospel, in English as well as Spanish. In the '70s, he started a youth camp in West Virginia. And wherever he went, he never let up.

"If I get to where I can't preach standing up," he said in 2004, "then I will preach sitting down. And if I can't preach sitting down, I will preach from the bed.

"God called me to preach, and I intend to end my life on this Earth preaching."

On June 1, Rev. Boyd's calling finally came to an end. He was 92. Imagine what his father would have thought, and not just that he was mortal.

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