Molly Ivins January 6

AUSTIN — New Texans and old Texans. Naturally all good Texans spent part of New Year's Day rooting for the Aggies, who played quite a game. You could hardly fail to notice No. 9, Dat Nguyen from Rockport, who set a Cotton Bowl record for tackles and was a finalist for All-American this year. Now that's a young man who plays football, as one sportswriter put it, with "an intensity on the field that resembles a lion on the prowl."

Several profiles of Nguyen (it's pronounced "Win") have gone into his family's remarkable history. He was born in a refugee camp in Arkansas after his parents fled Vietnam in 1974, at the last possible moment, with bombs falling on the city as they scrambled onto a boat. The profiles have been rather more circumspect about the "trouble" that occurred when the Nguyen family joined other Vietnamese who settled in Rockport in the mid-'70s.

For those of you who weren't around at the time, the Ku Klux Klan was often the welcoming committee on the Texas Gulf Coast for Vietnamese refugees, who had left their country rather than live under communism. In nearby Seadrift, after an Anglo shrimper was killed by a Vietnamese man whom he had beaten, some Anglos burned three Vietnamese shrimp boats, firebombed a Vietnamese house trailer and beat other Vietnamese. The Vietnamese killer was later acquitted by an all-white jury after much evidence of his persecution by the deceased. Death threats and firing on Vietnamese shrimp boats were common.

The problems were economic as well as racial, as is so often true: Many of the Vietnamese, like Dat Nguyen's father, had been shrimpers in their homeland, but they did not understand the rules of shrimping here. And the last thing that Texas shrimpers wanted was competition from the hard-working Vietnamese.

It was one of the weirdest Texas race stories I ever covered. Among the myths spread about the Vietnamese was that they were all getting some kind of special welfare money, that the government paid for their shrimp boats, and that the government bought businesses for them. And there was no convincing the folks in Rockport in those days that none of it was true.

Of course, the weirdly comic element in the tragedy was that the Vietnamese were guilty of the very qualities we like to think make good Americans: They were hard-working, entrepreneurial, family-oriented and anti-communist. Some of the Rockport shrimpers were used to a more good-ol'-boy approach to life, involving a lot of beer-drinking and cussing of anybody of a different color.

Over the long course of that hideous war, some Americans never did learn to sort out "our Vietnamese" from "their Vietnamese" (we actually used to say that) — they and called them all "gooks." Isn't racism charming?

Well, we've all read about Vietnamese-Americans graduating as the valedictorians of their high schools, but there's something wonderfully Texan about Dat Nguyen's triumph.

One of the best linebackers in the country, he's a hometown hero in Rockport. On top of everything else, he's said to be an especially nice young man. I like to think some of those old Kluckers had enough class to root for him on New Year's Day.

Another kind of "credit to his race," as I find the sportswriters still say, was Buck Ramsey, a cowboy who was crippled by a horse and went on to become a well-known cowboy poet and balladeer. His work in collecting and preserving traditional cowboy songs was so important that he was named a Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, was honored at the White House by Hillary Rodham Clinton and got a bunch of other important awards.

From the way "the bearded, burly Buck Ramsey" is being described in the obits, you'd think the fellow was a saint. As Buck's old friend Warren Burnett says, "He was one of the more interesting sinners I've known." The truth is that Ramsey was a bit of a rascal, drunk or sober (he pretty much quit drinking many years ago), and one of the most delightful companions God ever made.

I suppose what so often surprised the professional folklorists in the East is that Buck was a real intellectual, despite his cowboy boots and accent and having gotten kicked out of Amarillo College, West Texas State and Texas Tech — in all three cases for getting thrown in jail after fighting in a honky-tonk.

His great hero was Albert Camus, and he had read everyone from Umberto Eco to Jorge Luis Borges. A simple cowboy he was not. But then, he always understood that the stereotype of the simple cowboy was a lot of hooey.

A few years ago, he told an interviewer: "For every hundred cowboys, 25 of them were avid readers and five of them, you could almost call them scholars in one field or another. There were lots of biblical scholars. I know a cowboy in the bunkhouse who compared translations of Homer. Many cowboys read the Bull Durham classics so they knew Greek mythology. They'd sit around and imagine their lives around these characters. I once heard a cowboy, talking about cotton farming, snap, 'I ain't about to be yoked to that Sisyphus rock.'"

Buck only cowboyed himself for four years of his life as a young man, up around Amarillo. He rode out one morning in 1962 on a horse named Cinnamon; it bucked, and the bit broke. Buck went off, did a full somersault and landed on his back on a rock. Never walked again.

He newspapered some, wrote this and that, and really found himself when he won the first cowboy poetry contest at Elko, Nev. His epic poem "As I Rode Out on the Morning" was published by Texas Tech University Press. His work is in many anthologies.

Buck liked to tell the story of the time he and Brother Burnett stayed up all night drinking whiskey and attempting to determine if there is in fact a God. He reported that by dawn they had concluded, "With all this horse—— around, there must be a pony in there somewhere."

***

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. You may write to her care of this newspaper or via e-mail at mollyivins@star-telegram.com.

COPYRIGHT 1998 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.