Battle of the Brazos - T. G. Webb

I have been a college football fan for a long time, and an admirer of Texas A&M University for just as long.  Admittedly I was not alive in 1926, but imagine my surprise to learn that Texas A&M and Baylor played a game in October 1926 during which at halftime an A&M student was struck so hard on the head while on the field of play by either a club or a chair that he died of his injuries the next morning.  Why had I not ever heard of this?  Well, as it turns out, it might be because both schools decided within days of the tragedy that it might be best to pretend that it never happened.  In 2018, some 92 years after the tragedy, T.G. Webb and Texas A&M University Press published Battle on the Brazos, an in-depth attempt to determine exactly who struck and killed Charlie Sessums.

Battle on the Brazos is about as well-researched as can be expected in a case where those directly involved are long dead, including the two young men most likely to have killed Sessums.  The two were themselves dead within just a few years of Charlie Sessums - one to pneumonia and the other to a fatal collision with a firetruck.  Hubert and Edwin Connally were cousins, but more importantly they were also related to the mayor of Waco, Texas, home to Baylor University and this football game.  Let the coverup begin.

Battle on the Brazos is not a long book, but Webb packs a lot of information into the book's three parts: Part I, The Rivalry; Part II, The Riot; and Part III, The Murder.  College football was still in its early days (especially in Texas) when the A&M-Baylor rivalry began, and for near a decade their matchup was considered to be the premier football game in the state.  For a time the two schools respected each other both on and off the field, but that began to change during the 1922 and 1924 games, so what happened in 1926 was not a real surprise to anyone who had been paying attention (the schools did not play each other in 1923 or 1925).

And what happened on the field at halftime of that 1926 match was a full-fledged riot during which students from both sides were determined to defend the "honor" of their schools at any cost, thus sullying the very honor they were supposedly defending. The A&M students seem to have been both outnumbered and, if accounts from the day are to be believed, outgunned.  Witnesses at the time swore that Baylor students brought in wooden clubs along with the team's athletic gear that day - something, however, that has never been verified.

Bottom Line: Battle on the Brazos will especially interest football fans, true crime fans, and those interested in Texas history. It is written in a readable but rather dry style that builds a strong case that the killer has at last been identified.  There is little doubt that if the Waco police department and the presidents of both universities had put this much effort into finding out what really happened on the field that day, the killer would have been identified in 1926.


Book Number 3,392