Renaissance Man Degrate Paints a Pretty Picture for UT Defense
Jim Lassiter
Published: Wed, October 10, 1984 12:00 AM
Tony Degrate has the calloused hands of a football player who has spent countless hours in the weight room at the University of Texas getting as big as Bevo and twice as strong.
You would certainly never guess he has the touch of a skilled surgeon in those massive hands.
At 6-4 and 280 pounds, Degrate looks as if he could singlehandedly uproot a forest of giant oak trees. His reputation for putting over 400 pounds on his back and walking with it brings chills to the spines of his teammates who wonder what No. 99 would be like if someone got him riled.
Gene Chilton, Texas' 295-pound center, is the most massive Longhorn of them all. Last spring he benchpressed 520 pounds, breaking the UT record of 502 pounds set by the year before by Gene Chilton.
Jeff Leiding, the playful former Texas linebacker from Tulsa, had a habit of walking up to Chilton and pushing on his chest and saying, "Dr Pepper please." From that, Chilton became known as: "Gene, Gene the Coke Machine."
But Gene Chilton knows better than to fool around with Tony Degrate.
"I would never want to make him angry," Chilton said. Neither do any of his friends and certainly none of his enemies.
For Degrate is one of those humans whose mind and body don't quite match. It's like his Maker erred when Degrate's personality and his physique were matched.
Perhaps his Creator was distracted for just a second by some devilish trick and through an unfortunate error Degrate got a body from the extra-large pile and a psyche from the extra-sensitive stack. A psychiatrist might call Degrate a Jekyll-Hyde.
On football Saturday afternoons, Degrate is all you'd want in a college defensive tackle. He is second on the No. 1 ranked Lornhorn team with 30 tackles in three games. He has made five tackles behind the line of scrimmage, two quarterback sacks and pressured the passer a total of 13 times already. Those statistics tell you that offensive centers can't block him.
But away from the gridiron, Degrate is an artist. A real artist. The walls of his room on the Texas campus are dominated by 14 portraits of friends and teammates he has drawn. Art critics say his work shows legitimate promise.
Some of his work will probably hang in Jester Hall, the athletic dorm, when he has graduated. A Dallas newspaper had commissioned Degrate to paint his impressions of the Oklahoma-Texas game in time for this Saturday's 79th border war. But it's touch and go whether he'll complete the project in time for the paper to use it in its Friday morning editions.
This week the Longhorn All-American candidate is being asked more about his unusual blend of football and oils than he is about the Oklahoma Sooners. Painting is something this Rembrandt in shoulder pad prefers talking about anyway.
"I look at myself as a teddy bear and a grizzly bear," he said.
"My basic nature is to be quiet, to be creative. But on the football field you can't succeed if you're passive. You have to be aggressive."
But as David McWilliams, Texas' defensive coordinator, sees it, Degrate's blend of the beautiful and the beastly is not a bad mix at all.
"Any good artist is a perfectionist," said McWilliams. "He never finishes a work that he's satisfied with.
"And that is the way Tony is. We can be looking at game film in which he has played very, very well and he'll find something he could have done a little differently to play just a little better."
Degrate works in oils now because it relaxes him. But when he began drawing in junior high it was anything but a method for relieving the pressures of the day. His first work was done in Don Parsons' math class at Snyder (Texas) Junior High School. The subject: Don Parsons.
"Mr. Parsons sent me to the principal's office," said Degrate.
"He didn't think it was funny, Later though, he encouraged me to take art training."
When Degrate finished high school football he could have gone to any college in the Southwest. He chose Texas over Oklahoma the day before signing date after he had invited Freddie Akers and Barry Switzer into his home to make a final last-second sales pitch.
But his mother had an idea of where he was going to college when Tony presented her with the menu he'd like her to fix for the two famous coaches. Switzer got roast beef when he ate with the DeGrates, but Akers got Gracie Degrate's special barbecued ribs. It's the special sauce that makes them so good.
Naturally, she asked her son what had been the final determining factor.
"Coach Akers," she wasn't surprised to learn, "is a doodler himself." BIOG: NAME:
Archive ID: 206103
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