IMAGE FROZEN IN TIME

It’s the click of a camera shutter, a moment in time captured on film on the afternoon of Dec. 6, 1969, at Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville, Ark.

At the center of the frame, clutching the football after having crossed the Arkansas Razorbacks’ goal line, is Texas Longhorns running back Jim Bertelsen.

To the photographer’s left, Texas center Forrest Wiegand accomplishes the best jump for joy a weary offensive lineman can muster. To his right, receiver Randy Peschel displays the “Hook ’em Horns” sign.

For the Razorbacks, from left to right, defensive lineman Dick Bum-pas, linebacker Cliff Powell and defensive lineman Gordon McNulty, masters of the field for most of the afternoon, are silent witnesses to Texas’ celebration.

It’s the tying touchdown of top-ranked Texas’ 15-14 victory over No. 2 Arkansas that decided the 1969 national championship, with President Richard Nixon watching from the stands and 50 million people viewing on television.

They called it the Big Shootout, the climactic event of college football’s centennial season, played 50 years ago this Friday and commemorated by players on both teams individually and, in singular fashion, collectively, as a touchstone for the best the sport can offer.

“It’s apicture of two teams that fought hard,” said Mike Looney, who has written a book and directed a documentary about the game. “But the lines have blurred. The teams have become one, sharing the pride of being part of that game, the burdens that have fallen to their teammates as they’ve gotten older, and spiritual bonds as well.”

Representatives of both teams will spend Saturday, one day after the 50th anniversary, in Texarkana, which straddles the Texas-Arkansas state line, at ascreening of Looney’s documentary “The Big Shootout: The Life and Times of 1969.”

The game of the century

More ink arguably has been spilled and more film burned about the Big Shootout than any moment in Texas sports history. It’s been the subject of several books, two published within the past three months, plus a couple of documentaries and at least one feature film.

“I get asked about it all the time,” Wiegand said. “It’s like I have it stamped on my forehead.”

For the uninitiated, the game was moved from October to Dec. 6 at the suggestion of ABC Sports publicist Beano Cook as a finale to the 100th season of college football.

With both teams unbeaten after top-ranked and defending national champion Ohio State lost to Michigan, President Nixon said he would attend and present a national championship plaque to the winner. It was a decision that did not sit well with Penn State, which also was unbeaten with the nation’s longest winning streak at the time.

The game unfolded in perilous times, in the midst of the Vietnam War, between schools that had yet to break the color barrier. Texas would not have its first African-American varsity player until 1970, and Arkansas would not follow suit until 1971.

Arkansas led 14-0 before Texas rallied on a 42-yard run by James Street and a two-point Street run on the first play of the fourth quarter and, after a fourth-down Street completion to Peschel, Bertelsen’s 2-yard run and Happy Feller’s extra-point kick with 3:58 to play.

Wiegand, retired at 72 after a longtime coaching career in La Porte, chuckles at the modest vertical leap captured by the photo as he celebrated.

“For me to jump like that, it had to be pretty exciting,” he said. “I knew that all we had to do was to kick the extra point, and we’d be home. The play went to the other side, so I became a cheerleader.”

Two plays before the score, Peschel outreached two Arkansas defenders to track down a pass from Street for a 44-yard gain. He credits not so much his hands but his shoes.

“It was cold and wet, and we couldn’t figure out which cleats to wear,” Peschel said. “That was back in the early days of Astro-Turf. I finally settled on the shorter cleats, and I must have picked the right ones.”

Another photo of Bertelsen’s touchdown, shot from behind the Texas formation, shows UT guard Bobby Mitchell, who delivered the clearing block, and Arkansas defender Bruce James plus the rest of the Longhorns and Razorbacks picking themselves off the turf as the officials signal touchdown.

“It was a counter play, which means it was coming to my side,” said Mitchell, today a dentist in Dallas. “The defensive tackle crumped down a little bit, and I was able to block him. But the only room was right off my left knee — maybe a 2-foot hole — and Jim shot right through.

“I still can’t believe he made it through, that he was able to go so low and do it so fast.”

The play was an anomaly in that Powell, the Razorbacks’ All-America linebacker, was on his feet as an observer. Texas ran 70 plays, 60 of them runs, and Powell was in on 24 tackles, still the second-best one-game total in school history.

“That game was designed for the defensive line to turn the linebackers loose on the (Texas) wishbone,” James said. “We used the ends and tackles to take the dive backs, and Cliff and the linebackers would take the quarterback and the pitch men.”

As the Longhorns walked back to their huddle for the extra point, Bob McKay, the Longhorns’ All-America tackle, said to Wiegand, the team’s deep snapper, “Don’t screw this one up.”

“Nobody had said a thing to me all season about my snaps, and that’s when you tell me not to mess up the damned thing?” Wiegand said, laughing. “It was like a threat — like if you do screw up, don’t come back to the sidelines.”

Wiegand’s snap was high, but holder Donnie Wigginton pulled it down, and Feller’s kick was true. Texas clinched the game with a late interception, and Nixon visited the Longhorns’ locker room to declare them national champions.

A week after the game, doctors discovered that Texas defensive back Freddie Steinmark was suffering from bone cancer, and his left leg was amputated. Steinmark was on hand for the Longhorns’ Cotton Bowl victory a month later over Notre Dame but died in 1971 at age 22.

In accordance with the ratings mania that has accompanied college football’s 150th anniversary, the Big Shootout has been selected at No. 29 among the era’s best games and as one of eight “Games of the Century.” The 1969 Longhorns were selected as the 17th-best team of the 150 years.

Bertelsen’s winning score, framed by Wiegand, Peschel and the Arkansas defenders, was caught on film by Sam Pierson Jr., a longtime Chronicle photographer who shot Longhorns games throughout Darrell Royal’s coaching tenure.

Pierson, who died in 2017, was so attuned to Royal’s play-calling habits that he once was chided by the coach for inadvertently tipping plays.

“(Royal) told Sam and another photographer to stop moving before the play because the other team could figure where the ball was going based on where they were standing,” said Pierson’s widow, Barbara. “He knew the plays so well.”

Legacy of lifelong bonds

Time has taken its toll on the old Longhorns and Razorbacks, but both teams reunited this year on the same mid-October weekend.

For the Longhorns, one highlight was the presentation of a replica of the plaque that Nixon brought to the 1969 game in Fayetteville. The original’s whereabouts remain a mystery.

“We had a fantastic time,” said Peschel, who recently retired from a career in banking and residential construction. “We all kind of realized this would be the last one.”

Those who have died since the team’s 25-year reunion include Royal, who died in 2012, and Street, who died in 2013.

“I miss James every day,” Peschel said. “Just being around him lifted your spirits.”

Wiegand’s happiest moment of the weekend came when he and his teammates took the field before halftime with members of the Texas alumni band.

“We ended up in the tunnel at the same time,” he said. “Talking to them, you come to realize how many people were affected and are still affected by what we did.”

For such a hard-fought game — or perhaps because of that fact — the teams are unusually close. After Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles, the losing coach in the Big Shootout, canceled an on-field tribute to both teams during a 2004 nonconference game between the Longhorns and Razorbacks, the players proceeded with their own reunion plans.

Team members also met in 2013 at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock for a showing of Looney’s documentary.

Their relationships also are a central part of the two recent books written about the game, Looney’s “The Big Shootout: The Untold Story of the Game of the Century,” and longtime Texas sportswriter Mark McDonald’s “Beyond the Big Shootout: 50 Years of Football’s Life Lessons.”

“The Big Shootout was played in such a way that, win or lose, no matter what life will throw at them, Razorbacks and Longhorns today are better men for having trained for and played in acontest of that magnitude,” McDonald wrote.

Perhaps the most fitting tribute to the 1969 Longhorns and Razorbacks came in Little Rock, where James and several local businessmen in the early 2000s formed the city’s first Touchdown Club.

Among the club’s most popular speakers, James said, were Street and McKay, who regaled fans with tales from the old days of the Southwest Conference.

Street returned twice more to address the club, with his last visit coming two weeks before his death in 2013.

McKay presented the club with a donation in Street’s memory, and the club used the proceeds to establish the James Street Sportsmanship Award, presented annually to players or trainers from each Little Rock high school.

“Some are starters, some are third-teamers, and some are trainers or equipment people,” James said. “It’s something that we and the Texas players do together, and it represents everything that we stand for.”

Fifty years after the Big Shootout, a monumental win for the Longhorns and a crushing defeat for the Razorbacks, Texas and Arkansas stand together to impart life’s lessons to a younger generation.

“You may wonder how you can have two teams who played each other, and one team ends up honoring the quarterback who beat us in a national championship game,” James said. “The answer is that it was a game. There are other things that we are supposed to do in life, and this is one of them.

“I was really bothered for a couple of days after we lost that game, but then I realized that I would rather have played it and lost than never have been good enough to get that close to a national championship.” david.barron@chron.com twitter.com/dfbarron