Just a few weeks after Mack Brown was hired as the coach of the Texas Longhorns in 1998, several business and civic leaders from San Antonio invited him to join his counterpart, Texas A&M Aggies coach R.C. Slocum, for some political glad-handing.
The city was angling to put on its best face in an effort to land the 2000 Republican National Convention and had a number of events lined up with regional and national officials to drum up support. This being the state of Texas, the football coaches of the two biggest universities far outranked the governor—George W. Bush, who earned the presidential nomination two years later—in terms of star power and, importantly, the ability to actually sway hearts and minds.
