Remembering the Longhorn Band’s olive branch to a grieving Texas A&M community

COL. JAY BREWER is the epitome of an Aggie. His dad played for Texas A&M’s 1939 national championship team. He arrived in College Station in August 1977, joined the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band and never left.

For 40 years until his retirement in 2020, Brewer was one of the directors and also served as the voice of the Aggie Band, with his authoritative trademark — “Now forming at the North End of Kyle Field,” or wherever the Aggies were playing — punctuating each performance.

As Texas and Texas A&M prepare to resume a heated neighbor-against-neighbor rivalry in College Station on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC), ticket prices are soaring for the first Lone Star Showdown since 2011, when the Aggies left the Big 12 for the SEC.

But you won’t hear any vitriol toward the Texas Longhorns coming from Brewer’s mouth. They earned Brewer’s enduring gratitude on Nov. 26, 1999.

While the rivalry’s return centers on the hate between the two schools, their 1999 meeting looms large in the minds of many in Aggieland. That year, the Aggie bonfire — the giant symbol for their burning desire to beat Texas — collapsed, killing 12 students and injuring 27 others.

During a game the Aggies won in dramatic fashion, the Longhorn Band paid tribute to its rival university with a remarkable halftime performance. And 25 years later, the unprecedented show of unity between the two universities and their fans remains an indelible memory for many Texans. “It’s one of the most memorable days in my 40-year career,” Brewer said this week.

BREWER WAS JOLTED from his sleep on Nov. 18, 1999 at nearly 3 a.m. by a phone call from the band’s top cadet commander, who told him the bonfire “stack” — the 55-foot-tall rows of giant logs arranged like a tiered cake — had fallen. Every year since 1909, students had built the towering structure on campus, with construction organized by the school’s Corps of Cadets.

“We think we have everybody from the band accounted for,” the cadet told him.

Brewer thanked him for the update and laid back down, groggy and unaware of the severity of the situation. Then it hit him. He thinks he has everyone accounted for?

Brewer rushed out, jumped in his pickup and drove to the A&M polo fields where he saw the 5,000 logs — more than a million pounds of timber — strewn about like matchsticks. He could see the lights from emergency response vehicles. Even more shocking, he realized he was following two hearses through the gates.

As dawn broke, the news started to spread. Eventually, it was confirmed that 12 students died.

Football — and especially a halftime show — was an afterthought. The Texas A&M football team canceled practices. The players were among the rescue workers lifting logs off the pile as they looked for survivors.

“They are still in a state of shock,” Aggies coach R.C. Slocum said the next day. “It’s hard for them to realize their fellow students died working on a project to recognize the spirit that comes with the game.”

In Austin, the news stunned the Longhorns.

“I drove to the office with a tear in my eye this morning,” Texas coach Mack Brown told reporters. “I can promise you nobody here is thinking about football. Our thoughts and prayers are with those kids and their families, and all of the people at Texas A&M.”

Texas held a blood drive at the football offices, with Brown estimating that 400 to 500 people participated.

UT students wore white ribbons in memory of the Aggies who died, and the Longhorns’ Hex Rally — a tradition dating to the 1940s when fans burn red candles before the A&M game — was transformed into a unity gathering with a candlelight vigil in front of the UT Tower, which is traditionally illuminated but was darkened for the occasion. Brown fixed a white ribbon on his car’s antenna.

“We had the memorial with a lot of students and fans from Texas A&M, which was a night that I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” Brown told ESPN in 2021.

As the week went on, the coaches and officials from both schools started to talk about the football game and whether it should be played.

The decision was to play the 106th edition of the game, as the two schools had done the week after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and in wartime. The 10 a.m. game on a Saturday in late November would serve as a sort of memorial, in front of 86,128 — then the largest crowd to watch a football game in the state of Texas.

THE AGGIES AND the Longhorns have played 118 times. They have often been cultural opposites: A&M was founded as an agricultural school in a rural college town and Texas occupies prime real estate in the state capital. Texas A&M was an all-male military school until 1963, when women were first admitted, while Texas kept Austin “weird.” Both of their fight songs mention the other.

There’s not a lot of precedent for the two playing nice, as former Texas A&M quarterback Bucky Richardson once explained when he was playing for Aggies in the late ’80s. “You see ’em every day. You work with them. They live next door. Your kids know their kids,” Richardson said. “You want to like ’em, you try to like ’em. Heck, you’d really like to be their friend. But there’s just something different about you and them. Deep, deep down, there is this feeling you have when you see ’em wearing that color, or you hear them talk. … There’s a difference between Aggies and Longhorns. It’s a hate thing.”

On Nov. 26, the day of the game, Kevin Sedatole could tell things were different. The Longhorn Band director said there was a different tone as the members entered Kyle Field. Sedatole is a Texas native and Baylor graduate whose father was a high school band director in the Houston area. He knew the Aggies’ passion well.

In the parking lots and at tailgates outside, fans in maroon and burnt orange congregated. Trash talk gave way to hugs and handshakes. They shared plates instead of trading insults.

“It was very weird going into the stadium because people were being so nice,” said Sedatole, now the director of bands at Michigan State. “The band has to come in through the gauntlet of the Aggie tailgating.”

He was already concerned with how to manage the rah-rah pageantry of a marching band on such a somber occasion, and he struggled to find a balance.

“The first time that we played ‘Texas Fight’ was weird,” he said. “It felt like we shouldn’t really be doing this. But there are also people saying, ‘Look, we need to treat this as normal as it can.'”

But the occasion called for more than a standard performance. Sedatole and his counterparts in College Station were all friends, despite their bands being a study in contrasts. Texas’ Showband of the Southwest is known for elaborate themed shows, while the Aggie Band is defined by discipline and tradition.

“All of us here have always had a great deal of respect for the Longhorn Band,” Dr. Tim Rhea, the current director of the Aggie Band said. “They do what they do extremely well. And I think we do what we do extremely well. They’ve always been wonderful colleagues for us.”

Every year before the game, Sedatole and his staff would meet with their counterparts in the Aggie Band, led by Lt. Col. Ray Toler and his assistant, Rhea, who took over when Toler retired in 2002.

But this was no ordinary year. No one knew how to proceed. The Aggies were busy scrambling to make their own plans, and Sedatole and his staff opted to stay out of their way.

Every year, at the final home game, the Aggies perform a fan-favorite drill known as a “four-way cross” — an intricate precision marching maneuver in which band members from four different directions pass within centimeters of one another. Rhea scrapped it, feeling it didn’t suit the tone of the occasion.

Sedatole called Rhea, a close friend, to ask if they were even going to have halftime. Rhea said yes, but that the Aggie Band probably wouldn’t perform.

Since Texas was the visiting team, they had to go first, which concerned Sedatole. He had an entire show planned around “Carmen,” the opera, but opted to just keep “The Flower Song” from the show, which he calls a “healing melody.”

Then, the Longhorn Band played “Amazing Grace.” They held Texas and Texas A&M flags side-by-side as they played, and then lowered the Texas flags and kept the A&M flags aloft. The LHB then added a Marine band rendition of “Taps” to the end as a tribute to the students who had died.

“That never happens,” Sedatole said. “We were just trying to make sure that people knew that we were there with them. I’ve never heard Kyle Field that silent. You could hear the wires hitting the flagpoles.”

Fans wept in the stands.

Thomas Gray of Houston, a Texas fan who said he was one of the only Longhorns fans in his section on the third deck, remembers Aggies turning around and thanking him personally.

“I felt weird accepting compliments on their behalf,” he said.

In the press box, the Aggie band staff was floored.

“We had no idea they were going to do it,” Rhea said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is the classiest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.'”

The stands were still full as the Texas band performed, and Aggies fans gave the members a standing ovation. Over the loudspeakers, the Longhorn Band announcer said:

Our two institutions are great rivals, but more importantly great friends who have the highest amount of respect for each other. May the Longhorn spirit and the Spirit of Aggieland never die.

“It was very moving and I appreciated what they did so much,” Toler said. “It was what I hoped that I would’ve thought to do had the roles been reversed. That was very special what they did.”

Said Brewer: “I’m up on the third deck and you could have heard a pin drop in that stadium. The first half of the game just ceased to exist for those moments. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more beautiful rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’ than I did that day.”

The Aggie Band — which often marched in the shape of the Longhorn logo with the horns separated, a nod to the “Aggie War Hymn’s” encouragement to “saw Varsity’s horns off” — opted to form in their classic “Block T” formation in silence before walking silently off the field.

“It was so silent that you could hear the spurs clinking on the cadets’ boots, even up in the third level,” Gray said. “There have only been a few times in my life where the hair on the back of my neck stood up; this was one of them.”

MORE TEARS WERE shed in College Station after the Aggies stormed back in the fourth quarter to beat the Longhorns in a dramatic finish. Trailing 20-16, quarterback Major Applewhite drove Texas to the A&M 46 before Jay Brooks sacked him and forced a fumble, which was recovered by Brian Gamble with 23 seconds left. Gamble stood up, then fell to his knees, and held his arms out wide to the sky.

“We had the thought and memory of those 12 in our hearts and minds every single play,” offensive lineman Chris Valletta, who had the names of the victims written on his undershirt, said after the game. “I hope this win can ease the pain a little bit. I personally want to send this to all of them, from all of us.”

In 2013, Brown resigned after 16 years in Austin, and once again showed his respect for the Aggies in his farewell news conference after being asked if there was anything he wished he could’ve changed during his tenure.

“I would want the bonfire [collapse] to not have happened at A&M,” he said. “Playing A&M on Thanksgiving, I thought about the families. … When you lose your children, there is nothing worse than that in the world. I think about that every Thanksgiving because there are 12 families that don’t have a good Thanksgiving. That’ll never go away.”

The series (seemingly) ended in 2011 with Texas remaining in the Big 12 while Texas A&M went to the SEC. At that game, the Texas band presented Rhea with a parting gift: One of those Aggie flags they held high on the field is framed and on one of the walls of the Aggie Band hall.

But this week, the historic rivalry returns, and so does the halftime contrast between the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band and the Showband of the Southwest, the state’s two showcase bands will once again offer their signature styles.

There’s no longer an on-campus bonfire (there is a student-run one off-campus in nearby Bryan). In June, Texas A&M president Mark Welsh III decided against reinstating an official university-sponsored bonfire for the renewal of the Texas series, despite a committee’s recommendation to restore it, albeit with professional construction.

On this Nov. 18 as they do every year, Aggies gathered at a memorial on A&M’s campus at 2:42 a.m. in remembrance of the 12 who died.

For Brewer, it was a reminder to treat the upcoming game accordingly.

“It’s an athletic event between two big-time rivals in the great state of Texas, and that’s all it is,” he said.

The Aggies fans probably won’t be as nice when the Longhorn Band marches in. The fans probably won’t thank the Longhorns after their band performs. The Texas coaches aren’t going to make peace with an Aggies win. Brewer probably won’t get his wish of a new generation of fans — who grew up without this rivalry — keeping their perspective.

But it’s also just a football game, and not a makeshift memorial service. And for that, everyone is thankful. The hate might return, but the Aggies and the Longhorns will always have the memory of a day when they were all mourning Texans.

“A lot of the bitterness and the hate and all that kind of went away,” Rhea said. “When you have a tragedy, it does tend to unite your human spirit together.

“I hope we never have to do it again.”