Ohio State, Texas game has Flathead connection

by CARL HENNELL The Daily Inter Lake
| September 8, 2006 1:00 AM

Saturday's college football game in Austin, Texas, between top-ranked Ohio State and No. 2 Texas has a Flathead Valley connection.

Before the game, the defending national champion Longhorns will dedicate a nine-foot tall, 1,500-pound statue of their 1977 Heisman Trophy running back Earl Campbell. It will be placed near the southwest entrance of Royal-Memorial Stadium.

The Montana connection: The statue was sculpted by Bigfork's Ken Bjorge and cast at Kalispell Art Casting.

The former Gonzaga law professor of 17 years, who opened Bjorge Gallery in Bigfork in 1988, is a Texas alum. He mainly sculpts wildlife and western scenes but has done about a dozen larger-than-life-size statues since first doing a statue of former University of Washington football coach Jim Owens.

And that's how he got the Campbell gig.

James Nixon, a San Antonio oilman, spends some time during his summers in Montana and became familiar with Bjorge's work - in particular, the Owens piece. Nixon ended up spearheading the project with the help of 86 other donors and hired Bjorge.

"It has really been a treat and an honor to be asked to do this," Bjorge said. "Anybody that came out of the 1970s and who enjoyed football thought an awful lot of Campbell.

"The image I had to capture is the game face. He has a sense of humor, but he was a very serious football player."

Bjorge started sculpting two years ago and his work went to the bronze foundry a year later and shipped to Austin. That was last year. It has been stored in limbo at UT ever since because the school has guidelines for statues on campus.

The University of Texas System Board of Regents rules, "No gift of statuary depicting a living person shall be accepted by an institution, unless intended for display in a museum or addition to the colletcion of works of art for display in a museum."

It took a year for the powers that be to get the OK to display the statue in an entrance to the stadium.

The statue's name is The Tyler Rose. Campbell grew up in Tyler, Texas.