TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY
Jeff Mudd, a 1992 Texas State graduate, has published a novel set during his freshman year at the university. Titled “Truthfully Based on Loose Events: A College Examination,” the plot follows a freshman from West Texas as he adapts to college life in the late 1980s at what was then known as Southwest Texas State University.
The main character, like Mudd, was born and raised in a small West Texas town, and the move to San Marcos was a momentous change, one which very much concerned his parents.
In both the book and real life, the parents followed him down to San Marcos in their pickup truck, helping him to get set up in Brogdon Hall. His mother made his bed, his father gave him a hundred dollars and “tells him to figure it the hell out,” Mudd said.
Like the narrator in the book, Mudd joined a fraternity, and what follows in “Truthfully” is a semester of adapting to college life, including some “light hazing” and indoctrination from older dorm residents and fraternity brothers.
Among Mudd’s new friends were a group of students from Dallas, who introduced the country music fan from Odessa to alternative bands like Depeche Mode, the Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen. The Dallas students were also regulars at the Starck Club, and introduced him to similar dance clubs on road trips to Austin. But the majority of “Truthfully” is set in Mudd’s old San Marcos haunts.
Herbert’s Taco Hut, The Green Parrot, Grins Restaurant and the Showdown all serve as settings for scenes from the book, as does the San Marcos River.
The town of San Marcos has always played an important role in the life of Texas State students, Mudd said.
“I always felt like San Marcos was the co-star, I thought they coexisted really nicely with the university,” he said. “An older population, as far as the residents go. And they played nicely with the students.”
Mudd sums up this relationship in these excerpts from “Truthfully”:
“San Marcos wasn’t a college town so much as a working town with a university woven through it. SWT sat inside San Marcos the way a building exists inside a block-present, but not in complete command.”
“San Marcos revealed itself in pockets. You learned by habit and word of mouth, not by accident. … The Square came alive at night, not with glamour, but with options.”
On the back cover, Mudd describes San Marcos as “a college town still wonderfully unpolished,” and sums up his writing style as a “blend of nostalgia, humor and lived-in realism.”
Although he now lives in Round Rock, he regularly returns to San Marcos, which he said has maintained much of the uniqueness that he first encountered as a student, in spite of the recent growth and development.
“San Marcos has its own rhythm,” he said. “I wanted that to be a common thread throughout the book.”
When he first decided to come to Southwest Texas as a high school senior, Mudd intended to play baseball for the Bobcats... but that plan fell apart by the end of his first season. “I discovered girls and kegs and fraternity life and forgot how to hit a curveball, not that I ever really could,” he said. “I just wasn’t good enough.”
Although he was no longer part of the SWT baseball program, he continued to follow the games. As a senior in the journalism program, Mudd became the assistant sports editor at the University Star student newspaper and later covered TXST baseball for the San Marcos Daily Record.
“I walked into the Record one afternoon and asked if the sports department needed help with anything. Without putting down his sandwich, the then-sports editor asked, “Yeah, you wanna cover the SWT baseball team this year? The season starts in a week.”
Howard Bushong had just taken over the Southwest Texas State baseball team when Mudd was writing for the Record, and would later lead the team to division championships and even an NCAA tournament appearance in 1999. But Mudd had moved on long before then, becoming the Westlake Picayune sports editor from 1994 to 1998.
His tenure at the Picayune overlapped with the high school years of a certain Hall of Fame player Mudd had first encountered as a college-age counselor at Camp of Champions in Marble Falls.
“I was the champion of the entire camp in pickleball, until this punk kid named Drew Brees grabbed a paddle and beat me like 21-6 or something like that. So fast forward. I’m the sports editor at the Picayune while he was at Westlake.”
Mudd left the Westlake paper to start and run his own fitness business, Absolutely Fit, from 1999 to 2020 - when it shut down due to the COVID- 19 pandemic. He has continued to run a mobile fitness training business, Pinnacle Mobile Training, since 2021, but has recently focused more on writing.
“I still have the fitness business, because I still have to pay my bills, but I decided in the last year to make a real go at writing. ... I have published six books, all based in Texas, all set in the 80s or early 90s, because I enjoy writing nostalgia, … there’s no social media in any of my books.”
Mudd has branched out from writing novels and is currently working on two memoirs.
“If I had a nickel for every person that told me that their life should be a book or a movie,” he said. “But occasionally you’ll run across people whose life actually would make a good book. … I’m basically acting as an editor. It’s their words. I’m just shaping the story.”
During his breaks from writing memoirs, Mudd has taken his latest personal book project beyond the page. His next novel, to be titled “Shrimp Boat Summer,” is set on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1985, following a fictional Minor League baseball league. He’s created logos, caps, even fake memorabilia for many of the fictional teams, including the Matagorda Sharks, the Galveston Gulls, the Port Isabel Tide and the Pelican Bay Shrimps, much of it already available online.
“Shrimp Boat Summer” focuses on the 1985 season of the Shrimps, he said. During our interview, I asked him to come up with a name for a San Marcos team and the results of a hypothetical game between that team and the Shrimps.
Unfortunately, the San Marcos River Dogs lose to the Shrimps 7-4, but the Dogs were down 7-0 in the bottom of the ninth, and came up with four runs to make a game out of it.
“You can never discount the heart and soul of a San Marcos player,” declared Mudd.
Although he now lives in Round Rock, Mudd misses the Hill Country roots he developed during his college years in San Marcos.
“I have a 14-year-old, and the day he graduates high school, I’m desperately hoping to move back to the Hill Country, San Marcos, Wimberley, Gruene, New Braunfels, one of those towns. I want to be an old guy on the bank of a river with a line in the water and my laptop in my lap.”
