At Texas A&M, Rick Perry, the charismatic yell leader, and John Sharp, the student body president, became buddies. They lived across the hall from each other and conspired in everything from university political races to illicit dorm pranks.
After college, the pair remained close. In 1984, a little more than a decade after graduating, Sharp helped persuade Perry to run for public office as a fellow Democrat.
Perry won that race, and on election night in 1990 both were big victors: Sharp captured the state comptroller’s office, and Perry, having switched to the Republican Party, became Texas agricultural commissioner. The old dorm mates were back together, tossing aside their party affiliations and doing each other favors from their offices on opposite sides of the street.
The next big race for the men — the one that would define the trajectory of both political careers — would cost them their friendship. In 1998, nearly three decades after they first met, Perry and Sharp ran against each other for lieutenant governor.
Their contest showed the same dogged resolve in Perry that was on display in his fierce attack against Mitt Romney during last week’s Republican presidential debate — a full-throated, no-holds-barred personal lashing of his chief opponent on a night when Romney momentarily looked on the defensive for the first time in the campaign. The lieutenant governor’s race also revealed that Perry wouldn’t be deterred by the prospect of losing a good friend as he sought to realize his political ambitions.
The battle, like his later Texas gubernatorial contests, provided a telling look at Perry’s campaign style. As a front-runner, he exhibited a reluctance to engage in televised debates, which recently has invited questions about whether his dearth of experience has hindered him on the national stage.
A friendship evolves
At A&M, Perry and Sharp were an unlikely pair: Sharp had earned a reputation as a bright, focused student leader, and Perry as a fun-loving, if academically unmotivated, campus butterfly.
But Sharp saw the reality of their respective positions early. “Rick was very popular,” he remembers. “People . . . were attracted to him. He was funny. He told good stories. He just had that . . . quality. The yell leaders were the most popular guys on campus.”
Sharp viewed Perry’s rah-rah charm as deceptive. It masked, he thought, his friend’s discipline and intense drive, a relentless focus in going after whatever he wanted and exerting his will over those standing in his path.
About midway through their freshman year, fed up with an insufferable upperclassman who had made their lives hard, the two friends assembled a pack that plotted revenge. “Are you in?” Perry asked others, in a recruitment drive. He was persuasive. After the upperclassman finally left campus for a long holiday break, Perry and his buddies locked about 15defecating chickens in his room. “That place was never the same — and that guy never messed with us again,” Sharp remembers with a laugh.
A little more than a decade later, Sharp was among an early group of boosters to recommend Perry, by then a former Air Force pilot, as someone who might be interested in running for an open seat in the state House.
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