Boys Will Be Boys (2 page)

C
ARDBOARD BOXES SURROUND
the desk—listless reminders that a lifetime of accomplishment can be carted away in the briefest of milliseconds.

Not that Tom Landry is thinking of it this way. The man who coached the Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine years has never been the sentimental type. He is a person who prides himself on robotic mannerisms; who purposefully conceals his eyes beneath the brim of a fedora to keep the outside world at arm’s length. Emotions? Who needs emotions?

Yet while Landry refuses to open himself to displays of vulnerability, his feelings are, on this Sunday afternoon in February 1989, painfully clear. Just one day earlier, after completing eighteen holes at the Hills of Lakeway Golf Course near Austin, Texas, Landry was unceremoniously greeted by two men: Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ longtime president, and Jerry Jones, the team’s new owner. Their message was simple and brutal: You’re fired.

Come again?

You’re fired.

So now, sitting in his office in the Dallas Cowboys’ famed Valley Ranch complex, packing up the assorted trinkets and mementos of his life, Landry says little but speaks volumes. Having paced the sideline in a gray or blue blazer for nearly three decades, it is shocking to see him so
human
in a flannel shirt and mismatched checkered dress slacks. He is no different from the canned CPA or insurance adjuster, mechanically placing this in that box, that in this box. Friends and coworkers pop their heads in, offer a supportive word, quickly duck out. It is too painful. “The shock on his face was still registering,” says Dick Mansperger, the longtime Cowboys scout. “Tom was the type of person who didn’t believe there were bad people out there plotting against him. He had been with the Cowboys since the first door was unlocked. It was like someone coming home and telling you it’s not your child anymore.”

It has often been said that Tom Landry was the face of the Dallas Cowboys, and while such sentiment holds true, it does not extend far enough. Tom Landry was
the
Dallas Cowboys. The face. The mind. The
soul.
Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley town of Mission, Texas, Landry entered the world prepackaged to be a Cowboy. “As far back as I can remember,” he once said, “everything I did revolved around football.” Landry starred as a quarterback at Mission High before accepting a scholarship to the University of Texas. His time as a Longhorn was interrupted by World War II, during which he started building the eventual reputation as a heroic deity by serving as a bomber copilot over Germany. He crashed but once, following a bombing run over Czechoslovakia. “We came down between two trees that sheared our wings off,” he recalled later. “But we had no gas so the plane didn’t burn and we all walked out of it.”

Landry returned to school following the war and played fullback and defensive back for the Longhorn squads that won the 1948 Sugar Bowl and, his senior year, the 1949 Orange Bowl. Upon graduating, he joined the New York football Yankees of the All-America Conference,
and later went to the NFL’s New York Giants. Landry spent eleven years in New York, first as a player, later as an innovative defensive coordinator who designed the now-famous 4-3 alignment.

Then, in January 1960, Landry caught a break. The twelve NFL owners voted Dallas an expansion franchise. It was, at best, a quixotic move, what with northeast Texas serving as the heart of the collegiate football Bible Belt. Who would pay hard-earned money to watch a bunch of professionals when the likes of the University of Texas, Southern Methodist, and Texas Christian were readily available?

Clint Williams Murchison, Jr., was willing to take the risk. The son of a high-powered Texas oil baron, Murchison was a whiskey-swilling multimillionaire intrigued by a good old-fashioned game of chance. He paid $500,000 for the rights to the Dallas Cowboys, and shortly thereafter hired Tex Schramm, the former assistant to the president for the Los Angeles Rams, to run the operation. Though just forty years old, Schramm was wise enough to insist that Murchison agree—in writing—to let him hire the team’s first head coach.

Savvy, smart, and well versed in the ways of the league, Schramm interviewed two men for the job. The first was Sid Gillman, the former Rams head coach who would go on to innovate stretch-the-field offenses with the San Diego Chargers. The second was Landry—the oddest of fits. Whereas Schramm liked women, liquor, and never-ending stories, Landry was a born-again Christian who measured each word and preferred soft classical music to prolonged dialogues. “People want to know what makes Tom tick, and he’s too smart to tell them,” William “Rooster” Andrews, his longtime friend, once said. “He was born polished. He’s such a gentleman it’s almost spooky.”

Schramm offered Landry a five-year contract paying $35,000 per season, then hired Gil Brandt to be head of player personnel. A relative baby at age twenty-seven, Brandt’s hobby while majoring in physical education at the University of Wisconsin was studying college game films to determine what separated the great players from the good ones. He was an unrivaled football geek, content to spend his days and
nights poring over scouting reports and game recaps as girls and beers floated past his dorm room unnoticed.

Together, Schramm, Landry, and Brandt conquered the game. But it would take time. “The NFL gave us the pleasure of selecting three of the worst football players off of each team in the league, refused to give us a draft, and then said, ‘OK, boys, let’s play,’ Landry once recalled of the initial season. “It wasn’t easy.”

In 1960, the mighty Cowboys went 0–11–1, losing their first ten games before salvaging a 31–31 tie against the Giants. Those Cowboys ran for a grand total of six touchdowns, kicked six field goals, and subjected starting quarterback Eddie LeBaron to a league-high twenty-six sacks. “LeBaron used to raise his hand for a fair catch before taking the snap from the center,” Landry once uncharacteristically cracked. Worse than the on-field performance was the setting. The Cowboys practiced in Burnett Field, an abandoned minor league baseball stadium lacking heat and hot water for the showers. At night, toaster-sized rats would sneak through the locker room and gnaw on the players’ shoes. On Sundays the team played in the fabled Cotton Bowl, where approximately 8,000 fans filed into an 80,000-seat stadium. “I remember trotting out onto the field before one game,” Landry once wrote, “and wondering if we’d shown up on the wrong date.”

Despite his posting losing records in his first five seasons, calls for Landry’s dismissal were ignored. “There was a greatness about the man that eclipsed our record,” says Joe Bailey, the team’s business manager. “What effective leaders have in common is a vision of where they want to go and the ability to persuade and sell that vision internally and externally. They consider the position a privilege, not a right. And they’re totally trustworthy. That was Tom Landry.”

The Cowboys finally broke through in 1966, capturing the NFC East title with a 10–3–1 record—the first of twenty straight winning seasons. From 1966 through 1985, Landry’s Cowboys won two Super Bowl titles, five NFC titles, and thirteen divisional titles. The coach once mocked for his icy demeanor (players anointed him Pope Landry I)
was now being praised as insightful. His drafts (with an enormous nod to Brandt, the personnel king) were inspired, resulting in one All-Pro pick after another. There was Navy’s Roger Staubach in the tenth round of 1964, Elizabeth City State’s Jethro Pugh in the eleventh round of ’65, Penn State offensive lineman Tom Rafferty in the fourth round of ’76. The Cowboys used their two No. 1 selections in 1975 on Maryland’s Randy White and Langston’s Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, then took Bob Breunig of Arizona State with their fourth pick. It was Dynasty Building 101, and no one could argue when, in 1979, Bob Ryan of NFL Films dubbed the Cowboys “America’s Team.”

Landry and Co. were innovators, leaders in the fields of marketing and self-promotion. Under Schramm, a gaggle of female high school students known as the CowBelles & Beaux morphed into the high-kicking, scantily dressed Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. When Texas Stadium opened in 1971, Schramm made certain to include 196 luxury suites—the NFL’s first “business-class” seating.

By the late 1970s, the Cowboys were the envy of professional sports—the New York Yankees and Montreal Canadiens and Boston Celtics rolled into one. They played in five of the decade’s ten Super Bowls, winning in 1971 against the Miami Dolpins and 1977 versus the Denver Broncos. “The America’s Team concept had swept the country,” said Henderson, a Cowboy outside linebacker from 1975 to 1979. “It was mostly because of Tom Landry and his Christianity that the masses identified with the organization. That was the catalyst. But then came Tex Schramm’s genius of promoting America’s Team so that every patriot from places like Butte, Montana, stationed around the world, would say, ‘That’s
my
team.’”

In other words, the Cowboys possessed football magic.

Football aura.

Football greatness.

Then, one day, it vanished.

The reasons are numerous. Other teams followed the Cowboys’ lead by investing dollars and manpower into scouting collegiate players.
The Dallas drafts went from dazzling (first-round pick Tony Dorsett in 1977) to horrific (first-round pick Rod Hill in 1982). Cocaine infiltrated the locker room, sapping the team’s on-field brilliance and supposed moral superiority. Rampant steroid use led to more and more injuries—pulled groins, torn hamstrings, ripped quads. In 1984 Murchison sold the franchise to Harvey “Bum” Bright, a Texas oilman who viewed the Cowboys as an investment, not a lifeblood. The player strike of 1987 irreparably split the roster, with stars like Dorsett, Danny White, and Randy White crossing the picket line and incurring the wrath of once-loyal teammates.

The head coach lost his way.

It happens to all of us. The miles add up, the brain gets a tad fuzzy. The Cowboys’ descent kicked off on January 10, 1982, when they lost the NFC Championship Game in San Francisco on a since-immortalized 6-yard touchdown pass from Joe Montana to Dwight Clark. Dallas dropped the NFC title game the following season as well, and in 1984 finished 9–7 and missed the playoffs. By 1986 they’d sunk to an unnerving low, completing the year with a 7–9 mark, Landry’s first losing season in more than two decades. “When I got to Dallas, I felt like the team I just played on at UCLA was athletically superior,” says Mark Walen, a defensive tackle selected in the third round of the 1986 draft. “We had linebackers better than anyone the Cowboys put out there.”

As he aged, Landry’s mind began to wander. He’d forget the names of plays and players, make illogical calls and later explain things to the media with garbled thought patterns. “We were just getting our butts beat week after week,” says Kevin Gogan, an offensive guard, “and Coach Landry would never get anybody’s names right. I was always ‘Grogan.’”

Landry’s worst transgression was sticking with the antiquated Flex Defense, a 4–3 scheme he invented in the mid–1950s. Geared toward stopping the run, the Flex featured two offset linemen reading the various blocks, while other linemen attacked and clogged up the blocking patterns. As offensive linemen grew bigger by the year, the Flex suf
fered. Teams like the Redskins, boasting a bevy of elephantine offensive linemen nicknamed “The Hogs,” would blow the Cowboys off the line and dominate the trenches. “Tom was a great coach,” says Garry Cobb, a Dallas linebacker in 1988 and ’89, “but he was the last to see that his defense was out of date.”

By 1988, Landry and the Cowboys had bottomed out. A season that began with the slogan “Blueprint for Victory” concluded with Dallas’s finishing last in the NFC East with a 3–13 mark. Landry may have still been a god, but he was no longer a god with a team worth watching. In a telephone poll conducted by the
Dallas Times Herald,
61 percent of respondents wanted Landry gone.

“The public perception was not good,” says Bill Bates, a Cowboys safety. “The excitement at Texas Stadium didn’t exist. Everyone came to the games and just sat on their hands. You’d score a touchdown and it’d be, ‘Yeah—nice play.’ No one screaming or jumping up and down. Something had to change.”

For years, Bum Bright wanted Tom Landry fired.

The owner of the Dallas Cowboys
loathed
his head coach. He loathed his apparent coldness and his impassive sideline demeanor. Mostly, he loathed the arrogance. Where others saw steely and determined, Bright saw a holier-than-thou fraud who had somehow conned the good people of Texas into believing he was more than your run-of-the-mill football coach.

Bright had first met Landry in 1957, when Bear Bryant left Texas A&M to coach the University of Alabama. Asked to help find a replacement at his alma mater, Bright sat down with Landry for a lengthy one-on-one interview. “I was,” he recalled years later, “singularly unimpressed.”

Fast-forward to 1988, when Bright’s holdings were in financial free fall. Four years earlier, following his acquisition of the Cowboys, he had spent $71 million to purchase Texas Federal Savings & Loan and merge it with Trinity Savings and Loan. When he added Dallas
Federal Savings and Loan for $107 million, Bright became the world’s seventh-largest privately held mortgage broker.

Near decade’s end, however, hundreds of American banks filed for bankruptcy. Bright’s personal worth plummetted from $600 million to $300 million in less than a year. He had to sell the Cowboys. Lacking the emotional attachment of a true fan, Bright cared little whether a prospective owner would maintain the roster, trade everyone, change uniform colors, hire overweight cheerleaders, or switch the name from “Dallas Cowboys” to “Northeast Texas Mule Beaters.” No, all he needed was the assurance that Landry would be fired. It was a strange condition, but a condition nonetheless. Bright simply never “got” Landry—never
got
the legion of followers who would have dived from a bridge for the man; never
got
the cultlike way opposing coaches bowed in his direction; never
got
the perpetual cold shoulder he gave the owner. As the franchise fell from dynasty to doormat, Bright’s frustration morphed into a stinging resentment. Landry, in his eyes, was a failure who preyed upon the loyalties of others. He had to go.