by Chad Millman
Jonsson’s staid civic-minded use of his wealth clashed with the shoot-from-the-hip style and unapologetic attitude of Murchison’s. And, given his popularity, Jonsson had Dallas’s old guard by his side. To press the city into reconsidering his request, Murchison bought ninety acres of land fifteen miles away in Irving, Texas, and threatened to build his stadium there. Jonsson was unmoved. He agreed to renovate the Cotton Bowl at taxpayer expense, but he would not approve a downtown stadium complex.
After the ’67 bloodshed, Murchison announced that he’d build Texas Stadium, what he called “the finest football stadium to date in the world,” in Irving, if he could arrange for $13 million in financing. Because the majority of the Cowboy fan base was blue collar and located in South Dallas, near the Cotton Bowl, a new stadium in Irving would be no small move. But the consummate dealmaker Murchison deeded the land to the city in exchange for approval from the Irving City Council for a bond issue to fund the construction.
Murchison put the engineering and math skills he had learned at MIT and Duke to good use. With only minimal architectural consultation, he designed a remarkable amphitheater dedicated to football. “The problem with almost every modern stadium today is that they were designed to house both football and baseball,” he said, decades ahead of his time. The innovations were remarkable. He knew the importance of television, and with that in mind, he limited the stadium seating to 58,000, almost 20,000 fewer than the Cotton Bowl. The seats would be secured on a steep grade overlooking the field, rather than set back away from the field. There would be a roof that would cover the fans, but a rectangular chunk removed to keep the field open to the elements. The field would be impeccable, made of the same artificial grass—Astroturf—that was used at Houston’s Astrodome, and this would keep his Cowboys impeccable, too.
But the biggest innovation was the “Circle Suites,” the first NFL luxury boxes. They were marketed to wealthy football fans and placed at the very top of the stadium, offering the most complete view of the game as well as separation from the regular ticket buyers below. The brochure said it all, “Your personalized penthouse at Texas Stadium . . . the ultimate in spectacular luxury and comfort . . . similar to a second residence, like a lake home or a ranch.” A sixteen-by-sixteen-foot suite could be had with the purchase of two hundred Texas Stadium Corporation Bonds at $250 each ($50,000). But that was just for the concrete box. The owner would be required to decorate and outfit the suite at their own cost. The owner would also have to buy twelve $1,300 season tickets for thirty-two of the next thirty-five years. After thirty-five years, the bonds would mature at an anemic $300.
The bonds weren’t required just for the swells at the top. In order to purchase a single season ticket, a regular fan was required to buy one $250 bond (the first iteration of today’s “personal seat licenses”), plus pay the cost of the individual game tickets. If you wanted seats between the coveted thirty-yard lines, the minimum purchase was four bonds per seat. And you also had to commit to buy the tickets for twenty-one of the next thirty-five years or lose your option on the seat. Those hit hardest were the blue-collar fans that filled the Cotton Bowl in the early years, the loyal ones who stuck with the team even when they lost the big games. “I’d say we lost a whole group of fans in the $12,000 to $20,000 a year salary range who could afford season tickets at the Cotton Bowl but couldn’t afford to buy bonds,” Murchison said. “If we discriminated against them, we discriminated against them, but no more than all America discriminates against people who don’t have enough money to buy everything they want.”
Where you sat, if you could get in at all, defined your position in Dallas’s economy and, by proxy, your social value. Going to see a Cowboys game meant that you had money. Once you were there, you could look around and see who was above and below you in the race for more. Professional football was once a game for guys who didn’t go to college. It gave them teams to identify with and root for as their own. The players on the field were much like they were, working hard for a decent wage to support their families. While the Cowboy players remained blue-collar, the Cowboy target market for the 1970s and beyond was decidedly white-collar.
They were also finicky, which made Murchison’s football temple that much riskier. Because despite the Cowboys stellar regular-season record, attendance figures decreased 13 percent between 1966 and 1970. Dallas fans were losing interest in their team. Falling in the playoffs year after year to hardscrabble cities like Green Bay was humiliating. Dallas newspaper writer Steve Perkins summed up the city’s frustrations with his book, which came out in 1969.
He called it Next Year’s Champions.
19
BORN IN DALLAS IN 1947, DUANE THOMAS CAME OF AGE PRE-INTEGRATION, when North Dallas meant white and South Dallas meant black. After being pushed from their home by an eminent-domain seizure for a government housing project, his mother, Lauretta, and father, John, moved the family to a yellow wood-framed house a few blocks from the Cotton Bowl. Their neighbors were field hands, laborers, and domestic service workers, the future fans for Dallas’s expansion pro football teams. When his father’s undertaking business failed, there was only enough food money for four children. The middle child and one of three boys, ten-year-old Duane was sent to Los Angeles to live with his Aunt Madie. Thomas “couldn’t get over the freedom of it—you could actually go up to a white lady and talk to her without everybody looking at you funny.”
Before he left for California, his father sent Duane and his older brother, Sonny, to their grandfather’s farm in Marshall, Texas. Their grandmother woke them at four thirty in the morning. In pitch black, the boys slopped pigs, fed the cows, horses, and chickens, chopped wood, and drew water from the well. They’d come home to a huge breakfast made from the farm’s fresh food, then head out to the fields for the rest of the day with a packed lunch. They’d pick cucumbers, cotton, corn, alfalfa—whatever was ready—and head home at dusk for dinner. Duane learned that if you worked hard enough, the world would provide.
When he turned fifteen, Duane returned home to Dallas and attended Lincoln High School, part of the all-black league of secondary schools. Textbooks were hand-me-downs from North Dallas’s white schools, and there wasn’t budget money for mimeographing football play-books or fancy mobile blackboards. Duane followed his older brother to football practice his first day at school in slacks and a Ban-Lon shirt. He scrimmaged without protection for two days before freshman coach Rabbit Thomas found him a uniform, who recalled, “The first thing I noticed about Duane was his speed . . . he always could run . . . but he had an explosion, too.” Lincoln players were taught to memorize their assignments. Coach Thomas ran drill after drill and play after play until there was no longer a delay between a call and his players’ performance. With football habits so deeply ingrained in each and every player, the team became larger than the sum of its parts. Players no longer worried about forgetting a play, they concentrated on their block or their tackle or how best to run the ball. Duane Thomas thrived in this environment. By his senior year in 1965, Duane Thomas grew into an intense, 6’1”, 215-pound fullback who rushed for 1,443 yards and led Lincoln to the city championship.
Thomas was a weekly story in Dallas’s sports pages, and Gil Brandt paid attention. He started a Duane Thomas file for the Dallas Cowboy computer. He even called his alma mater, Wisconsin, and urged them to offer Thomas a scholarship. Self-motivated, with piercing eyes, a perfectly maintained and trained body, and an “I’m getting out of here” vibe, it was obvious that Thomas had ambitions. But by necessity, Thomas stayed close to home and went to play for West Texas State, a little-known program that played against the major football powers (the NCAA did not institute Division I classifications until 1973). A choice that sent most young men directly into the workforce—his new teenage wife gave birth to his child during his senior year of high school—would not keep him from his destiny. Football would be a way for him to provide for his new family. Deep down he hoped that it would also
eventually bring enough money to free his parents from the humiliating and debilitating work they continued to do to survive.
Thomas modeled his professional life on the Cleveland Browns’ legendary running back Jim Brown, a black man who lived in the white world with dignity. To prepare himself, Thomas devised innovative training regimens to reach his physical peak and religiously took care of his body. “My day would start off at 5:30 A.M. I’d do thirty minutes of stretching, then eight hundred push-ups and sit-ups in flights, then fifteen miles of roadwork . . . in the evening I’d work on speed trials—twenty-six to thirty reps of eleven-yard striders at half to three-quarter speed, followed by four to six 220-yarders for speed-endurance. Then I’d do four to five miles of roadwork,” Thomas recalled.
Pro scouts who had come to see West Texas’s Mercury Morris—the lightning-quick tailback who would star for the Miami Dolphins and was a year ahead of Duane—took a hard look at Thomas, too. But at the end of his sophomore year at West Texas, all that Thomas was working for began to fall away. His father, John Thomas, was in excruciating pain from a long and eventual losing battle with pancreatic cancer. Ten months after his death, Duane’s mother collapsed in front of her house with a massive heart attack. Her death pushed Thomas’s youngest sister over the edge and she suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. In his grief, Thomas drew inward. He pressed himself even harder on the field. In his senior year, he averaged 5.4 yards a carry and rushed for 1,054 yards.
Throughout the season, pro scouts would come to check him out, so Thomas reached out to the only man left that he could trust, West Texas State head football coach Joe Kerbel, for professional advice. Kerbel recommended an agent from White Plains, New York, Norman Young, to represent him. Mercury Morris had used him for his contract with the Dolphins, and from what Kerbel understood, he was pleased with the result. Kerbel hoped that Vince Lombardi, who had just taken the head coaching job at Washington, would draft Duane. “He said he’d be my kind of coach,” Thomas said. “He didn’t like the Cowboys, though. He said they played sissy football.”
But the Cowboys loved Thomas. In fact, the team’s IBM 7090/7094 had him at number one for the 1970 draft. When he was still around for their pick in the first round of the draft, twenty-third overall, the choice was easy to make. Thomas hired Young, who took a 10 percent commission on Thomas’s entire three-year deal ($87,000) up front out of Thomas’s signing bonus and had Thomas sign over power of attorney to him so that he could handle his finances. Young’s company would cash all of Thomas’s paychecks, take care of the living expenses, bills, etc. for his wife and now two children, and then turn over the remaining portion at the end of each month. Duane would concentrate on learning the Dallas offense and making the team.
Thomas was handed jersey number 33 by the Cowboys. He liked it. It was one higher than Jim Brown’s 32. In his rookie training camp, Thomas memorized the playbook (no small accomplishment considering the intricacies of head coach Tom Landry’s alignments, sets, and motions), never missed a meeting, and buried himself in the Cowboy life. He did not get distracted when he discovered that his new agent had failed to pay any of his bills, his wife asked for a divorce, or he took multiple poundings on the field. In one particularly sensitive moment, Landry had to bring Thomas into his office to meet with an officer from the sheriff’s department. The cop handed Thomas a bill from a clothing store that was never paid and demanded immediate attention. Thomas coolly thanked the man for his time and said he would take care of it.
When his rookie season started, Thomas played behind second-year sensation Calvin Hill. But he didn’t complain. When he got into a game and was handed the ball, he delivered. As Hill began to struggle, Landry gave Thomas more and more touches. In two games alternating with Hill, Thomas rushed for 213 yards, at an average of 6.5 yards per carry. Hill then injured his shoulder in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, and Landry made Thomas his starting tailback. At that point, the 1970 Cowboys were 5-4 and in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time since 1965. They needed a spark.
Thomas provided it. He led the Cowboys to victory in the last five games of the season. He averaged 5.5 yards per carry and went over a hundred yards three times, leading the team in rushing and kickoff returns. At the end of the regular season, he was the unanimous choice for NFL Rookie of the Year. And he did it exactly the way he was told. Roger Staubach remembered, “He was perfect at practice, and when he got in a game, he seemed to know what everyone else was supposed to do. The guy was amazing. A mind.” During the 1970 playoffs, he was even better, with 135 yards against Detroit in the first round and 147 yards against San Francisco in the NFC Championship. Behind Thomas’s dazzling running, the Dallas Cowboys made it to their first Super Bowl. They would face the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl V.
For Landry, this was one more opportunity to test his mettle and his methods. He didn’t buy into old-school coaching pep talks. The so-called intangibles—chemistry, heart, camaraderie—had no place in his system. Players’ emotions were to be held in check, and then channeled to best effect on and off the field. Lean and professorial, Landry maintained an unflappable cool no matter the circumstance. He gave off an aura of allknowingness. If his players did their job and executed the plans he laid out for them, the final outcome of the season—a championship—would be ensured. And the best way he felt he could get the players in line to do what he required was to manipulate them psychologically. He cut them off from the rest of the world, constantly testing them with physical and mental drills. He knew who responded best to criticism, challenge, flattery, or ambivalence, and he fed them what was necessary to keep them in check. To be a Cowboy was to be controlled.
Meetings were strict and intense and all practices were filmed to ensure that every mistake was documented. Levity was not allowed and tardiness could get you traded. Landry also had a strict rule about wearing baseball caps in meetings and he fined players for any and all infractions. On the road, the players were supervised from dawn until dusk, with security on every floor. No visitors were allowed in a player’s room. If family came to visit, the player would have to go to the lobby to meet them. The message was abundantly clear to all players: Don’t get comfortable, you are expendable. Landry spoke of the importance of the “system” and the “organization.” His players found him emotionless and passionless. Asked if he had seen Landry smile, fullback Walt Garrison said, “Nope. But I’ve only been here nine years.”
He was a coach who demanded everything a player had, and then gave little in return. Success was expected. Touchdowns and stellar defense were the result of planning, not of individual effort. Little praise with constant criticism kept the players unbalanced and hungry for recognition.
And, to Landry, Duane Thomas was the ultimate football player—a perfect machine that would take his elaborately choreographed directions and execute them without fail. He played with pain, under personal duress, and yet when the game was on, he never lost his composure, was as cold as ice.
The Cowboys would be playing another team with the “can’t win the big one” moniker plastered on its back. The Colts had still not fully recovered from their loss to the New York Jets in Super Bowl III. Landry believed the game would come down to execution. And he was certain that Thomas was the missing piece to the Cowboys’ championship puzzle.
The “can’t win the big one” bowl was a dud. The Orange Bowl didn’t even sell out, forcing the NFL to black out the televised coverage in Miami. There were ten turnovers in the game, and the biggest gain on one play was the result of a deflected pass. In the third quarter, the Cowboys led 13-6 on two field goals and a seven-yard Craig Morton pass to Thomas, and they were threatening to score again. Two yards from another touchdown, Thomas took the handoff and was hit just shy of the goal line. He tried to spin away from the tackle and in his second effort, the ball came loose. Cowboys center Dave Manders fell on it and, as Morton argued with the line judge to blow the play dead, the Colts piled on top
of Manders and wrestled the ball away. The referee signaled Colts’ ball on their own one-yard line. Months after the game, Colt defensive lineman Bubba Smith told a reporter that the referee had obviously blown the call. A stunned Thomas buried his head in his hands on the bench, but with almost a full half of play left in the game, he recovered his confidence and prepared for his next opportunity.
The Cowboy offense sputtered, and penalties (they had ten for more than a hundred yards) kept them in poor down and distance. Embittered by the fumble, Landry abandoned the weapon that had brought the Cowboys to the Super Bowl. Duane Thomas had just two carries the rest of the way. Landry put the fate of the game in the hands of Morton. Three fourth-quarter Cowboy drives resulted in Morton interceptions, the most crucial from a ball that bounced off halfback Dan Reeves’ hands and into the waiting arms of Colts linebacker Mike Curtis, who returned the interception to the Cowboy 13. The Colts kicked a field goal in the final seconds and beat the Cowboys 16-13. Speaking to reporters after the game, Landry pinpointed the “big play” as Thomas’s fumble on the one-yard line at the start of the second half. Ignoring the two later interceptions that had led to ten Colt points, he pinned the blame on Thomas’s mistake, which had led to none. “If he had scored, they would have had a lot of catching up to do.”
Thomas was stunned. Football had been his escape from his grim reality—two dead parents, being fleeced by his agent, and his wife abandoning him in the middle of his first professional season. In deference to his job, he neglected his problems, put his head down, and gave the organization everything he had. He gave Landry everything he had. The Cowboys were 7-1 with him as the starting tailback and had scored 175 points. Without him as a starter they were 5-4 and no sure thing to even make the playoffs. He rushed for 1,116 yards in those eight games and scored the only touchdown for the Cowboys in Super Bowl V. And now he was being blamed for the Super Bowl loss because of an aggravating but minor fumble? “After that game, I knew the only way I could survive was to make no errors,” Thomas resolved.
