When it came time for Staubach to thank his teammates for the 11 years, things got a little heavy. You don’t just snappy-patter out of a career. But the toughest time came in the press conference when Staubach had to speak of Landry. “Of course the nuts and bolts of the Dallas Cowboys,” he said, and there was a pause of 10 seconds or so while he got himself together, “was the man who wears the funny hat on the sidelines.”
“I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t say his name,” Staubach said later. “I didn’t want to get too emotional, but when I came to his name — well, I knew if I said it I’d probably lose control.”
The press conference over, Staubach drove home with Marianne. Danny White and Glenn Carano, who will line up for the quarterback job next season, dropped by, along with Middle Linebacker Bob Breunig, and they played some two-on-two half-court basketball in the backyard. Staubach and White took two of three games.
When sundown came, Staubach and his family went to a friend’s house for a first night of Passover seder. “I wore a yarmulke,” he said. “The kids got a tremendous kick out of the hiding of the matzo and then ransoming it; the food was terrific. It was a good way to end a very tough day.”
For the Cowboys the tough days are only beginning. Landry will spend more time coaching the defense this season, and former Cowboy Halfback Danny Reeves will have more responsibility for the offense. It’s not hard to figure out why Landry is so interested in his defense. The Cowboys gave up 313 points last year, the most since 1963, when Don Meredith and Eddie LeBaron were battling to quarterback a 4-10 team. The rushing defense was 11th in the league, and the Cowboys had the fewest interceptions (13) in the NFL. Staubach pulled out four games in the last two minutes. “He was the difference between a good year and an average year,” Landry says. And now there’s no Staubach to carry the Cowboys anymore.
Everyone says White has the potential to produce points, but what about the defense? “It’s the kind of challenge that Landry handles best,” Harris says. “Somehow I get the feeling he’ll find exactly the right pieces to fit into the puzzle. I think his genius will really come out next season.”
Landry still isn’t convinced Harris will stay retired. “He’s impulsive,” the coach says. “He does things the way he plays. He gives so much, just like Roger, that he needs the spark, and if he doesn’t think it’s there … well, then he just doesn’t feel he can give what’s needed. I think he might get the spark back.”
Harris likes to talk about the oil firm he works for, U.S. Companies Inc., which acquires property, makes tests, then drills. He gets excited when he tells you about the chances of hitting a big one. Staubach has already become an investor in U.S. Companies. Harris doesn’t sound as if he really wants to drill receivers anymore.
“Listen to this,” he says. “One of the guys who called me when I retired was Lynn Swann. Can you imagine? Swann, of all people. Such a bitter rival, for so long. He said, ‘I don’t mind your leaving. It’ll extend my career.’”
Harris was one of four players, along with Staubach, Breunig and Tony Dorsett, who came up with $2,000 apiece to help Hegman cover those checks. Hegman himself covered the rest, and the bank, Republic National of Dallas, is supposedly satisfied, but the Dallas DA’s office has not yet decided what to do about the case.
Henderson is gone. “Landry has had it up to here with him, and so have a lot of us,” one player says. “The guy would always pick defensive day to come up with a sore back or something. When he pulled that sideline stunt in the Washington game (Henderson was fooling with a bandanna for a TV camera) it was the last straw. We were getting blown out, and he wasn’t making any tackles — that’s the wrong time to clown.”
“The offers we’ve had on a trade for him are embarrassing,” says Brandt. “Nothing as high as a first- or second-round draft, which we need. I don’t know, Butch Johnson (a backup wide receiver) keeps talking about wanting to be traded. Maybe we can put together a package with him and Thomas.”
Pat Thomas, L.A.’s left cornerback, is mad at the Rams and wants to play for Dallas. He’s visited the Cowboys’ office, which is only a short trip from his home in Plano. But not many people seriously expect the Rams to trade their best defensive back to a traditional playoff rival.
Then there’s talk about Patriot Cornerback Mike Haynes, who has played out his option and wouldn’t mind wearing silver and blue. But if the Cowboys pick him up, it would cost them two years’ worth of first-round picks, based on Haynes’ salary, which would mean going in hock until 1982. It’s a risky way to travel, and it’s never been their style.
The reality is that Staubach is gone and so is Harris, and the defense shows patches. For the first time in years, the Cowboys are going into a season shorthanded. Landry has been there before. He didn’t lose all that hair for nothing.
* * *
Born to Be a Quarterback
This article appeared in the Aug. 6, 1990 issue of Sports Illustrated.
It’s a normal minicamp lunch break at the San Francisco 49ers’ training facility. The players are unwrapping their sandwiches in the locker room, and Joe Montana is giving an interview upstairs in p.r. director Jerry Walker’s office. Well, most of Joe Montana is concentrating on the interview. His right hand is busy with something else, as if it has a life of its own, a mechanized life of autograph production.
A steady stream of objects appears on the table in front of him — hats, jerseys, photos, posters — and Montana’s right hand automatically rises, then lowers, producing a large sweeping J and tailing off to an almost illegible ana. Then his hand rises again, and another item is moved into place. Secretaries, p.r. people, coaches, players all come to present offerings at this ritual.
“A book to sign,” says Walker. “Two pictures,” says tight end Jamie Williams. “A ball,” says p.r. assistant Dave Rahn. “Make this one out to ‘a Nevada sports fan,’” says defensive coordinator Bill McPherson, sliding in a picture.
Rise and fall, rise and fall; the big J, the scribbled ana. Most of the time Montana doesn’t even look at what he’s signing. You get the feeling that someone could slip in a small child, a hamburger bun, a fish. It’s all the same. At 34, the world’s most famous quarterback has turned into an autograph machine.
Secretary Darla Maeda brings a hat. Walker is back with a toy rabbit. Guard Guy McIntyre is next with a jersey.
“Oh, no, not you too,” Montana says, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, me.” It’s Norb Hecker, the team’s senior administrator, and he has a poster showing a glowering Montana. “A beauty, huh?” he says.
“They name animals after him,” Rahn says, producing a picture of a German shepherd. “They send in every piece of football equipment you can think of. The office is cluttered with stuff.” There is a children’s book from a woman in Hillsborough, Calif. “To Joe Montana, for your kids … let me know if you need extra copies,” reads the accompanying letter. There are eight mail cartons filled with letters going back four months, letters from France, Ireland, Tokyo.
“He’ll come up here once or twice a week to sign stuff,” says p.r. assistant Al Barba. We use the real Joe pictures until they run out, then we send the ones with the printed autograph. Everyone will get something — eventually.”
Since he blistered the Denver Broncos in last January’s Super Bowl, Montana is hot again, just as he was after the 49ers’ Super Bowl victory in ’82 and the one in ’85, having been voted the game’s Most Valuable Player each time. The first success represented the thrill of discovery, the potential star who blossomed, and it carried a healthy round of commercial endorsements with it. The second one reestablished him after Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino had captured most of the headlines in ’84. But then, in the 1985 season, the adulation for Montana cooled.
There were drug rumors, all unsubstantiated. Montana in his Ferrari reportedly stopped by police, even though th
e car was in his garage at the time. Montana seen in a bar, when he happened to be in a team meeting. In ’86 there was the back operation two weeks into the season. Doctors said Montana might never play again. He was back in 55 days. The ’87 season was his best statistically at that time, but the year ended with a disastrous loss to the Vikings in an NFC divisional playoff. When Montana was lifted for Steve Young in that game, it was the first time since he had reached football maturity that San Francisco coach Bill Walsh had given him the hook. The fans cheered when Young entered the game. Trade Joe now, they said, while you can still get something for him.
Walsh started Young a few times in ’88, saying he was giving Montana time to get over nagging injuries and “general fatigue.” Montana says it was a lack of confidence, tracing back to the end of ’87. “It’s tearing my guts out,” Montana told his wife, Jennifer. But the exclamation point on the ’88 season was the terrific 92-yard drive in the final minutes to beat Cincinnati in Super Bowl XXIII, and Montana came into ’89 riding the crest. He put together a remarkable season, the best any quarterback has ever had, according to the NFL’s rating system. And he was even better in the playoffs and Super Bowl XXIV, reaching a level of brilliance that had never been seen in postseason football. Which leaves only one question to ask about this remarkable 11-year veteran: Is he the greatest quarterback ever to play the game?
Wait, let’s back off from that one for a minute. Greatest ever? What about Unitas, Baugh, Luckman, Graham? History’s a serious business. Van Brocklin, Bradshaw, Tittle? When, in the long history of the NFL, was a quarterback in his prime called the greatest ever? The man in the most glamorous position in football going against the most famous names of the past? Does anyone point to a surgeon in Houston and say, “Yep, there’s the greatest doctor ever?” How about Albert Schweitzer? It’s rare ground we’re treading on.
Montana’s roots are in western Pennsylvania, the cradle of quarterbacks. Soft coal and quarterbacks. Steel mills and quarterbacks. Johnny Lujack from Connellsville, Joe Namath from Beaver Falls, George Blanda from Youngwood, Dan Marino from Pittsburgh, Montana from Monongahela, Tom Clements and Chuck Fusina from McKees Rocks, Arnold Galiffa from Donora, Terry Hanratty from Butler — he was Montana’s idol as a kid. Terry Hanratty of Notre Dame, the Golden Domer. Montana would throw footballs through a swinging tire in the backyard, just like Terry did. Why? Why do so many of them come from western Pennsylvania? “Toughness, dedication, hard work and competitiveness; a no-nonsense, blue-collar background,” says John Unitas, from Pittsburgh.
But there are a lot of no-nonsense, blue-collar places in the country. Why not Georgia or Texas, where the great running backs come from? Why not Michigan or Ohio, with all those fine linemen? What is it about western Pennsylvania and quarterbacks?
“Maybe it’s the Iron City beer,” says Montana.
The most logical answer is tradition — and focus. If you’re a kid with athletic ability in western Pennsylvania, you’ve probably got a picture of Montana or Marino on your wall. Montana had the athletic gift. You could see it right away.
“He used to wreck his crib by standing up and rocking,” his mother, Theresa, says. “Then he’d climb up on the side and jump to our bed. You’d hear a thump in the middle of the night and know he hit the bed and went on the floor.”
And he had the focus, supplied by his father, Joseph Sr., who put a ball in his son’s hands when the kid was big enough to walk and said, “Throw it.”
“I played all sports in the service, but when I was a kid I never had anyone to take me in the backyard and throw a ball to me,” says Joe Sr., who moved to California with his wife in ’86. “Maybe that’s why I got Joe started in sports. Once he got started, he was always waiting at the door with a ball when I came home from work. What I really wanted to do was make it fun for him. And I wanted to make sure he got the right fundamentals. I read books. You watch some quarterbacks, sometimes they need two steps to get away from the line of scrimmage. I felt the first step should be straight back, not to the side. We worked on techniques, sprint out, run right, run left, pivot and throw the ball.
“You know, I’ve been accused of pushing him. I don’t think that’s right. It’s just that he loved it so much, and I loved watching him. And I wanted to make sure he learned the right way.”
Joe Jr. was an only child, a pampered child, perhaps, but he didn’t see it that way. The family lived in a two-story frame house in a middle-class neighborhood on Park Ave., a house no better than the neighbors’ and no worse. To Montana, his home was his strength, his support system. He was shy with strangers, outgoing at home. He had a few friends, neighborhood kids mostly, but no one was as close to him as his father — and his mother. His fondest childhood memory? Playing ball in the backyard with his dad, then coming into the kitchen, where his mother would have a steaming pot of ravioli on the stove. That was the best.
Montana started playing peewee football when he was eight, one year younger than the legal limit. His father listed his age as nine. His first coach on the Little Wildcats was Carl Crawley, a defensive lineman in college and now an NCAA referee.
“We ran a pro offense, with a lot of the stuff he’s doing now, the underneath stuff,” Crawley says. “Joe would roll out. If the cornerback came off, he’d dump it off; if he stayed back, he’d keep going and pick up five or six yards. He was an amazingly accurate passer for a kid.”
Montana’s favorite receiver was Mike Brantley, who caught his passes through junior high and high school. Brantley eventually made it as far as the Pittsburgh Steelers’ training camp. “Joe throwing to Mike was like the right hand throwing to the left hand,” Crawley says.
Crawley remembers Montana as an “exuberant kid who had stardom written all over him, but nobody ever resented it because it came so naturally. And there was no show-off in him. He wanted to win and he’d do whatever it took, and that’s another thing the kids liked about him. With Joe on the field, they knew they were never out of any game.”
In the spring it was baseball, and Montana played all the positions. As a pitcher in Little League, he threw three perfect games. In the winter it was basketball, for which there was no organized program for kids until Joe Sr. started one. The team practiced and played in the local armory, and the kids paid a dollar a piece for a janitor to clean up after them. The practices were five nights a week, and there were always tournaments to play in. “Those were the most fun,” Montana says. “The trips. We’d go anywhere. One night we played in a tournament in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, then drove up to Niagara Falls for another one, then back to Bethel Park for the finals.”
Montana has always said that his favorite sport, through Waverly Elementary and Finleyville Junior High and finally Ringgold High, was basketball. He loved the practices. “I could practice basketball all day,” he says. Practicing football was work.
He came to Ringgold with a reputation for being something of a wunderkind. When coach Chuck Abramski took his first look at Montana on the football field, he saw an agile, 6-foot, 165-pound sophomore with a nice touch on the ball, but a kid who was too skinny and too immature to stand up to the rigors of western Pennsylvania Class AAA football. Abramski gave Montana a seat on the bench and told him to watch and learn. And to be sure to report to the summer weight program before his junior year. Montana had other ideas.
“For me, competing in sports was a 365-day-a-year thing,” he says. “I was playing American Legion baseball, summer basketball. It was hard for Coach Abramski to accept that.”
Last January, a week before the Super Bowl, a story appeared in The Baltimore Sun saying that, in Monongahela, Montana was regarded as a lesser god, a fact the rest of the world was dimly aware of. A number of old resentments surfaced in the story, but the worst quotes of all were from Abramski. “A lot of people in Monongahela hate Joe,” was one of them. “If I was in a war, I wouldn’t want Joe on my side … his dad would have to
carry his gun for him,” was another, and it was the one that bothered Montana most because it hit him where he lived. No one connected with football had ever questioned his courage.
“I called him about it,” Montana says. “Three times now, I’ve seen those Abramski quotes around Super Bowl time, about why people hate me. I asked him why he kept saying those things, and he said, ‘Well, you never sent me a picture, and you sent one to Jeff Petrucci, the quarterback coach.’ I said, ‘You never asked.’ I mean, I don’t send my picture around everywhere. We ended up yelling at each other. We had to put our wives on.
“Of course, I know what it was really about … that summer weight program. Chuck was a great coach in a lot of ways. He always tried to get the kids good equipment, he was always helping them get into college. I even wrote a letter of recommendation for him to go to another school after he left Ringgold. He was a fired-up, gung-ho coach, but he never got over the fact that I didn’t take part in his summer weight program before my junior year. The man’s all football.”
Abramski, hard and wiry at 58, still lives in Monongahela, but he’s out of football now. He sells real estate, just as Joe Montana Sr. does in the Bay Area. Abramski bounced around the western Pennsylvania high school circuit and held one college coaching job, at California University of Pennsylvania, under his old assistant at Ringgold, Petrucci. The problem was always the same: He was a great guy for developing a program, but school administrators found him impossible to deal with.
“I came from the south side of New Castle, the poor side,” Abramski says. “My father was an alcoholic. My mother died of tuberculosis when I was 10. My grandmother raised me. There have been coaches with more brains, but nobody in the world worked harder at football than me. The year before I came to Ringgold, they lost every game and scored two touchdowns. They left me 14 players in uniform. Two years later, we had 100 kids out for football and we dressed 60, home and away. Three years later, Joe’s senior year, we had one of the best teams in the eastern United States. We went 8-1 and then lost to Mt. Lebanon in the playoffs on a miserable, sleety night with three starters out. Before the season we scrimmaged South Moreland and scored 19 touchdowns. Nineteen touchdowns!”
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