Chapter Four
California Dreaming, Dallas Realities
How many times in your life have you found yourself wondering about what might have been? I’m sure that those 1967 Cowboys did a bit of thinking about how the NFL championship game might have turned out if the playing conditions weren’t so bad. I don’t think that they knew about the malfunction of the heating elements under the turf. I know that we can drive ourselves crazy “what-if-ing” our way through life. I also know that sports fans engage in a special variety of “what-if-ing”—what if (insert team or player name here) had done ______________ back in the ______________, then they would have won. (Note the use of “they” in place of “we” in this losing situation.) Well, let me share a little what-if story that fills in some blanks about my career and how I very nearly missed out on having a Cowboy existence for more than a decade.
Right before the Cowboys’ Super Bowl VI victory in New Orleans, I received a phone call from KNXT television in Los Angeles. They wanted to know if I was interested in coming out to the West Coast to become the sports director for that CBS affiliate. At the time, Los Angeles was the second-largest market in the United States. I told them, well, yes of course I would. This was shortly after the New Year, and by the time we finalized arrangements for me to go to Los Angeles to audition, I was in a bit of a scheduling jam. I was going to cover the game on radio for KRLD, and I was going to do my remotes for TV. The game was scheduled for January 16, 1972. My audition was the day before the Cowboys’ charter flight would take the team and all other personnel to New Orleans. I was scheduled to return to Dallas in time to make that flight the following day. Obviously, any delays or cancellations and I’d be in a tough spot.
I decided it was worth the risk. The folks at KNXT did their best to woo me. They put me up at the Beverly Hills Hotel for two days. They took me to lunch at the Bel-Air Country Club, where I was sitting and eating my cheeseburger when I saw Jack Benny and George Burns dining together in the corner. I thought, Boy, this is something. Two of my early radio-days favorites sitting in the same restaurant as me. Boy, I could get used to this!
I did the audition and felt it went well. I figured I’d get the usual “we’ll let you know” response, but to my surprise, before I left I had in hand a five-year contract at twice my WFAA salary. I agreed to accept those terms. Though I took the commercial jet back to Dallas, I barely needed it I was flying so high. I’d miss Dallas, and the opportunity to do the radio work for the Cowboys, but this was Los Angeles, the home of swimming pools and movie stars! Step aside, Uncle Jed; Uncle Verne is coming through!
It’s funny the things you remember, but I recall touching down at Love Field and hustling from my arrival gate to B3, where the Cowboys’ charter was loading. I made it just in time and settled into my seat. Once we were in the air, it hit me: this was going to be my last Cowboys game. I knew that I had to let them know. I found Tex Schramm seated a few rows in front of me. He’d been instrumental in my first working for the Cowboys five years earlier. Since then, I’d grown to appreciate his ways even more. I also knew that like certain gunslingers, he took verbal shots first and asked questions later. He spoke his mind and sometimes what was on his mind was not the most gracious sentiment in the world. Nonetheless, I had to let him know and I preferred to tell him face-to-face. After I’d let him know that I’d agreed to the Los Angeles deal, he pursed his lips and asked if I’d signed a contract. When I told him I hadn’t, he asked me not to, or at least not until we got back to Dallas after the game. He wanted to have lunch with me; he had an idea, some plan, and he couldn’t share that with me now.
A week or so after we got back to Dallas, Al Ward and Tex took me out to lunch and what turned out to be a four-hour business meeting. They offered me the Cowboys’ play-by-play job. I was hesitant at first, mostly wondering what that meant for Bill Mercer, my partner in the booth. His lifelong dream had been to be a baseball play-by-play man. The Washington Senators had decided to relocate to Arlington, Texas, and, unbeknownst to me, Bill had accepted that radio job. They wanted to slide me over one seat and have me assume his responsibilities. From the time Tex asked me to wait before signing until this meeting, I’d only vaguely entertained the notion of sticking around. I’d verbally committed and considered myself a man of my word. Mostly out of respect for Tex and the rest of the Cowboys, I’d gone to lunch to hear them out. I told him as much.
Tex’s middle name was Earnest and he embodied that word when he eyed me when he led me down the well-trod interview path by asking where I wanted to be in my career in ten years. I told him: network play-by-play announcer. He asked me what it was that KNXT had offered me. A six-and-eleven sportscast. Well, if any play-by-play jobs came up in LA, I’d be forty-seventh on the list of those considered for it. His blunt assessment of my chances of gaining traction in Los Angeles wasn’t a ploy just to keep me in Dallas. His argument had some merit, especially when he backed it up with the following questions:
Have you heard of Chick Hearn?
Have you heard of Dick Enberg?
Have you heard of Vin Scully?
They’ve all got pretty good jobs and they’re all pretty good at what they do? Where do you think you’re going to fit in?
I don’t recall humble pie and a reality chaser being on the menu, but Tex served them up and I gulped them down. The truth was, the Los Angeles market was populated by Hall of Fame–caliber play-by-play men, guys who were well on their way to becoming legends in the field. I trusted what Tex was saying because he was a football guy and knew what was going on around the league and the media that covered the game. He also was a UT guy, a journalism major, and he’d written for the Austin American-Statesman while at school. From 1947 to 1956 he’d worked for the Los Angeles Rams—he knew that market well.
Being with the Cowboys wasn’t small potatoes, either. They had 119 stations along their radio network. The team was doing well and gaining exposure across the country. I’d never done play-by-play but Tex believed that I could do it. He had that kind of trust in me.
I asked about the compromise position. I go to Los Angeles and take the Cowboys’ offer as well. Tex was smart. He wanted me in Dallas and on Channel 8 all week. He wanted me on his radio network on Sundays. He wanted me to be known as a Cowboy guy. In a sense, I was like free advertising for the team. I saw the wisdom of that approach for him and for me. I asked for four or five days to think about it. I faced a tough choice. I hate to make this about the money, but the fact was that I was earning $10,000 a year for my TV job. KNXT had offered me $35,000! Sense won out over dollars and cents. If I truly aspired to be a Big Three network play-by-play man, then I needed the Big Double-E—experience and exposure. I could get that in the Big D. I sent my regrets to Los Angeles and signed with the Cowboys. I never looked back. What if I hadn’t listened to Tex’s advice? I’ve had a few men in my life who I consider mentors and Tex is one of them. A more colorful guy I have not met.
Tex was passionate about the Cowboys, to put it mildly. He understood that he could occasionally pop off and say things an executive of a major sports franchise probably shouldn’t say. Once, in the mid-1970s, Tex assumed his usual position in the second row of the writers’ press box. Joe Bailey, executive vice president, or Doug Todd, head of the public relations staff, usually sat alongside him to keep the boss steady and his excitability level below overload. Tex had invited NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle to attend the game. Tex had hired Pete to work for the Rams back in the day and remained friends. Rozelle sat in Tex’s suite, adjacent to the writers’ box.
As the game went on, Tex believed the referees were blowing calls all over the field. He’d jump and shout and curse and turn red-faced. Doug was with him on this occasion and was doing his best to keep Tex from banging on the glass and whatnot. Tex’s voice was booming and the writers were used to his antics, so no one paid him too much mind—that is, until at one point when the referees were huddling on the field discussing some
call against the Cowboys. Tex was close to apoplectic. He jumped out of his seat and walked over to the soundproof glass partition separating the writers’ box from his. The pounding got Rozelle’s attention. Startled, he looked over at this loon of a man waving his arms and gesticulating wildly. Pete laughed. Tex wrapped his hands around his own throat in the universal choking gesture and Pete kept on laughing. That didn’t quiet Tex for long. He stomped back to his seat and unleashed a tirade of trash talk that lasted until halftime.
Tex left the press box. While the writers sat there relaxing, Doug Todd commandeered the PA system that only went into the press boxes to announce in his most formally modulated voice, “According to General Manager Tex Schramm, the C———ers are leading the M————ers eight to seven.”
I think I stopped my laughter and tears by the second-half kickoff. Barely.
No, sir, you can keep your LA dollars, my money is on Tex.
Speaking of gambling, after the last preseason game of the year, a group of us would get together and engage in a betting pool on who would make the final squad for the regular season. Tex and his wife, Marty, my wife, Nancy, broadcast partner Brad Sham and his current date, and Joe Bailey and Doug Todd and their wives would all enter. We jokingly accused Tex of having an insider’s advantage. He swore he didn’t and the proof is in the pudding. Tex never won the pot.
Before that, of course, I had to begin my rookie season as the Cowboys’ play-by-play guy. As the defending Super Bowl champions, the Cowboys had the honor of playing the College All-Star squad at Soldier Field in Chicago to open the preseason in August 1972. I’d done some play-by-play for basketball and baseball when I was in Austin, but not a single minute of football. I was as nervous as heck, and what I mostly remember of that experience was when I wandered through Chicago’s Grant Park and along Michigan Avenue well past midnight on the eve of the game, trying to walk off some of my anxiety. I was splitting the play-by-play duties with Frank Glieber. We flipped a coin to see which of us would do which part of the game. I wanted to listen to how Frank handled things. I was glad that I did. Frank was a real pro and I learned a lot in that first half.
I’d developed a love of classical music along the way, and later in life I would watch the movie Amadeus. When Mozart, a recognized genius, finished conducting one of his symphonies for Emperor Joseph II, Wolfgang asked for input from the ruler. Joseph II replied, “Too many notes.” That was what I learned from Frank and what I tried to put in practice as much as possible in my career: the human ear can only take in so many notes. I wanted to keep to the facts—down, distance, time, and, periodically, score—mixed with concise descriptions of the action. That served me well in Chicago and from then on. I would learn when to add the occasional flourish to the formula but not that first night.
The 1972 season was a tough one for the Cowboys. Roger Staubach went down with a shoulder injury in the preseason. Duane Thomas was traded when management tired of his antics. The offense would have been expected to struggle a bit with Roger’s absence, but thanks to Tom Landry’s shuffling of quarterbacks Craig Morton was accustomed to starting and performed well. In fact, he set the Cowboys’ passing yardage record that year. The Doomsday Defense was starting to feel Father Time catching up to them. Age and injuries are always a part of the game and it’s tough to let go of the past. I felt privileged to see the great Bob Lilly have an All-Pro season despite a back injury and assorted leg injuries that hobbled him.
For the seventh straight season, the Cowboys reached the postseason, albeit as a wild card entrant. They faced the San Francisco 49ers in the first round of the playoffs. Earlier that year, back in November, the Dick Nolan–coached 49ers beat the Cowboys 31–10 on a blustery Thanksgiving Day in Dallas. At that point, the 49ers had former Heisman Trophy winner Steve Spurrier at quarterback. Their veteran signal caller, John Brodie, had gone down with an injury and Spurrier had stepped in. In the regular season, Spurrier had gone 6-2. leading the team to the Western Division crown. I’d get to know Steve later on, when he was the head coach at Florida and later at South Carolina.
Steve was highly regarded as a coach in many circles but not all. Some didn’t like his approach to the game. He was as competitive as they come and didn’t always take other folks’ feelings into account. In 2000, I was covering the Kentucky–Florida game. Florida had a great football tradition, and, well, let’s say that Kentucky had a great basketball program. UK had never beaten the Gators during Steve’s time at the helm. As I recall, the Gators were putting a whipping on the Wildcats, 45–7, with less than a minute to play. Florida had the ball just their side of midfield. Most coaches would have just let the clock run out. Not Steve. He called in the play and Jesse Palmer (who later went on to become TV’s Bachelor) dropped back and threw a perfect strike for a touchdown.
Final score, 52–7.
After the game, Steve was asked in a peevish tone by one of the writers why he’d called that last play. In so many words, Steve said that nobody had scored half a hundred on Kentucky and he wanted to be the first to do so. His grin was a lot louder than the silence that followed his utterance.
For years I traveled with my personal statistician Chuck Gardner. After the game, Chuck and I were standing waiting for the elevator to take us down from the press box to the stadium exits. Unbeknownst to Chuck, the Florida athletic director, Jeremy Foley, got on it with us. Speaking to me, Chuck asked why in the world would Spurrier have not just run out the clock.
Before I could answer or indicate that Chuck should pursue another line of questioning, Jeremy Foley spoke up and said that we had to admit that Steve was a perfectionist.
Without skipping a beat, Chuck said, “So was Hitler.”
The elevator seemed to me to have slowed to a crawl; I scanned it for an escape hatch.
Truth is, Steve was a perfectionist and as I’ve said, anyone who achieves success has to have a strong sense of self. I know that Steve was humbled a bit by his brief excursion into the swamp that is Washington, D.C., and NFL football. His tenure with the Redskins wasn’t anything like he’d hoped it would be. I saw him after he’d signed on to undertake the challenge of resuscitating South Carolina’s program after it was put in a choke Holtz. We were at the National Football Foundation’s banquet. I gave him a quick hug and whispered that I was glad to have him back home where he belonged.
I meant it.
I was fond of Steve because I was able to glimpse the other side of him. I liked how he kept things in perspective. As driven and perfectionistic as he was, he stuck to his Friday-before-game-day ritual—a haircut and nine holes of golf. One year, my partner Todd Blackledge and our sideline reporter Jill Arrington were in Gainesville before a game. We went to Steve’s office. It was a virtual museum with memorabilia covering nearly every square inch of the place. Jill was relatively new to the team. Steve welcomed us all in and could see Jill scanning his office. He showed her a photo of one of his Duke University teams. This was obviously before he took over at Florida and attained so much success. That he was proud of the job he’d done at that school spoke volumes about him. He wasn’t going to brag about himself or his better-known squads. He pointed out some of the players and what they’d gone on to do in other things besides playing in the NFL. His evident pride in them impressed me.
Even though the Cowboys had a better regular season record, that 1972 playoff game was held in Candlestick Park. I was grateful that it wasn’t frigid up there on our rooftop perch overlooking the bay. Candlestick was a tough venue. The park was designed for baseball, so we had to deal with being at an odd angle to the field of play. With the cutouts for the infield diamond still there, yardage markers frequently got obscured, adding to the difficulties of perspective. The Cowboys had beaten the 49ers in the previous two NFC championship games, and the old third time’s a charm was once again in play. It seemed as if the magic was in the home team’s corner. Vic Washington fumbled but returned the opening kickoff for a 97-yard touchdown, and
the nearly 60,000 in attendance were making enough noise to register on the Richter scale—not a good thing considering the city’s seismic history. The Cowboys got a field goal from Toni Fritsch, but a pair of San Francisco touchdowns had them up 21–3 and things looked bleak for the Cowboys despite the bright Northern California sunshine. Two Craig Morton turnovers—a fumble and an interception—led to those scores. Fortunately, he threw a touchdown pass and then led the team on another drive that resulted in a field goal. At halftime the Niners were up 21–13.
It pains me to relive some of these Cowboy memories—particularly as it applies to Morton and other Cowboy quarterbacks. Seems as though all I’m recalling is Craig’s failings on the field. That hurts me, not because the facts aren’t accurate, but because I really like Craig Morton. I also really like and have built a lifelong friendship with Roger Staubach. Don Meredith was a great and lovable guy who left the game and earth far too soon at age seventy-two in 2010. Quarterback is never an easy position to play, and each of these three men provided Dallas fans with a lot of thrills and not a little anxiety in their careers.
Of the three, I think that Dandy Don, a nickname Meredith tried to disassociate himself from, was most sensitive to the criticism that he took from passionate Cowboys supporters. For all the ups and downs in his pro career and his remarkable run as a broadcaster on Monday Night Football, many people likely don’t know how great an athlete he was. Don Meredith, before I got to Dallas, played at Mount Vernon High School in East Texas. He was a basketball and football player and his scoring record of 52 points in a Dr Pepper high school basketball tournament in Dallas stood for many years. I didn’t witness that feat, but when I came to Dallas, folks were still talking about it.
What’s interesting about Don’s emotional response to his perceived (and often real) poor treatment by the fans was that he remained the loosest man I’ve ever known. He had a great sense of humor and seemed on the surface to be as carefree as could be. He’d remind his teammates to remember their ABCs—Always Be Cool—sang in the huddle, and called out names of fruits from behind center. He was also saddled with the burden of being a quarterback on an expansion franchise. The two years before he became the starter the club went 4-20-2. They won five games his first season as the starter in 1963. It wasn’t until 1966 that the team had its first winning season, going 10-3. He bore the brunt of a less-than-stellar offensive line and the wrath of some fans.
Play by Play Page 7
