Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  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 Mon
tana 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 suffered. 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.

  Among those vying to take over America’s Team were a band of Japanese businessman (the archconservative Bright would have sooner eaten his spleen than sell America’s Team to a nationality of people he still detested over Pearl Harbor); a posse led by former Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach and Denver billionaire Marvin Davis; Don Carter, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks; Jerry Buss, owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers; and hotelier Robert Tisch. “Bum would like to see the Cowboys carry on the tradition that has been built over three decades,” John J. Veatch, Jr., the managing director of Salomon Brothers’ Dallas office, told the Wall Street Journal—and it was pure garbage. What Bright wanted was someone to fork over $180 million for the team, the stadium, the new Valley Ranch headquarters, and the $34 million debt.

  What he wanted was Jerral Wayne Jones.

  An obscure Arkansas oil driller with a cache of loose women and loose business dealings, Jones was fishing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on September 8 when he opened to page 10 of that day’s Wall Street Journal. A headline caught his eye: LIKE MANY OTHER TEXAS INSTITUTIONS, THE COWBOYS HAVEN’T FOUND A BUYER.

  The Cowboys? The Dallas Cowboys?

  Jones was euphoric. Ever since his boyhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, Jones had always possessed an indefatigable desire for big. He wanted big things. Huge things. He could talk any girl into a dance, any store owner into handing over a free gumball or two. In his first year at North Little Rock High School, Jones willed himself to become the freshman team’s starting quarterback, even though he weighed a mere 120 pounds and played with a hairline fracture in his upper right arm. The beatings from opposing defenses were brutal—but Jones loved the glory and spotlight of the position. The quarterback did things; went places.

  While his father, Pat, who first supported his family by selling chickens, rabbits, and eggs from the back of a truck, was building the thriving Modern Security Life Insurance Company from hard work and elbow grease, young Jerry was paying close attention. “I learned early on,” says Jones, “that if you bust your ass and go after exactly what you want, you’ll get it.”

  By the time he enrolled at the University of Arkansas in 1959, Jones was a junior executive in the family insurance business, earning $1,000 per month. At the same time he attended classes and played fullback for the Razorbacks, Jones was a full-fledged entrepreneur. He sold shoes from the trunk of his car, purchased the rights to a pizza parlor, and operated a taxi service that shuttled Razorback fans from the airport to the football stadium.

  As teammates were solely focused on the next week’s contest versus Tennessee, young Jerry was focused on the next decade’s potential for economic expansion. His short-term postcollegiate goal: Make boatloads of money. His long-term goal: Own a football team.

  The sport was in his blood, an ingrained love that germinated in his five years at Arkansas. When coach Frank Broyles recruited players, he assumed 80 percent would fail to survive his taskmaster ways. Indeed, of the sixty freshman players who began with Jones, a mere eleven lasted. Limited as a fullback, Jones was gradually transitioned to offensive guard, and excelled. The scrappy 6-foot 200-pounder not only started for the 1964 national championship team, but earned an undergraduate degree in finance and a master’s degree in speech and communication. “Jonesie had this unique way of verbalizing in very few sentences his very innermost feelings and convictions,” said Jim Lindsey, a wingback with the Razorbacks. “I played four years of college football and seven more in the pros. But I was never around a more inspirational leader.”

  With no shot at a professional football career, Jones followed an unconventional path. Less than two years after leaving school to work for his father in life insurance, Jones attempted to purchase Barron Hilton’s 80 percent share of the San Diego Chargers of the American Football League. “I was very excited,” says Jones. “To be so young and have the chance to own a professional team—it was a dream.” When Hilton offered a 12
0-day, $50,000 option on his $5.8 million stake in the Chargers, Jones turned to his father, who advised the twenty-four-year-old to walk away. The Chargers were later sold to a group headed by Eugene Klein and Sam Schulman for $10 million. Jones was disappointed, but he believed the opportunity would arise again.

  With his football dreams on hold, Jones used much of the $500,000 he garnered from the 1970 sale of Modern Security Life to enter the mysterious world of oil and gas exploration (aka “wildcatting”). For Jones, a swashbuckling risk-taker with an unparalleled desire to strike it rich, the career choice was a natural. “Nobody,” Sports Illustrated ’s Ed Hinton once wrote, “plays hunches harder than a wildcatter looking for a lock, a hole card, a secret advantage in searching out oil deposits,” and it was true. Adhering to the unorthodox practice of drilling for “close-in” reserves between the dry holes of previously abandoned leases, Jones hit it big. The first thirteen wells he sunk in 1971 and ’72 struck oil. By 1981 Jones had made $10 million.

  Over the ensuing decade, Jones and partner Mike McCoy (who would later become the Cowboys’ vice president) formed the Arkoma Production Company to man the fertile, gas-rich Arkoma Basin in northwestern Alaska, then earned nearly $174.8 million from a corporate buyout in 1986. The obscure, up-from-the-sticks Jones was now one of America’s wealthiest men.