Game Over 
Tom Landry: Melting the Plastic Man
O.K. On the surface he looks like an old computer face, but that's not all that makes him run.
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Now they were gone, the non-conformers as well as the non-achievers, and Landry looked more relaxed than I'd ever seen him. You know the illegal smile, the one John Prine sings about? Landry wore what you might call a legal smile.
He told me: "I've come to the conclusion that players want to be treated alike. They may talk about individualism, but I believe they want a single standard. Yes, that belief is behind many of the trades we made. If a player is contributing and performing the way he ought to, he will usually conform. Now if he isn't performing well and not conforming to team standards either, he ought not be around. We can put up with someone who is getting the job done as long as he'll conform. But we just can't get along with a player who doesn't conform or perform. No way."
There is a common misunderstanding among football experts that the best team—the team with the most talent—wins. It is true that you don't win without talent, but in the National Football League there are five or six teams of more or less equal ability. In those delirious hours after Super Bowl VI when the Cowboys were drunk with victory and talk of the new dynasty rained down, Landry permitted himself a Virginia reel around the dressing room, then he struck a note of caution. The question, Landry said, is will the Cowboys perform at the same level next year.
"At the championship level," he said, "there is a very narrow edge between winning and losing. You don't have to take much away from a team to keep them out of the Super Bowl. The hunger that makes a player work hard enough to win is inherent in some, but in others it has to be built in. The edge comes from trying to achieve a goal. Once you've achieved it, it is very difficult to look back at the price you've paid and then make yourself do it again."
At the bottom of the sweet cup of Super Bowl VI, Landry read the future. Though they were essentially the same team that won the Super Bowl, the 1972 Cowboys were found lacking. There is only one Super Bowl; and it's no disgrace not to get there: in recent years, only Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers have been able to repeat as champions.
That is what hurt, the fact that Lombardi had done it. There had been no double standard at Green Bay. All-pro guard Jerry Kramer once remarked, "Coach Lombardi treats us all the same—like dogs." Even before his death a few years ago Lombardi was a football legend, a vane, volatile, uncompromising dictator, a living metaphor for Number 1. Could Tom Landry afford to be something less? Not if he had character.
It wasn't Jesus or Paul that Tom Landry had in mind when he did corrective surgery on the 1973 Cowboy team, it was Vince Lombardi.
LOMBARDI AND LANDRY WERE GUIDING forces behind the great New York Giants' teams of the Fifties, and when pro football climbed out of the coal yards into the affluent livingrooms of America in the early Sixties, they were major influences. Jim Lee Howell was the head coach of the Giants, but it was Lombardi's offense and Landry's defense that gave the Giants character. After Lombardi moved on to the head job at Green Bay and Landry took on the new franchise in Dallas, Howell resigned, explaining that "Ten victories don't make up for two defeats."
"Lombardi was a much warmer person than Landry," says Wellington Mara, the Giants' owner. "He went from warm to red hot. You could hear him laughing or shouting for five blocks. You couldn't hear Landry from the next chair. Lombardi was more of a teacher. It was as though Landry lectured the top 40 per cent of the class and Lombardi taught the lower ten per cent."
Landry was still a player-coach when he designed the modern 4-3 Defense, pro football's equivalent of the dooms-day machine. Later, at Dallas, Landry pioneered a method of combating that defense—the multiple offense.
"Landry was a born student of the game," says Em Tunnell, the great defensive back who played with (and later for) Landry. "But he was kind of weird. After a game the rest of us would go out for a beer, Tom would disappear. He was always with his family. You never knew what was going through his mind. He never said nothing, but he always knew what was going on. We didn't have words like keying (ie: reacting to prearranged schemes) in those days, so Tom made up his own keys and taught them to the rest of us."
By training, Landry was an industrial engineer: he had a need to know what was going on. "I couldn't be satisfied trusting my instincts the way Tunnel did," Landry explained. "I didn't have the speed or the quickness. I had to train myself and everyone around me to key various opponents and recognize tendencies."
"Most of us just played the game," Frank Gifford recalls. "Landry studied it. He was cool and calculating. Emotion had no place in his makeup."
Another former Giant, Dick Nolan, who went on to become head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, says, "I remember one time Tom was at the blackboard, showing me that if their flanker came out on the strong side on a third-down play, and the fullback flared to the weakside, I was to follow the fullback out a few steps and then race back quickly because they would be bringing the wingback inside me to take a pass. 'But Tom,' I said, 'what if I commit myself that completely and the wingback isn't there?' Tom just looked at me without any change of expression and said, 'He will be'."
Landry's reputation was constantly exposed to ridicule in the mid-1960s, not only because his Cowboys twice lost championship games to Lombardi's Packers, but because Landry himself came across as such a cerebral paradox, a rigid, humorless figure stalking the sidelines of the Cotton Bowl in his felt snapbrim and buria1-policy dark suit. Like the team he coached, Lombardi was purely physical, seething, kicking, pushing, openly humiliating those around him; and getting results. If the Packers were the bludgeons of pro football, the Cowboys were the slide rules. Paul Hornung once observed, "Lombardi would be kicking you in the rump one minute and putting his arm around you the next. "
Landry would react to a great play or a poor play in the same dispassionate manner, as though it were ancient history. When a player was down writhing in agony, the contrast was most apparent: Lombardi would be racing like an Italian fishwife, cursing and imploring the gods to get the lad back on his feet for at least one more play; Landry would be giving instructions to the unfortunate player's substitute.
Landry once explained: "The reason I take on the appearance of being unemotional is I don't believe you can be emotional and concentrate the way you must to be effective. When I see a great play from the sidelines, I can't cheer it. I'm a couple of plays ahead, thinking.
"Lombardi's style of play was very different from ours. The Green Bay system of offense—we call it the basic system—was that you were going to run the power sweep regardless of what the other team put up against you. Run that play over and over until you could execute it in your sleep. It was all execution. So Lombardi had to develop the players to an emotional pitch, keep them doing their best all the time against a defense that knew what was coming. The Packers had to stay very high emotionally to win.
"Our system is different. We run a multiple offense and must take advantage of situations as they present themselves. Everything we do from every formation doesn't work against every defense, so we have to concentrate, we have to think. Our defense is also quite complicated. It depends on reading movements and formations and knowing where to go. Therefore the nature of response from the sidelines must be very different. The players don't want to see me rushing around and screaming. They want to believe I know what I'm doing."
Lee Roy Jordan, Dallas' middlelinebacker, explains: "Landry isn't a praising coach, he's a corrective coach. If you do something right, that's what you oughta do. He only talks when you do something wrong. If Tom says 'damn it', you know something severe has happened."
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