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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There were traces of empathy when the Packers referred to Vince Lombardi as Il Duce. Landry has been called Old Computer Face, a description that has all but vanished with the non-conformers and non-achievers. Pete Gent used to say he could tell when Landry was mad, the muscles beneath Landry's ears would pop out and his eyes would sort of glaze. "His normal method of discipline is to treat you like a number," Gent said. "He seems to be concentrating on talking to you mainly to keep you from vanishing."
Gent, author of the bitterly-critical pro football novel North Dallas Forty [read: Dallas Cowboys], agrees with another ex-Cowboy, Duane Thomas: "Landry is a plastic man. And yet, there is this paradox—in Landry's presence you do not feel the cool platitudes of plastic and computers, you feel something more visceral. You feel fear." Meredith and other ex-Cowboys have said the same thing. It is the fear that no matter how hard you try or how much you care you will be found inadequate.
Landry hadn't read Gent's novel and didn't plan to, but he was aware of the general criticism: bigtime football is dehumanizing, brutal and unfairly stacked on the side of management.
In rebuttal Landry said: "It's an amazing thing, this whole area of criticism…the one thing a player respects in a coach is that the coach makes him do what he doesn't want to do in order to win. Lombardi had great respect from his players, not because they liked him personally but because he made winners of them. That is what all coaches are attempting to do, make players do things they don't want to do in order to achieve success. The people who usually level this sort of criticism [read: Gent] are the people who didn't achieve."
By Landry's code, you could stick Gent's ration of character on the back of a postage stamp. Gent was not a great player, but he hung around for five years. Landry never understood why Gent, Meredith and others sat at the rear of team meetings, laughing hysterically. Gent explains why in his novel: they were cracking and passing snappers of amyl nitrate. Gent once observed of Landry's playbook, "It's a good book, but everyone gets killed in the end." Gent's own book has already earned him more than $500,000. Non-achiever, indeed.
Meredith, the honky-tonk hero, was a special case. From the beginning he was the Cowboys' future. Coming off a brilliant career as an All-American quarterback at SMU, Meredith approached pro football as though he were Popeye saving Olive Oyl from the cannibals. Meredith's quality was leadership, an ability to strike a spark of hope in the most hopeless situation. That is why he was called Dandy Don, a name Landry never appreciated. Meredith could rally a team from certain defeat, or splinter the sobriety of a practice session by perking off his helmet and threatening Cornell Green with bodily harm. He played it for laughs: the notion of Meredith threatening a headhunter like Cornell Green was beautifully absurd, and everyone appreciated it—everyone except Landry, who reminded the Cowboys in the meeting that night: "Gentlemen, nothing funny ever happens on a football field."
I don't know if Landry ever saw it, but beneath all that tomfoolery and searching Meredith was essentially the person he joked about—a good ol' East Texas boy, eaten up with talent and the Protestant vision of material success, fairly begging to excel and be recognized. Meredith endured against his own better judgment. He played many games when he could have rightly been in the hospital.
Meredith's unhappy decision to slide into premature retirement came after Landry supplied an obstacle Meredith wasn't prepared to endure. Landry pulled Meredith from the 1968 playoff game with Cleveland and replaced him with Craig Morton. Ironically, Landry pulled Meredith for throwing an interception that should have been credited against Landry's disciplined system of play. According to Landry's gospel, the Cleveland defensive back who intercepted Meredith's final pass should have been on the other side of the field. Unfortunately, the Cleveland defensive back was in the wrong place. It wasn't that Landry was wrong; Cleveland just wasn't right. Meredith couldn't endure the consequences—the humiliation that after all these years of enduring he could be benched for non-achievement.
When Meredith went to Landry, his pride crushed and personal problems weighing around him like a 90,000-ton infection, thinking that at last he had made the right choice, a choice that would please Landry, the choice to quit football—then Landry would stay in character and say: straighten up, don't do it, forget it ever happened and smile tomorrow. Instead, Landry looked at him coolly and said: "Don, I think you are making the right decision."
Landry contends that he was "treating Don Meredith as an adult," respecting Meredith's right and ability to decide for himself. But given their relationship, a relationship Landry controlled, that was no way to treat Don Meredith.
WHEN I WAS A SPORTSWRITER in Dallas Meredith and I had this unspoken arrangement whereby he would tell me what I needed to know and I would change his quotes to make both of us appear literate. Meredith had only one reservation to this arrangement. "Watch out for my image," he would caution me after every interview. Meredith saw himself as a 13th-century troubadour persecuted for his good intentions. He saw Landry as the Black Monk, a creature who could swallow himself without changing form. If Landry understood the depth of Meredith's paranoia, he never let on.
Sitting now across the desk from Landry, looking through the man and seeing my own reflection, I wonder: what image does Landry have of himself? I have been in many coaches' offices and observed that the decor is narcissistic—for example, the walls of Bear Bryant's office are papered with pictures of the Coach and his Team, the Coach and his Family, the Coach and Phil Harris, the Coach and his Buick. But there are only two pictures in Landry's office—a small, gold-framed portrait of his family, and the large autographed picture of Billy Graham looking down from infinity. Is it possible that Landry sees himself as a rock?
I ask Landry if he thinks he has changed in the last four years and he takes a long time to answer. "I've tried to," he says. "I think I've become more aware of people as individuals. I know the criticism—that I look at my players as numbers—and I guess there's something to it. People my age…we grew up with the Depression, the War…a time of ICBMs and pinstripe suits and rampant materialism. But times are changing. I see that and I make an effort to change, too."
Has Landry changed? I ask Clint Murchison, Jr., the Cowboys owner. "His hair has gotten shorter," Murchison says. Anything else? "Not that I know of," Murchison says.
They are subtle, befitting their instigator, but the changes are there. There are fewer rules, veteran players tell me. Veteran players (though not rookies) can wear their hair any way they please, and with a few exceptions like Bob Lilly and Roger Staubach, most of them look like candidates for a drug raid. Landry personally sees to it that the word "optional" is printed on the schedule announcing the time and place of the weekly Sunday devotional. And the double standard, while officially reputed, exists as a practical matter.
"Just before training camp," Al Ward tells me, "Walt Garrison asked Landry for permission to ride in a rodeo. Landry has strictly forbidden Garrison to rodeo, but of course Garrison does it anyway. But this time, when he asked permission, Landry just said, 'I don't want to know about it.' "
In the preseason game against Kansas City Landry did something that no one in the press box could remember seeing him do before—he walked over to an injured player and inquired about his health.
What was it that Paul said again….about adversity and endurance and character and hope? Hope for what? More adversity? I look at Tom Landry again and now I know his self image. Landry sees himself as a circle. So be it.
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