Game Over 
Turn Out the Lights
My night at the Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion is over, but it left me wondering why Don Meredith didn’t show up, whether Tom Landry deserved his reputation as a coaching genius, and where America’s Team went wrong.
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My wife and I left just behind Tom and Alicia. I’m glad I went, but I don’t think I want to do it again.
Dandy and Landry
Perhaps the reason that Meredith’s failure to show up cast such a pall on the party—as if the class president hadn’t attended the high school reunion—is that it reminded everyone of his unexpected and premature decision to retire after the 1968 season. It still haunts and puzzles these Cowboys, because it robbed them of their destiny to become the game’s finest team. In 1966 and again in 1967, under Meredith’s leadership, the Cowboys lost the NFL championship to the Green Bay Packers in the final seconds. In retrospect, these two near misses reflected the growing pains of a still immature franchise, but at the time, they devastated the Cowboys and prompted some finger pointing and blame shifting. As usual, Meredith was the designated goat. A hometown boy who twice played to All-American honors at Southern Methodist University, Meredith was the first big name to sign with the Cowboys. He got a five-year contract for $150,000, an enormous amount of money in 1960, and Dallas fans, being rank novices to the pro football experience, assumed that it guaranteed the team and the quarterback instant success. When they realized how dreadfully wrong they had been—that first Cowboys team went 0—11—1—they took it out on Meredith. No athlete in Dallas has ever been so maligned and abused by fans, sportswriters (including myself), and even coaches. John Eisenberg, a sports columnist for the Baltimore Sun who followed the Cowboys as a kid growing up in Plano, writes in Cotton Bowl Days, “Someone had to serve as a laboratory rat as the city developed the harder edge that came with the pros. It was [Meredith’s] destiny to become the sacrificial figure on whom Dallas lost its innocence as a sports town.”Meredith set the tone for the sixties, playing with pain and an incredible assortment of injuries, shouldering the blame for defeats, deflecting the credit for success, defying and mocking Landry’s somber, bloodless approach to the game. “Meredith had more fun playing the game than anyone I ever saw, and it made it fun for the rest of us,” former running back Dan Reeves, now the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, told me after the reunion.
Landry used to lecture his players on the subject of character, which he claimed was gained through adversity. But time after time, when adversity visited the Cowboys during a game, Landry pulled Meredith from crucial situations. Football stopped being fun for Meredith when Landry removed him from the 1968 playoff game against Cleveland after a couple of interceptions. The interceptions were not Meredith’s fault; he was following the “keys” that Landry had given him—believing that the Browns’ defense would react in a certain way, and if he threw to the right spot, the pass would be completed for a handsome gain. Unfortunately, the Browns failed to cooperate with Landry’s game plan. And Landry rewarded Meredith’s faith with a spot on the bench.
“Meredith shouldn’t even have played in that game,” Bob Lilly told me in a telephone interview following the party. “He had just gotten out of the hospital with a punctured lung. He didn’t have a very good game, but then none of us did. The players felt that Tom should have defended him, but Tom got so focused on a game he didn’t know if a player was hurt or not.”
When Meredith went to Landry’s office to tender his resignation after the season, he fully expected—and desperately wanted—Landry to reject it. The quarterback was only 31, just reaching his prime. After years of building, the Cowboys were finally putting all the pieces together. The offensive line was respectable, the defense was the best in the league, Meredith was comfortable with Landry’s multiple-set offense and had mastered the art of picking apart a defense, and the players loved and trusted him. But Tom made no attempt to change Meredith’s mind. Instead, he said, “Don, I think you’ve made the right decision.” No blitzing linebacker ever crushed Dandy Don Meredith the way Tom Landry did.
As things worked out, Landry was able to replace Meredith the following year with a 27-year-old rookie named Roger Staubach. After a couple of seasons of sharing time with Craig Morton, Staubach got Dallas its first Super Bowl championship. Had Meredith elected to keep on playing, Staubach, as he has been the first to admit, probably would have left for a less-talented team, not content to be a backup. Game of inches, right? Say Landry had made the tiniest effort to talk Meredith out of retirement. Everything might have been different. Meredith might have been front and center at the 1997 old-timers reunion, and Roger Staubach would have been the answer to a trivia question.
Cowboys fans got to know Meredith mostly through the media, and the media often reflected Landry’s point of view. Meredith’s congenital good humor was one of his many unique qualities the Cowboys coach was unable to appreciate. Landry viewed the game of football as a set of physical laws grounded on his own two innovations—the multiple-set offense and the flex defense. In Tom’s scheme of things, players were as interchangeable as the parts of a machine. As long as a quarterback could operate the multiple-set offense, one player was no better or no worse than the other. Even after Staubach took over as the starter, Landry continued to juggle quarterbacks, with the result that the team sometimes panicked and lost confidence. The difference between Staubach and Meredith was that Roger never smiled when he talked back. What Landry found hard to accept in Meredith was exactly what made him so beloved by his teammates: No matter how grave a situation, he refused to lose his sense of humor.
At the reunion the old-timers told stories of how Dandy Don would waltz into the huddle singing a Willie Nelson song. Or he would interrupt the snap count at the line of scrimmage and tell an opposing player like Redskins linebacker Sam Huff, “Hey, Sam, you’re in the wrong position!” It was his way of saying, “Stay cool, baby.” In the 1966 NFL championship game, after the Packers jumped in front 14—0 before the Cowboys’ offense ever got on the field, Meredith looked around at the grim faces in the first huddle and cracked, “Men, we’re in a shitload of trouble!” By halftime the offense had responded with two touchdowns of its own and the score was tied. Latter-day Cowboys no doubt had great respect for Staubach, but the feeling that the sixties Cowboys had for Dandy Don Meredith went way past respect. “We would have done anything for him,” Boeke told me. “Anything!”
My Savage Beating
I WAS A GREENHORN 26-YEAR-OLD SPORTSWRITER in 1960 when both the Cowboys and the Dallas Texans of the AFL started up business. For the next seven years, I covered pro football, first as the beat man following the Texans for the Dallas Times Herald (1960—1962), then as the beat man following the Cowboys and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. It was one hell of an education.
My influence on the Cowboys was minimal but not entirely nil. In 1964 I started writing about the Doomsday Defense—for no particular reason except it sounded sexier than flex defense—and the name caught on. My counterpart at the Times Herald, Steve Perkins, and I started a campaign to force Landry to move Mel Renfro from defensive back to offensive running back. Landry believed that Renfro’s slight build couldn’t take the pounding at running back, but our daily reports from training camp so fervently pleaded our cause—we called it MOO, short for “Mel on Offense”—that Landry finally relented. Unfortunately, in the season opener against the Giants, running back Renfro broke a bone in his foot. He subsequently returned to defense, where he made the NFL Hall of Fame, and Perkins and I found something else to write about. When I left Dallas in 1967, the Cowboys gave me a going-away party and a plaque, which is still on my bedroom wall. Mounted on the plaque is a kicking shoe and engraved beneath the shoe are the words “Just for Kicks,” celebrating the time that I kicked a universally despised radio reporter down a flight of stairs at the Cowboys’ headquarters on North Central Expressway.
Although I remain, however grudgingly, a Cowboys fan, my favorite memories of the team are still of those years—not just because I covered the team, but because I felt I was watching an absorbing sports drama. The Cowboys had great potential and great flaws, and you never knew which one was going to win out. When the Golenbock and Eisenberg books arrived, I read them avidly to see if their recollections of the early years matched mine.
Eisenberg’s book, Cotton Bowl Days, paints an accurate and often moving portrait of the team, reflecting both the researching skill of a veteran sportswriter (the author worked at the Times Herald before moving to the Baltimore Sun) and the memories of a boy who grew up believing in God, country, and the Dallas Cowboys. From 1960 until the present, Cowboys football was a family affair for the Eisenbergs. John’s grandfather Pop originally purchased ten season tickets in 1960 and “lorded over them with patriarchal sway.”
Golenbock’s Cowboys Have Always Been My Heroes is a different matter. Though the book is billed as “a definitive oral history” of the Cowboys, the author’s technique of running long, unchallenged quotes from former players, interspersed with just enough writer’s narrative to move the story along, is anything but definitive. The oral history depends on interviews with a relative handful of players. And a disproportionate amount of the quotes on the turbulent 1965 season come from two infamous malcontents, Pete Gent and Buddy Dial. I should know. According to Golenbock’s book, one of the main things they were malcontent about was me.
My Library
