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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I remember the 1965 season all too well. It was a gut-wrenching roller coaster ride that carried the Cowboys to new lows and new highs. The team finished with a respectable 7—7 record—the first time in their six seasons that the Cowboys had not had a losing record—and earned a trip to a playoff game, but the ride was seldom pleasant. Landry benched Meredith unceremoniously during a losing streak and compounded his poor judgment by alternating two rookie quarterbacks, Craig Morton and Jerry Rhome. After a fifth straight defeat, in a hushed locker room in Pittsburgh, Landry broke into tears as he admitted to the team that perhaps the fault was his. Bob Lilly recalled the moment for me: “He just started to cry, and nobody knew what to do. But we saw the real man that day. He was crying because he felt he had let us down. We never forgot that moment. It was the turning point for the Dallas Cowboys.” A few days later, Landry pulled himself together and announced that Meredith would be his starter for the remainder of the season. But the team hadn’t yet bottomed out.
The Cowboys moment that will forever live in infamy arrived a couple of weeks later in the Cotton Bowl against the defending NFL champion Cleveland Browns, with the first sellout crowd in Cowboys history looking on. Though the Cowboys were overmatched, they outplayed the Browns most of the game. Trailing by a touchdown with 83 seconds remaining, Dallas owned the ball on the Cleveland one-yard line. Seventy-six thousand Cowboys fans were on their feet; after six seasons of frustration, their team was about to tie or beat the best team in the league.
On first down Meredith dropped back to pass, read the reactions of the defenders as Landry had taught him to do, and threw the ball—straight to the Browns’ middle linebacker. My game story in the Dallas Morning News the following day began with a takeoff on a famous passage written by Grantland Rice about the 1924 Army—Notre Dame game:
“Outlined against a grey November sky, the Four Horsemen rode again Sunday. You know them: Pestilence, death, famine and Meredith.”
Golenbock devotes four pages of his book to the reaction of four Cowboys receivers—Gent, Dial, Frank Clarke, and Pettis Norman—to my “Four Horsemen” story. All of them insist that the interception was Landry’s fault, not Meredith’s, and say that the players were so outraged by the story that in a team meeting they decided to give me a savage beating. Gent recalls, “We had a private team meeting without the coaches over Cartwright. They all wanted to kill him, and Meredith kept saying, ‘You can’t. It’s his job. He’s just doing his job like we’re doing ours.’” Norman says the story was typical of “the sour grape that really made the Gary Cartwright Era in Dallas.” Dial, the onetime Rice All-American, calls me “a wormy little old devil . . . [who] breathed an ill wind.”
There was no Gary Cartwright Era, just as there was no beating. To settle the question of my alleged thrashing and determine once and for all who called the fatal play that November day in 1965, I checked newspaper stories of the time and telephoned several players on the team, including Lilly, Reeves, and Bob Hayes, as well as Landry. None of the players I spoke with remembered a team meeting or talk of physical violence against me. “No, that never happened,” Lilly said. “Now, Landry would come into the locker room with newspaper articles sometimes and say, ‘Here’s a scathing article and it’s true, that’s where we are, right there!’” Reeves, who is now the dean of NFL coaches, remarked that Gent had often reworked facts to fit his own agenda and said of the controversial play: “Really and truly, that play wasn’t Meredith’s fault. He only had three plays to choose from in our goal-line offense, two passes and a wedge where he hands off to the fullback going low over the top.” In that case, I asked, shouldn’t Landry have defended Meredith to the media? Reeves, who still refers to Tom as “Coach Landry,” paused for a moment, then told me, “That’s one of the things a coach has to consider when the quarterback is choosing the play.”
Landry didn’t return my call. But in the dressing-room interview published in the Morning News the day following the game, Landry made it clear that the play was Meredith’s doing. Then he added, disingenuously, “I don’t second-guess my quarterback.” There was a phrase, also borrowed from Grantland Rice, that you used to hear around the Cowboys locker room after a losing game: “It’s not whether you win or lose, but who gets the blame.”
Many of the players quoted in Golenbock’s book (and Eisenberg’s) are critical of Landry, not necessarily for the way he handled Meredith but for the way he handled the entire team. “Even when we won, Tom Landry would go to the media, and you’d think we’d lost,” says Cornell Green. “Tom had trouble saying we played a good game. He had a problem with that.” Even Lee Roy Jordan comes down hard on Tom: “The players always had to take the blame for the losses. If Tom had a bad game plan or if he called a bad play, it was always the players’ fault.”
Looking back, I realize that I allowed myself to become emotionally involved with the Cowboys. My reaction to a game was not much different from that of an ordinary fan, except that I got to talk to the players and coaches before blowing off steam. At a downtown fan club luncheon a few days after the loss to the Browns, a hard-core fan asked Landry why the team allowed me to write such uncensored garbage. Landry replied, “You have to remember, when the game is over and we’re all feeling terrible about losing, Gary is the one with the typewriter.” I’ve always been grateful to Tom for understanding my role.
I don’t regret the Four Horsemen story, but I do regret writing in my column later that Meredith was a loser. I have committed a lot of stupid opinions to print, but none as stupid as that. Timothy McVeigh is a loser. Don Meredith was an extraordinarily gifted and complex man, at once whimsical and introspective, and no one ever worked harder or under more pain or pressure to prove himself as an athlete. Reading Golenbock’s book, I regretted all over again not getting straight my feelings for Meredith.
Several players described flying home from Washington the week after the Four Horsemen episode. Meredith’s daughter, Mary Donna, was sitting in his lap. Apparently overcome with a sense of failure, Don began crying and saying out loud, “I’m not a loser.” I had never heard that story before, and reading it nearly brought tears to my eyes.
After the 1965 season I spent several days talking with Meredith for what was later a cover story in Sport magazine. It was as complimentary as the Four Horsemen had been abrasive. Meredith predicted that the Cowboys would continue to improve until they won more consistently than any team in history. The reason, he said, was Tom Landry. “I’ve learned one thing: Tom is right,” he told me. “You get tired of a guy being so right so often, but that’s the way it is. The hardest thing to do with Tom’s system is believe it.”
After he retired, Meredith went on a binge of self-destruction, literally trying to kill himself. In Cowboys Have Always Been My Heroes, Gent tells Golenbock about a drugs-and-booze-besotted trip that he and Meredith took to Baja California in 1969 as guests of the Jantzen swimwear company. On the trip, Meredith insisted on swimming in shark-infested waters, challenged a cantinaful of bad Mexicans to a fight, and rode his motorbike into a ravine, dislocating his shoulder and fracturing an arm. In a local hospital, he almost died from an overdose of morphine. Until then, Gent says, Meredith and the Cowboys were talking about his coming back for the 1970 season. Instead, Meredith became one of the stars of ABC’s Monday Night Football and eventually made peace with his past.
Land of Cotton
JOHN EISENBERG TRACES THE DECLINE of the Dallas Cowboys as a team worth loving not to the arrival of Jerry Jones or the departure of Jimmy Johnson or to any other recent event, but to the abandonment of the Cotton Bowl in 1971. There is wonderful nostalgia in his recollections of the ratty old Cotton Bowl, “a big concrete tureen, a Depression-era project incorporating none of the amenities that would become standard features.” The bathrooms were little more than outhouses, hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and the stadium’s general-admission seats were separated from the reserved seats by strands of chicken wire. It was a blue-collar stadium, where blue-collar fans watched a blue-collar team, which for five seasons lost many more games than it won.
The concept of pro football as a social event didn’t arrive in Dallas until 1971, Eisenberg reminds us, when Clint Murchison, Jr., defied the civic leaders of Dallas and built Texas Stadium in suburban Irving. “The Cowboys had always cultivated a mildly snobby character with their multiple-set offense, reliance on computers, and Landry’s unemotional approach,” he writes. “But moving to Texas Stadium pushed their elitist reputation to a new zenith.” In 1993, after Eisenberg’s grandfather died, his 74-year-old father somehow forgot to mail the renewal for the family’s season-ticket allotment, which by then had dwindled to a single pair. The old man telephoned the Cowboys’ office, certain that they would forgive the minor oversight from a family that had been ticket holders since 1960. A sharp-tongued assistant eventually renewed the seats but warned him that he was on “probation” and that if this ever happened again, his tickets would be forfeited. “[This] was emblematic of the attitude searing pro football’s soul,” Eisenberg says. “Teams no longer wanted fans: They wanted clients.”
It is impossible to compare the teams of my generation with the present Cowboys. Everything is different—the game, the expectations, the money, the fans, the owners, even the sportswriters. If some of the old-timers thought I was a tough critic, how would they deal with Randy Galloway or the acerbic current crop of Dallas—Fort Worth talk show hosts?
The self-commodification of pro football has bred an atmosphere of nihilism and greed in which players jump from team to team, teams jump from city to city, and fans pay through the nose and damn well like it. The old Cowboys had no agents, no business managers, no limousines waiting to take them to the practice field. After every game they signed autographs for hours—without charge, of course. People felt like they knew them personally, and in some cases they did. Most of the players had regular jobs in the off-season: Landry sold insurance, and Meredith worked for a stock broker. In 1958 the entire payroll of the twelve-team NFL was $3 million, about what Cowboys defensive tackle Leon Lett was making before his drug suspension. There was loyalty to team and teammates unknown today, a willingness to sacrifice, and a devotion to the game itself.
It’s ironic to remember that one of Landry’s last top draft picks was Michael Irvin. Someone at the reunion asked Landry if he could coach today’s game. “I probably could,” Tom said, “but I wouldn’t.” A lot of us know that feeling.
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