Game Over 
God Bless America's Team
What the Dallas Cowboys need right now, even more than tirades from Bill Parcells, is help from above. At least we know Tex Schramm will put in a good word.
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Most evenings, Tex took a bunch of us to a fancy restaurant, where we drank and argued about some arcane aspect of football until the early morning hours. Tex loved to argue and drink J&B. He was opinionated, stubborn, hot-tempered, and passionate about football, and he knew more about the subject than any man living. He read every word we wrote and wasn't shy about hammering us when he disagreed. "What's 'autocratic' mean?" he asked me one morning as we were leaving the dining hall. I'd written the previous day that Tex was the most autocratic general manager in football. He followed me to my training camp dorm room, where I read him the dictionary definition of an autocrat: "1. A ruler having absolute or unrestricted power; despot. 2. Any arrogant or domineering person." Tex nodded as he considered the words. "I can live with that," he decided.
Maturity and the perspective of time allow me to understand today what I saw but didn't fully comprehend in the sixties. I remember, for example, standing in the rear compartment of a Cowboys charter flight, returning from California. Tex was huddled with Landry, chief scout Gil Brandt, and two or three assistant coaches, and they were conferring with a small, dark man named Salam Qureishi who worked for IBM. At that exact moment, Tex was perfecting and computerizing the player draft, something everyone in the league takes for granted now but a nascent science back then. The Rams of the late forties were the first team to put resources into a scouting system, and Tex had seen its value up close.
Tex also took some gambles that paid off big. In 1964, for example, the Cowboys drafted two of their greatest players in late rounds. They got an Olympic star named Bob Hayes in the seventh round, because other teams tended to ignore players from obscure schools like Florida A&M University. And they grabbed a quarterback named Roger Staubach in the tenth round, even though he had a year of eligibility left at Navy plus a four-year military commitment.
Manipulating for advantage kept Tex young. Sometimes his manipulating helped the Cowboys; sometimes it helped the league. In his mind it was the same thing. Tex was instrumental in bringing about the NFL's first big network television contract. At CBS, he had produced the first televised Winter Olympics, an idea he had conceived and sold to a dubious network that never dreamed it was possible to cover such a multifaceted event or that sports alien to most Americans would prove so popular. If Americans would sit still for skating and downhill racing, Tex knew they'd die to watch pro football. The billions that poured in from TV were shared among the teams; revenue sharing and the common draft allowed teams to compete equally, regardless of market size, an advantage that baseball has yet to recognize.
Tex hated anything that wasn't NFL, and that included the rival AFL. But in 1966, when the two leagues were fighting a war that nobody could win, Tex telephoned Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt—think Nixon going to China—and the two of them met and began negotiating football's historic merger. The first benefit of the proposed merger was the 1967 Super Bowl, matching the top teams from each league. Tex brought sexy cheerleaders who were professional dancers to the NFL too and instant replay and the wild-card playoff system. He didn't coin the term "America's Team," but he made it his own, to the envy and distress of everyone else in the league. He was a fierce and unrelenting competitor. Who but Tex would have dared protest when record-setting kicker Tom Dempsey, born with a deformed right foot, was permitted to wear a special shoe designed to resemble a driver? I can't remember if Tex won the protest, but I do remember sitting next to him in the press box in the closing seconds of a Cowboys-Eagles game. Dempsey was the Philadelphia kicker that year, and as he lined up what could be the game-winning field goal, I heard Tex mutter under his breath, "Hook it, loser." And Dempsey hooked it.
In some ways, it's a different game today. Because of free agency and the salary cap, a team can go from also-ran to Super Bowl champ in a year or two. In Tex's day, a general manager could assemble talent sufficient to win a Super Bowl and retain it until the players wore out. But Tex claimed that no matter how things change, the smart teams always win. It was true then and it's true now. Teams like the Raiders, 49ers, Giants, Packers, and Broncos were contenders ten years ago and are still contenders. If Jerry Jones wants to know how to win, he should ask himself what Tex Schramm would do. Forget about calling plays and start thinking of ways to outsmart the opposition.
DON'T EXPECT PARCELLS TO BE a public figure in Dallas. He has always been a loner who, in all his years in football, has made few close friends. In recent years his circle has narrowed even further. The co-author of his autobiography, Will McDonough, died just before Parcells took the Cowboys job, and his agent and friend Robert Fraley died in the 1999 plane crash that took the life of golfer Payne Stewart. After 39 years of marriage, his wife, Judy, divorced him. Parcells lives alone in an apartment at Las Colinas, a short drive from the Cowboys' Valley Ranch complex. He has almost no social life, except an occasional round of golf or a trip to the racetrack. Most days, he arrives at his office early and stays late. Behind his desk is a photograph of him and Landry, taken before a game at Texas Stadium in the mid-eighties, when Parcells coached the Giants. Above the desk is a sign that advises "Just Coach the Team." Outside influences must be ignored.
In a profile of Parcells, published in June in the Morning News, writer Juliet Macur reported that on Mother's Day, Parcells played golf by himself at the Cowboys Golf Club in Grapevine. "It was early, the course empty," she wrote. "He played ten holes, often hitting two balls from the tee, killing time until he needed to be at Valley Ranch."
There are no sure things in the NFL, though Parcells comes close. The Cowboys will eventually win and win big, but it's not going to happen this year or next. This year's edition is good enough to finish 8-8, three games better than last year. But then the Cowboys could have won three more games last year if they hadn't made so many mistakes, committed so many penalties, coughed up so many turnovers, or missed so many easy field goals. These are failings that Parcells can fix. He will turn a bad team into an average team, but he knows what a good team looks like, and he hasn't seen one yet in Dallas. Tearing the club apart and starting over isn't an option. He has to patch and fill as opportunity presents itself.
Historically, Parcells' teams win with solid defense and by running the ball and controlling the clock. This year's team will have to win with defense; otherwise forget about it. And they must do so without a good pass rusher. The offense hasn't a clue how to replace Emmitt Smith, the most productive running back in NFL history. Nor is there a proven quarterback. Parcells showed no interest in any of the free-agent quarterbacks available last spring. Barring an unexpected move, he has to go with either Quincy Carter, who was benched last year after throwing four interceptions in a loss to Arizona, or Chad Hutchinson, the former baseball player who, after replacing Carter, was sacked 34 times and fumbled 12 times.
Notoriously hard on quarterbacks, Parcells berates and abuses them on the theory that it prepares them for the licks they'll take from an opponent. But he can bring out the best in a quarterback too; he's a master at taking underachievers and motivating them to play to their potential. If he can do that with tackle Flozell Adams, pass protection will improve greatly. Parcells is searching for what he calls "foxhole guys," the kind you want when you go to war. "I'm looking for guys who are willing to do whatever it takes to win all the time," he has said. "You don't get medals for trying. You get medals for achievement."
It took Parcells four years to transform the Giants from losers to Super Bowl champs and another four years to get the Patriots to the Big Dance. Four years is what he has in Dallas. My guess is he'll get to another Super Bowl—or die trying.
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