Tony Romo Is the Greatest Cowboys Quarterback Since...
Troy Aikman? Roger Staubach? Don Meredith? The dawn of mankind? How you answer that question shows how you feel about the undrafted free agent from Eastern Illinois University who is now the undisputed star of America’s Team—and whether you’re willing to put up with the tabloid headlines that follow him everywhere.
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Nobody took a worse beating than Meredith, physically or emotionally. Dandy Don—the nickname was coined by his brother, Billy Jack—played most of his career behind a terrible offensive line, throwing to mainly journeymen receivers (“Bullet” Bob Hayes was a magnificent exception), before a crowd of neophyte fans, with an ignorant gallery of sportswriters who had never seen pro football up close. Confession: I was the most offensive of this sorry lot. When Meredith threw an infamous interception against the Cleveland Browns at the Cotton Bowl in 1965, in a game that decided the conference championship, a game the Cowboys should have won, one that would have allowed them to turn the corner and be recognized as a legitimate contender, I borrowed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse lead that Grantland Rice used years before to describe the Notre Dame backfield and twisted it to read: “The Four Horsemen rode again Sunday in the Cotton Bowl. You remember their names: Death, Famine, Pestilence and Meredith.”
I heard later that Meredith thought that line was pretty funny, and at least it was lighthearted. But I wrote some heavy-handed things too, and I’ve regretted them and felt stabs of guilt wondering if I’d helped push him to early retirement. I had enormous respect for the way Meredith played through the pain and suspect Romo has the same brand of courage: Being injured and being hurt are two different things, Romo has said, adding that you can’t play in this league if you can’t play hurt. But like a lot of early-day Cowboys fans, I was impatient for success and quick to assign blame. That’s the downside of being an icon: You’re always the primary target of critics.
The Cowboys learned the brutal lessons of toughness and pain at Meredith’s expense, which must have made the jeers that much sharper. Craig Morton, who was Meredith’s backup from 1965 until he retired, remembered his shock at hearing fans at the Cotton Bowl boo Meredith. “I tried to tell him I was sorry,” Morton told me, “but he said, ‘It’s going to happen to you too. You won’t believe how quick it’s going to happen.’” Morton recalled a game in which Meredith was hauled off the field on a stretcher, his face covered with blood. “He looked up at me and said, ‘You wanted it, Curley. You got it,’” Morton told me. “I’m thinking, ‘No, no, wait . . .’”
When I called Meredith at his home in Santa Fe—he and his wife, Susan, split their time between Santa Fe and Rancho Mirage, California—I wasn’t sure he’d want to talk to me. To my surprise, he came on the line laughing and saying, “If I’d known that all the defense wanted was the ball, I’d have given it to them and saved myself about two million hits to the head.” In a flash, we’d retreated forty-something years, two young wiseasses discussing the price of apples. I told him that a lot of Cowboys fans looked at Romo and saw a young Meredith, which inspired him to quip, “You mean he’s that good-looking?”
Meredith confessed that he doesn’t watch football, but he has seen Romo play. “They must like him if they gave him a $67.5 million contract,” he said. “Or was that a typo?” Meredith remembered that in 1960, before the Cowboys actually came together as a team, he signed a personal-services contract with owner Clint Murchison Jr. worth $150,000 over five years—and that seemed like big money at the time.
“Signing with the Cowboys was so very special in my life,” he told me. “The thing I’m happiest about is that I talked Clint into giving me a five-thousand-dollar advance, which I gave to my parents, Jeff and Hazel, to pay off the wholesalers for their dry goods store on the square in Mount Vernon.”
Meredith, who is now seventy, had a stroke in 2004, which has affected his eyesight, and lack of balance keeps him from playing golf. “I’m feeling so-so,” he said. “I’m still Jeff and Hazel’s baby boy and really happy to be here. Oh, and I dyed my hair gray.” When I asked if he had any regrets or harbored any bad feelings, he began singing Willie Nelson’s “One Day at a Time”: “I live one day at a time/I dream one dream at a time/Yesterday’s dead and tomorrow is blind/And I live one day at a time.”
Morton, who was the fifth player selected in the 1965 draft, is still surprised that Meredith retired so young. “He was just thirty,” Morton said. “He hadn’t even reached his peak. He could have played another ten years, in which case Roger and I wouldn’t have happened.” Morton and I both knew that a big reason for Meredith’s early retirement was Tom Landry, who never fully appreciated that football should be fun, that a quarterback could have a sense of humor and still love the game. Meredith told me that after the 1968 season, he went into Landry’s office and told the coach that he was thinking about retiring. He believed—desperately hoped—that Landry would say, “Come on, Don, you’re in your prime, and your best years are still ahead.” Instead, Landry replied, “Don, I think you are doing exactly the right thing.” Then he suggested they drop to their knees and pray.
Meredith hung up his jersey eleven years before Romo was born, so you have to wonder if the current Cowboys quarterback has ever heard of him. Sam Blair, who wrote for the Dallas Morning News for 41 years and knew Meredith from his college days, asked Romo that exact question: What did he know about Meredith? The young quarterback was ready, chapter and verse. “He was the guy who really started the franchise,” Romo told Blair. “He put the position of quarterback on the map. He’s the pioneer to Staubach, Aikman, and the guys who came after them. It’s kind of neat to have a club like that: Such great players and it all started with him.”
“Neat.” Now, that’s exactly the kind of word Meredith would have used.
I wonder what Landry would have made of Romo? Landry didn’t like scrambling quarterbacks or anything else unorthodox, unless he had invented it. I’m sure he would have agreed with Bill Parcells’s initial evaluation that Romo would never make it in the NFL because of his sidearm throwing style. David Lee, an assistant under Parcells, told an ESPN.com columnist that Parcells had predicted as much. “With that delivery, he’ll have six out of every seventy passes batted down,” Lee remembered Parcells saying. When Romo heard that, he begged Lee to help him change his motion. Lee had his doubts that Romo would even make the team but nevertheless agreed to give him private lessons at Valley Ranch. Lee rigged a ten-foot-high net that took the place of the defensive line and forced Romo to release the ball at a higher point. After countless practice throws, Romo adjusted to a three-quarter motion. You still see traces of the sidearm, but Romo is so good at moving around and finding throwing lanes outside the pass rush that his delivery has never been a problem.
One thing Landry would have loved is Romo’s dedication to improve. In the weeks before the start of every season, Romo goes back to the basics, examining his throwing motion and checking his footwork, drop-back style, and ability to read coverages. At the Cowboys minicamp in June, he concentrated on standing taller, “calming” his feet before throwing, and trying passes from various angles with different motions. “You practice a lot of different shots in basketball,” he told the Sporting News last spring. “Your fadeaway, your jumper. You practice a lot of different shots in golf. I find it funny that most quarterbacks practice the same throwing motion. . . . In a game your arm is going to be in different slots because you’ve got to throw around people. You want to be able to stand taller and throw down over someone and put a little more touch.” Jason Garrett, the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator and a good bet to be their next head coach, thinks that Romo’s most impressive asset is not necessarily his strong arm, his quick release, or his mobility but rather his discipline and his desire to be a good football player. “He comes in, he’s ready to work,” Garrett told the Sporting News. “He gets dialed in at practice and really focuses.”
Eventually, Landry came to believe that Staubach was the best quarterback to play in the NFL, the greatest combination passer, athlete, and leader. But that evaluation came after years of criticizing what he saw as Staubach’s reckless style. “Coach Landry wasn’t happy with my scrambling,” Staubach recalled. “It caused consternation between us. But I put up with his play-calling, and he put up with my scrambling.” Over the years, Landry adapted to Staubach’s style but never fully accepted it. “I was still running after eleven years,” Staubach told me. “And he was still saying, ‘Roger, you’ve got to learn to . . .’ I was trying to tell him, ‘Coach, don’t you know I’m about to retire?’”
So what does Staubach think of Romo? He calls him the real deal. “I was right about Troy,” Staubach said. “I saw him get beat around as a rookie, but he never complained. Romo’s got the same stuff.” Staubach believes that Cowboys coaches should encourage Romo to trust his gut. “If I saw a third-and-four and thought I could get it by running, I’d take off,” Staubach told me. “It was instinct. Favre does that, and so does Romo. The Cowboys need to let him run. He’ll mature. That’s what Landry did with me. I got smarter, and so will Tony.”
Over the past decade Cowboys fans have watched a procession of forgettable names occupy the quarterback position—Randall Cunningham, Quincy Carter, Ryan Leaf, Chad Hutchinson, Vinny Testaverde, Drew Bledsoe—but for the first twenty years of their existence, the Cowboys usually had an embarrassment of riches at that spot.
Back in 1964, a year before the Cowboys drafted Morton and began grooming him as the quarterback who would replace Meredith, the club drafted Staubach, even though he wouldn’t be available for another five years because of military obligations. (Amazingly, the team got him in the tenth round, having discovered that Staubach played a year at the New Mexico Military Institute before entering the Naval Academy and was thus eligible to be drafted his junior year.) Staubach was a 27-year-old rookie and a Vietnam veteran when he finally joined the Cowboys, in 1969. That was the year Morton took over the starting job. A classic drop-back passer in the mold of the great Giants quarterbacks during Landry’s formative years in the NFL, Morton took the Cowboys to their first Super Bowl, in January 1970, a defensive struggle won by the Baltimore Colts.
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