COWBOYS AT A CROSSROADS

The year Tom Landry was given creative control of the brand new Dallas Cowboys, real estate in Addison was going for about forty bucks an acre and blacks were required to ride in the back of the roller coaster at the State Fair. That was 1960.

Throughout Landry’s phenomenal tenure, he has outlasted six U.S. presidents, five Texas governors, three Popes, and, most importantly, 164 head coaches in the National Football League.

The man’s longevity is surprising to Landry himself, who took the Cowboys job primarily to supplement his income in what he then considered his life’s work, selling life insurance.

Throughout it all, Landry has been there on the sideline with his arms folded, about as animated as the statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback in the park. But the statistical fact remains that Landry is neck and neck with Don Shula as the second winningest coach (behind George Halas’s forty-season tenure) in the history of the league, a truth that even the most ardent Cowboy haters in Pittsburgh must accept.

But the season the Cowboys are now approaching, their twenty-seventh, may turn out to be a crucial and pivotal one for both the coach and the franchise.

Nobody seriously expects the Cowboys to play in the Super Bowl this season. They haven’t performed in the Ultimate Game since 1979, and the franchise is face to face with being sucked into the quicksand that the NFL calls “parity’-in which most teams look alike, play alike, and finish 8-8 one season after the other.

Clearly, the team-and Lan-dry-seem to have arrived at a crossroads, and this is the year that the true side of the Cowboys’ recent split personality will emerge.

Who are the Cowboys of 1986 and beyond? The gutsy outfit that beat the Giants and the Redskins twice to win the division, or the mild bunch that ran up the white flag in humiliating losses to the Bears, Bengals, and finally the Rams in their hasty exit from the playoffs?

Recently, we’ve seen the Cowboys taken over by new ownership. This year they’ve hired a new offensive pass coordinator, Paul Hackett, and a new vice-president of pro personnel, Bob Ackles.

But will the other shoe drop? After the dismal showing against the Rams, many felt that a change of coaches was overdue. If the team misses the playoffs this season or has a losing year (the last time that happened was 1964), the kiss-Tom-goodbye faction will probably be the prevailing majority.

Should Landry stick it out as the Cowboys slide toward the sludge pits of mediocrity, or should he ride into the sunset? The proponents of both sides of this controversy have some serious ammunition. The most telling arguments for each side have been distilled into the following five-point manifestos. If we’ve missed your favorite reason for holding or folding Tom Landry, drop us a note. Your reason may appear if we do this story again in 1990.

YES

The Sunday gathering at the house on Guernsey Lane, after Mike Ditka’s hired thugs finished with the Cowboys on Black Sunday, November 17, 1985, had become about as festive as the party room at Sparkman Hillcrest.

One of the guests, addled by several cups of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, had lapsed into a trance-like state. “Forty-four to nuthin’… forty-four to nuthin’,” she kept muttering, over and over, before disappearing down a hallway. Later, an out-of-town visitor who didn’t know America’s Team from Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Orchestra asked, “Why is that woman back there weeping in the bathroom?”

Why? Because of you, Tom Landry, that’s why. Your ball club fell apart like a cardboard suitcase, and everyone in town went to work that next Monday feeling depressed.

After that unseemly 44-0 display at Texas Stadium, it became all too evident that it was time for Tom Landry to take advantage of the facilities at one of the many fine convalescent centers in this area, where he could make himself useful by learning to square dance and tie macramé.

A growing contingent of Cowboy-ologists, many of whom have been advising this team since the Cotton Bowl days, believe it’s time to present Tom with a gold watch and a rod and reel and turn the decision-making over to someone with a couple of fresh ideas. Here are the five leading reasons why Tom Landry should step aside:

1. The Eventual-Collapse-of-the-IQ Factor: In 1966, when Pete Gent was a rookie in training camp with the Cowboys, a reporter asked him what he thought of the intricate offensive playbook, otherwise known as the book of Landry, that all the players had to keep handcuffed to their wrists. “Well, that was a pretty good book,” said Gent, “but everybody gets killed in the end.”

In their efforts to outsmart opponents with a game plan that looks like Einstein’s doodles on a bar napkin, the Cowboys have too often succeeded in confusing only themselves. Football, let’s recall, is more a game of biceps than concepts. Games are won by players like Jack Tatum of the old Oakland Raiders who, in his autobiography, They Call Me Assassin, said, “When I tackle a guy, I like for him to limp off the field hearing train whistles in his head.” If Tatum had been drafted by Dallas, he probably would have been released for failure to grasp the millimetric exactitude of the Flex defense.

2. The Garbage-In, Garbage-Out Crisis: The most important day in the life of an NFL franchise happens not in December but in early May-draft day. And this is when the Cowboys have been coming up consistently empty-handed since 1977, when they conned Seattle out of the rights to Tony Dorsett.

Gil Brandt and his home computer have been absorbing the blame for a decade of uninspiring draft choices. But after all, Landry has the final say-so in all draft selections, so we have him to thank for the immortal Rod Hill and the rest of that legion of mediocrity. With a computer programmed to select Rhodes Scholar candidates instead of muscle-heads, naturally the Cowboys choose too many guys from Stanford and not enough from Cal State San Quentin and Mongoloid Tech. On draft day, the Cowboys’ press information corps is always quick to zero in on Joe So and So’s impressive grade point average and spotless driving record. Nice guys. But the Eagle Scouts-too many of them to single out here-have been the first ones culled when the real Judgment Day came to pass at Thousand Oaks. The time is clearly at hand to offer the services of the Cowboys data processing operation to the utilities authority at Kiev and replace it with a dart board. Could they do worse by random chance?

3. The Party-Pooper Syndrome: For lo these many years, the ongoing criticism against Landry has been that he remains too aloof from his men in the trenches and can’t effectively communicate with the hired hands because his brain is infected with a terminal case of generation gap.

It also has been suggested that Landry maintains a deep streak of mule-headedness when it comes to adapting to changing times. This was exemplified when Landry put the clamps on Butch Johnson and his California Quake routine after catching touchdown passes.

“They didn’t tap dance in the end zone during my playing days, and I’m not going to tolerate it now,” was the message. Of course, during Landry’s playing days, the average paid crowd at an NFL game was about 9,000. Everyone stayed home to watch Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. Landry refuses to concede that pro football today is simply Show Biz, played by a wholly different set of entertainers who are light years different from the Andy Robustellis and Y.A. Tittles of the Eisenhower years. At any rate, Landry no longer has to concern himself about any post-TD Soul Train activity on the part of the Cowboys. That’s because he always sends Timmy Newsome up the middle for no gain on third and three and settles for a field goal.

4. The Distraction Dilemma: The public largely accepts the image of Tom Landry the devoted workaholic, poring over films, camped out in the Cowboys war room, cogitating like George Patton devising a battle plan to confound Rommel, Shockingly, once Landry’s schedule is broken down, it is revealed that Tommy Loy, the trumpeter who plays “The Star Spangled Banner” at home games, probably puts in more hours for the Cowboys than Landry.

Landry, in fact, logs more time on the golf course than any American since Gerald Ford during his days of avoiding the desk at the Oval Office. He’s famous for his emotionless demeanor on the sidelines in front of the Cowboys bench on game day, but you should have seen the Landry version of the Butch Johnson tango after he registered a hole-in-one at No. 16 at the Colonial Pro-Am a couple of years ago. Also, Landry puts in countless hours doing American Express commercials and serving as a character witness for his players on the frequent occasions when they have gone to trial. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for football.

5. The Failure of the Seniority System: Under the Landry Doctrine, a starter with the Cowboys has greater job security than a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Landry has always endorsed the concept that once a person secures a job, it’s his for life. The Landry Doctrine does cut down on paperwork in the personnel office, but it has its drawbacks.

There have been various instances where certain Cowboy veterans managed to overstay their welcome. In the declining years of Bob Breunig, the Cowboys could have more effectively placed a bar stool at middle linebacker. An opposing running back might have occasionally stumbled over the stool, impeding his progress in a way Mr. Breunig seldom did.

And then there was Harvey Martin, seemingly auditioning for the lead in “The Invisible Man” during his last couple of seasons before he turned into a fossil. If the Cowboys should somehow emancipate Herschel Walker from the USFL, he’d spend a season or two playing behind Newsome if Landry’s prevailing guidelines were to continue.

Duane Thomas, whose role in the Tom Landry Adventure Series was shortened by what the former running back now describes as his “idiosyncratic behavioral patterns,” was sitting in the Stoneleigh P and offering some insights on a variety of topics. Thomas has quite a bit of time for that, since he is temporarily between careers.

Thomas was tossing out candid assessments of the current state of the Dallas Cowboys when someone asked for an opinion on Tom Landry-the man, not necessarily the coach. Thomas thought that over for a moment and said, “Well, Tom’s only human, you know. He’s not God.”

Maybe not, Duane. But he does offer a fairly convincing impersonation. And certainly you don’t write off a person of his stature simply because it’s been a while since he won the Super Bowl. Almost nine years? Big deal. Don Shula hasn’t won one in twelve. Has anyone checked out Chuck Noll’s Pittsburgh dynasty lately? Not much going on in Steeler country since Terry Bradshaw hung ’em up.

The argument that it’s time for Tom Landry to retire can be summed up in one word: stupid. If Cowboys fans think the team has problems now, wait and see what it’s like when Landry leaves. That’s when it will become painfully obvious that Landry was the cohesive element that held the whole thing together all along. Without Landry, the Cowboys will become a chaotic mess. They’ll be like the Oilers with stars on their helmets instead of hokey oil derricks. Won’t that be fun? The Cowboys need to get rid of Landry like they need to put spacesuits on those cheerleaders.

Here are five reasons why Tom Landry should head the Cowboys until he catches George Halas:

1. You’re Only as Old as You Feel: Physically and intellectually, Landry is one of those fortunate people who begin to enter their prime when they turn sixty. Look at the guy. He’s a bronzed god. He’s in better shape than Jane Fonda. While many top executives have pickled their brains with four-martini breakfasts, or poisoned them by watching a lot of mind-warping sitcom rot on TV, Landry has remained young with a steady diet of orange juice and Louis L’Amour novels. “Landry has got to be the youngest sixty-one of any man in America,” says one Cowboys insider. “Look at Dick Vermeil. When he quit coaching the Eagles, he was a burned-out old man at thirty-eight.”

2. Return to the Penthouse: This will be the year that Landry successfully silences those whining ninnies who have demanded his early retirement, the ones who make up this city’s flourishing ’’what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” clientele. How will Landry accomplish that? By winning the Super Bowl, that’s how. That should shut them up. Of course, the Cowboys must get around the Bears first, but that might not be as impossible as it sounds. With those Super Bowl rings usually comes a serious case of complacency. Meetings with agents, lucrative commercials for razors and batteries, and appearances on the Carson show have a way of diverting attention from the old gridiron. The banquet circuit and media overexposure will defrost the Fridge.

The secret? The Cowboys will roll back into the limelight behind a new shooting star, a running back from Arizona State who was acquired with the draft choice Dallas got from Indianapolis for Gary Hogeboom. Remember the name: Daryl Clack. The name itself, like that of Jethro Pugh, reeks of marquee potential.

3. Mr. Clean: the Man and the Image: Suppose you had a kid and didn’t want to raise the little tyke. There are two men in America that you would choose to act as a substitute father: Ward Cleaver and Tom Landry. They both symbolize the same sense of values. Honesty, patience, loyalty, the straight life. But Ward Cleaver was just an actor reading a script; Landry, on the other hand, is the genuine merchandise.

The Cowboys-and the city in general-need a person like Landry, who so effectively projects positive energy and straight-arrow values. A Landry is especially vital as the image of players in professional sports continues to slide into disrepute. The sports pages devote more space to dope, gambling, and problems with the IRS than completed passes and yardage gained. But when you think of Tom Landry, you think of decency. Sure, plenty of players who toiled for Tom will tell you that he didn’t particularly remind them of a father figure. They should also remember that it is not Lan-dry’s job to be their daddy.

As for the no-motivation raps, let’s recall that these strong, young millionaires receive a big green dose of motivation on the first and fifteenth of the month. The modem realities of the business enterprise known as professional football have made spiritual motivation and locker room rah-rah a dead issue. Knute Rockne need not apply. The only thing that motivates these guys is the almighty buck.

4. Coach of the Century: It’s easy to pick through the ashes after some of those emasculating losses to Cincinnati, Chicago, etc., and conclude that Landry has finally lost his touch. However, the more intuitive observers around the league will tell you that the job Landry did last season, with the talent on hand, was the best of his career. Maybe the best of anyone’s career. He finished with a 10-6 division championship that might have gone 3-13 under the guidance of anyone else.

Before the start of last season, a sportswriter in New Jersey sug-gested that if Landry could win the Eastern Division with his 1985 material, he ought to be recognized as Coach of the Decade. Six months later the writer found himself in Dallas, presenting the award in a mock ceremony.

“But that’s right,” says one

No

well-qualified NFL observer. “Tom out-coached every team he faced last year in six games that he had any chance to win. In those blowouts they lost, no coach could have done anything to prevent it. Nobody. Against the Bengals, Bears, and Rams, the players saw the fastball coming early and hit the dirt.”

Now Landry, always the innovator, is out there in Thousand Oaks perfecting a new space-age offense, prepared by newcomer Paul Hackett, that will be the envy of the league and certainly not some offensive Edsel devised by a doddering old-timer consumed with the past.

5. A Link With History: People who have spent a lifetime in Dallas have had to fight the hollow feeling that comes with watching the things you cherish about the city gradually disappearing. The Baker Hotel… imploded. The Esquire Theatre… R.I.P., the victim of a wrecking ball. Progress has engulfed us and it’s not that great. As we speak, there is a group of developers down at P and Z trying to have Landry rezoned, so they can bulldoze him and turn him into a reflective glass, rectangular high-rise.

The Cowboys without Landry? What a joke. That would be like Dolly Parton without her guitar. You’ve heard the cliché: “Tom Landry, the only head coach the Cowboys have ever had.” To the real fans, and surely there must be some of those, that will always be the case-no matter when, and by whom, Landry is eventually replaced.