This Plastic Is the Best on Market

The trouble with Tom Landry is, he doesn’t fit the media--or public--conception of the mythical football coach.

He should. He’s one of the best, maybe the best.

A football coach in the public mind, not to say in the press’ or Hollywood’s, is this kind of guy: He bangs the walls of the locker room at halftime. He cries, yells, calls on the shades of long-dead halfbacks, cajoles, exhorts. He’s as emotional as the second act of Tosca or a Browning poem.

He shows he cares.

Tom Landry is the man who isn’t Knute Rockne. He isn’t even Vince Lombardi, Bear Bryant or Howard Jones. He doesn’t have a quip on his lips or a chip on his shoulder.

He’s not quotable. He never says things like, “Winning is the only thing.” He never calls on the deathbed utterances of long gone players, and his teams aren’t emotional extensions of himself.

Tom Landry is, for Texas, quite a specimen. Tight-lipped, laconic, his speech is as dry as a high plains dust storm. It is not interspersed with the bucolic colloquialism of the state, even though he comes from deep in the heart of Texas.

He projects the image of a bloodless banker, a computer, not a man, with circuits instead of veins.

His own players cut him up.

“A plastic man,” Duane Thomas once complained.

“Tom Landry and (Minnesota Coach) Bud Grant once had a personality contest--and no one won,” Don Meredith used to say on the air.

When someone pointed out to Meredith that Landry would one day be a statue in the park, Meredith retorted, “He already is.”

One of Landry’s linebackers once complained: “He looks at a player and he sees an X or an O. They put the names on the back of the uniforms for Tom, not for the spectators.”

Don Rickles used to get one of his biggest laughs at Landry’s expense with this one: “Eighty thousand people are going nuts in the stands, and there’s Landry, standing there looking up and trying to get his hat straight.”

His team was America’s Team. Why wasn’t he America’s Coach?

You go a long way to understanding Landry when you understand that his personal idols were Ben Hogan and Paul Brown.

Ben Hogan didn’t play a round of golf, he engineered it. He didn’t care what the world thought of him. He already had the hardest person to please in the world--himself.

Paul Brown was the one who changed football from grand opera to high tech.

Those were Tom Landry’s role models. His own respect for technology grew when his life depended on it. He flew 30 missions over Europe as a co-pilot in a B-17 when you could lose your life over the target or over your landing field.

“Your instruments are better than you are,” he says he found out.

He fell in love with the football technology when, as a player with the New York Giants, he helped set up the defense that stopped the rampaging Cleveland Browns, 6-0, in 1950 on the Browns’ way to the NFL championship.

“We shut them out again in 1958, and no one else shut them out until 1971,” he said.

The Dallas Cowboys under Landry are probably the most perennially successful team in their sport and occupy roughly the same niche in the public mind as the New York Yankees or Notre Dame. The Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers, even the Miami Dolphins, abide their destined hour and go. The Cowboys endure. Because Landry endures.

They are his lengthened shadow. The public likes them because they project an image of Billy the Kid evading the posse, Wyatt Earp gunning down the Clantons at the OK Corral, Tom Mix foiling the rustlers or even John Wayne holding the fort.

They are not the Monsters of the Midway or the Pack or the Steel Curtain. They are the guys in the white hats, outmanned, outgunned but not outdrawn. Watching them win is like watching Gary Cooper save the town. It’s always high noon when the Cowboys play.

I think America fell in love with Landry’s Cowboys when they took on the heavily armed Green Bay Packers in the years when they had to live by their wits. They barely lost, with the ball on the one-yard line once and another time in a game that might just as well have been played on the slopes of Everest.

America’s Team is Landry’s team. They have never had any other coach in their 26 years.

So why isn’t he Captain America? Why isn’t he recognized, as he will be one day, as the foremost of all men who teach and coach football today? Why do other men have the labels genius and wizard, while Landry is labeled cold and aloof, and lampooned for having a whisk broom in his hat and a crease in his pants and not lauded for the game plan in his pocket?

Landry, a practicing Christian, never complains. But he thinks he knows why.

“When a big play occurs for our team, I’m concentrating on how the defense is reacting to it,” he says. “Most of the time, I don’t see the great catch or the long run. What I’m looking at is how the other team defended it. The camera pans on me and it looks as if I’m disinterested. I’m not. I try not to break my concentration. When you’re concentrating, you don’t show emotion.

“Vince Lombardi was more of a motivator than I am. I always concentrated on the science of football, not the emotion. Lombardi’s teams were no finesse teams. They just ran over you. Lombardi’s greatness was in arousing players to play above themselves.

“I take the game and apply engineering principles to it. I put in my system at a time when, to succeed, we had to be flashy. We couldn’t sit there and trade punches with the league. We were an expansion team and we had to surprise teams, not surround them.

“We were the first to raise up linemen and shift them around. We had to try to get teams off balance. That was our personality and it still is. We cultivated the reputation of being a complex team and we were.”

Dynasties come and dynasties go, but the Cowboys are the team to beat. No other team in the NFC has gone to as many Super Bowls, or has won as many division championships, 12.

His name really should be Tom Legend. But he may be like the father who should have told the kids he loved them more, or the man who really was happy but his face didn’t know it.