OH, DANNY BOY : The Dallas Cowboys’ Great Collapse of ’86 Came as a Direct Result of the Loss of Their Quarterback; He’s Back, Mended, to Make Amends

Hard times for oil barons and pro football teams are rare in Dallas, where cliches about winning are carved in stone and the only thing that’s more important than hitting a gusher is how many Cowboy season tickets you have.

But about the only good thing that happened in that booming, sprawling Texas city last year was Bobby Ewing’s return from the dead.

In 1986, the citizens of Dallas finally had to learn two things the hard way: He who booms with the oil industry sometimes busts, and it’s not all Danny White’s fault that in his eight up-and-down years in the saddle the Cowboys haven’t been to a Super Bowl.

Since succeeding Roger Staubach, the man who led Dallas to five Super Bowls and may be behind only Coach Tom Landry in the Cowboys’ pantheon, White has served as the whipping boy for media and fan critics who blame him for Dallas’ absence from the big game.

In 1984, after the Cowboys had lost three straight National Conference championship games and endured a first-round playoff loss to the Rams, even many of his teammates called for White to be replaced by Gary Hogeboom, a man whose name Landry could neither remember nor pronounce when he announced the change before the Cowboys’ 1984 opener against the Rams.

Well, the Cowboys didn’t even make the playoffs that year, and White was back as the starter midway through the season. In 1986, Hogeboom was traded to the Indianapolis Colts.

White was alone in the saddle again, and he had a fine new rider alongside him in Herschel Walker. The Cowboys had just installed a new pass-oriented offense that both Landry and quarterback coach Paul Hackett said was perfect for White. In the first half of the season, the Cowboys went 6-2 and scored more than 30 points in each of their first four games. White was having the best season of his 11-year career.

Then, all at once, Dallas--the city and its team--went bust.

Too much oil and poor bank investments are largely to blame for Dallas’ economic hard times, but the Cowboys went down on Nov. 2 when New York Giant linebacker Carl Banks tackled White, who suffered a broken wrist and missed the rest of the season.

With a 1-7 second-half record and a 7-9 finish, the Cowboys had a lot of room to be whipped. The injured White, for once, had to be spared. He, like the rest of the Cowboy offense, was having his best season before the injury.

In his last 11 games as the Cowboy starter, dating back to 1985 when the Cowboys upset both the Giants and the Washington Redskins to win the NFC East title, White has thrown for 22 touchdowns, completed 62.3% of his passes and thrown only 8 interceptions.

The reasons for Cowboys’ demise went well beyond White and his backup, second-year man Steve Pelluer. In 1986, the Cowboys had a number of holes that led to only the second season since 1966 that they failed to make the playoffs. The offensive line was porous, the defensive line was aging, and nagging injuries bothered other veteran superstars such as running back Tony Dorsett and wide receiver Tony Hill.

But White’s absence was clearly a key to the Cowboys’ bleak autumn. In the 1987 Cowboy press guide, the first line in the entry about White reads: “Danny White’s value to the Dallas Cowboys was never more evident than the second half of the 1986 season.”

Said Landry before the Cowboys’ opening training camp practice last week: “(This offense) is ideal for Danny. . . . The system we put in last year was just too difficult for a young player (such as Pelluer) to handle.”

Appropriately, then, the condition of White’s wrist ranks only behind AIDS testing as the hot topic at Cowboy training camp here on the Cal Lutheran campus.

First, the medical report. In addition to the break, White’s wrist suffered ligament damage, which wasn’t discovered until his cast came off--and the ligaments had withered away. Ligament transplant surgery was rejected. White is in constant pain, and doctors have told him that the wrist could become worse with continuous play.

Second, the functional report. The problems in his wrist have forced White to alter his throwing motion to a stiff-armed approach, something more natural for volleying on the tennis court than passing on a football field. White has to treat the wrist much as a pitcher treats his arm--plenty of ice after the game.

Finally, the personnel report. The current condition of White’s wrist doesn’t seem to bother Landry.

“He’s throwing well now,” Landry said. “He is (the leader of the team) if he’s healthy and ready to go. Obviously, it’s something different whether you can count on him all year. There’s always the question of whether he’ll take another hit.”

With White himself, optimism springs eternal. The wrist hurts and he spends most waking moments thinking about it, but he is confident that the injury will not prematurely end his career.

“I’m just watching it every day,” White said. “But if the season started today, and I had to play, I could do it.”

In other words, the summer of the Cowboys’ discontent is not wholly that for White. For once, the training camp challenge that faces the beleaguered quarterback is not some kind of personnel controversy. He doesn’t have Hogeboom looking over his shoulder, and he doesn’t have reporters asking questions about to whom he will hand the ball--Walker or Dorsett. With soap operas sitting this training camp out, White doesn’t really mind having to overcome the wrist injury.

“This is the first time I’ve come to training camp with something to prove physically,” White said. “In a way, that makes it challenging. I think it’s the kind of challenge a guy who’s been in the league 12 years needs.”

To say that White is eager to take on the St. Louis Cardinals in the Cowboys’ season opener Sept. 13 is an understatement. He hasn’t competed on the field since last Nov. 2.

“This is different from what I had to prove in ’84 (when he replaced Hogeboom as starter midway through the season),” White said. “I’m dying to get back in a game. I know we have a lot of work to do before the season starts, but this is the longest I’ve ever gone without playing.”

Barring further injury, White won’t have to go much longer. With Hogeboom a year removed to Indiana, the season is White’s to start. The quarterbacks who now share the roster are clearly relegated to support roles.

Pelluer is the man Landry is counting upon to be his top backup. Veteran journeyman Paul McDonald and rookie Kevin Sweeney are battling for the third quarterback spot.

White said that competition among the four exists, but it is a healthy rather than a destructive competition. In other words, quarterback controversies are better left to the overstocked Chicago Bears.

“I feel like this is an ideal situation for a quarterback,” White said. “I know the team is depending on me to be the leader I can be and have been in the past. With Steve and Paul, it reminds me of when Roger was playing, and I couldn’t wait to get on the field and beat him.

“He was such an example, everything I thought a quarterback should be. I wanted to be on the same level and compete with him, yet I had the greatest respect for him. It was a good competitive situation for him, but he didn’t feel the pressure because we knew who the starter was. I think this season we have that kind of a deal. A lot is expected of me, but there’s not a lot of pressure.”

The pressure is on the Cowboy mystique and tradition that gave the team enough of an ego to dub itself America’s Team. Last season they were not only a disappointment, they were not the Cowboys, who have been in 60% of the NFC championship games since 1970.

“It’s tough on the Cowboy pride, having the kind of season we had last year,” White said. “Especially for those of us who were on the Super Bowl teams and even on the teams that made it to the championship game in the early ‘80s.”

So the Cowboys’ off-season, which is usually a time of celebration, became a period of rededication. Landry, who is also known as the only coach the Dallas Cowboys have ever had, signed a new three-year contract with the team. So did White. To almost a man, they decided that 1987 would not be 1986.

“We’ve got a real challenge ahead of us as a team,” Landry said. “Our young players are going to have to start making an impact. But the response of our team has been very good. We’ve worked a lot harder than we ever have in the off-season.”

Said White: “The off-season program has never, ever had participation from the veterans that we had this year. That indicates to me we’ve got the desire to go out and have a championship season. We’re probably a little hungrier than we have been.”

Landry has seen to that. He’s already begun to trim the fat--an overweight Tony Hill was dismissed in July--from the aging veteran roster. Defensive linemen Ed Jones and John Dutton, both 36, are also among veterans whose jobs may be in jeopardy, and last weekend defensive back Ron Fellows was traded to the Raiders for wide receiver Rod Barksdale.

White is disappointed about Hill’s departure. “I feel like I lost my left arm,” he said, but he is excited about the offensive prospects that lie ahead of the Cowboys. Along with Dorsett and Walker in the backfield, the Cowboys have speedy second-year man Mike Sherrard and crafty veteran Mike Renfro to join Barksdale at the wide receiver spot and proven veteran Doug Cosbie is the Cowboy tight end. White said he only hopes that he’s still around when the players mature into Hackett’s wide-open, pass-oriented system.

“I feel like we’re back on the leading edge of offensive football,” White said. “I look at these guys we’ve got, and if we continue to work with Mike Sherrard and Herschel Walker, I just hope I’m around when this offense really matures.”

At 35, it’s not too early for White to talk about retirement, but that’s not a question of his wrist or anything else physical. He’s been hurt and come back so often he ticks better than a Timex.

For White, then, retirement is more a question of living in the fishbowl that is Dallas Cowboy football. It is a question of how much longer he can take the emotional beating.

“It’s definitely been a roller coaster,” White said. “It’s been a real learning experience for me. You see people react to what they hear and what they see. You have these fans who accept nothing less than a Super Bowl.”

In his first four years with the Cowboys, when he was punter-quarterback in the Staubach era, the only pressure White felt was that which he put on himself to take over Staubach’s job. The two maintain a competitive, friendly relationship, but back in the late 1970s, White wanted to step into Staubach’s shoes so badly that he almost didn’t wait for Roger to step out of them.

Then came the three consecutive championship game losses--to Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington--charges from Dallas fans and media that Roger’s shoes were too big for White, and the Hogeboom episode.

“Physically, I feel like I could play this game until I’m 50,” White said. “I’ve never had any trouble coming back from injuries or getting in shape for the season, but I feel like I’m getting a bit frazzled, a bit frayed on the ends. If it were not for the fast-paced life, I could do this forever. But I don’t like the fact that some lady in Northern Idaho is going to base her opinions of me on what she’s read and what she’s heard.

“I’m less patient with it than I used to be. One of these days I’m just going to say to hell with it.”

The latest bit of scrutiny in White’s life has been speculation that his Dallas business ventures, like other Dallas business ventures, are going belly up. The Dallas Morning News reported in May that three companies in which White has an interest have accumulated debts of at least $230,000. White dismisses speculation that he is having serious off-field business problems, and team spokesman Doug Todd said the Morning News has been alone among the Dallas papers in pursuing the topic.

Yet Landry says White is a survivor, and that few quarterbacks know better the old cliche that a quarterback gets too much credit when his team wins and too much blame when his team loses.

“He’s learned, he’s pretty tough mentally,” Landry said, “and we’ve learned that about him, too. The loss to San Francisco was probably the toughest. If we’d won that one, then there would be no criticism of Danny.”

White, who doesn’t worry about being misquoted because he doesn’t read what is written about him, is more concerned, however, about the toll the public scrutiny is having on his wife, Jo Lynn, and their four children.

“I think my wife probably has struggled with it a bit,” White said. “We’d like our kids to lead normal lives. We’d like them not to go to school and be treated in a certain way depending on how well I’ve played the day before.”

Not that Danny White is bitter about being a Cowboy. Although he grew up a Ram fan, he said he doesn’t regret the many ups and downs of being a Cowboy, and he doesn’t wish his career could have been with another team. He has learned that there are benefits and hazards to following Roger Staubach in a city where football is as much religion as sport. White has just learned to plow a middle course in a sea of many tides.

“You have to learn to stay on an even keel, that’s a real key to survival in this league,” White said.

Not a bad lesson for a city and a team that in one short year have plunged from boom to bust.