Memories of the Way They Were

Working with the Dallas Cowboys almost from their inception 29 years ago, Joe Bailey has seen them come and seen them go at the club’s training camp at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

For some, it’s the coming that is memorable--the arrival of a superstar like a Tony Dorsett or a Herschel Walker.

But as a longtime administrator with the Cowboys, Bailey has seen far more draft choices go than stay, and that, too, can be memorable.

The routine is usually pretty standard. A rookie will receive a message to stop by and see Coach Tom Landry.

“And oh, by the way,” the rookie is told, “be sure to bring your playbook.”

It isn’t long before the rookie can be spotted entering a Cowboy van, headed on a long ride to the airport and, probably, football oblivion.

But some rookies, while unable to alter the final result, insist on choosing the circumstances of their professional demise.

“A couple of years ago,” Bailey recalls, “we had an exercise known as the Landry Mile where players were timed based on their position. We had this one guy, I can’t even remember his name, who was having a rough time. He came to this turn on the run and just kept going, ran a straight line right back to the locker room here at Cal Lutheran, changed his clothes and was gone. We never saw him again.”

An even more unorthodox exit was made by a low-round pick who reported to camp, took his physical and then headed into the locker room to put on a Cowboy uniform for the first time.

A minute later, however, he came back out, still in his street clothes, and approached Bailey.

“I want to go home,” declared the rookie, whose name also escapes Bailey.

“Home? Why?” Bailey asked.

“Because the lockers are too close together.”

Bailey wasn’t sure what was coming next, but he was certainly anxious to hear it.

“You see, I played some basketball in college,” the rookie went on, “and the lockers were farther apart. Here, getting undressed is so uncomfortable, I don’t even want to try.”

And nobody forced him to.

Then there was the rookie who went out in style. After the ax fell, he marched proudly to the edge of the Cal Lutheran campus where his girlfriend was waiting for him in a limo, complete with champagne.

Now, none of the above should be construed to mean that rookies have a market on eccentricity in Cowboy lore around the CLU campus. Not when such characters as Don Meredith, Duane Thomas, Mike Ditka and Bob Lilly have put on the helmets with the stars on the side.

Thomas, a talented running back who starred in the early 1970s, didn’t save all his unusual moves for the playing field. Remember when he wouldn’t talk to the media? Well, it turns out, he wasn’t talking to his teammates either.

“He didn’t even want to eat with them,” Bailey remembers. “Nor run into them in the halls of the dorms here at Cal Lutheran where the players stay. So when it came meal time, Thomas would go out the window of his room, make his way over to the cafeteria, grab a plate of fruit--he was a vegetarian--and then make his way outdoors back to his room where he would again go through the window so as not to run into anybody.”

The antithesis of Thomas was Meredith, the gregarious, fun-loving but hard-playing quarterback of the ‘60s.

“I remember the day the veterans would arrive here at Cal Lutheran every year,” says Don Cochren, a Cowboy trainer for 23 years. “The rookies had already been here a week and Meredith would walk in, wearing a brightly colored sports coat, looking great, and announce, ‘OK gang, Dandy Don’s here. It’s showtime!’ ”

For Ditka, the great Dallas tight end (1969-72) and assistant coach, who is soon to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, the only thing that mattered was winning. Regardless of what he was doing.

Bailey remembers playing tennis at Cal Lutheran with Ditka, Landry and former player and assistant coach Dan Reeves, now the head coach at Denver. On one missed point, Ditka became so angry that he flung his racket over a nearby three-story building.

One year, the Cowboys left Thousand Oaks to fly home for an exhibition game against Green Bay. Before he got that far, however, Ditka got into a traffic accident, his head smashing into the steering wheel.

Cochren was called in and he and Ditka, blood still caked on the player’s face, went to a dentist.

“The dentist told me,” Cochren says, “that quite a few of Ditka’s teeth had been pushed back and that some roots may have been exposed. He fitted Ditka with a brace.”

And then gave him the bad news.

“You’re, of course, not going to play,” the dentist told Ditka.

“Why do you mean?” asked an outraged Ditka.

Remember, this was an exhibition game they were talking about.

“If you get hit in the mouth,” the dentist said, “you could lose some teeth.”

Ditka was adamant.

“They’re not going to keep me from playing,” Ditka said. “Pull the damn things.”