Commentary : Schramm Sold the Sizzle, Not the Steak

A fundamental principle of putting fannies in the seats or keeping eyeballs glued to the screen is “sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

Tex Schramm sold the sizzle, and he put out a good steak, which is a terrific combination.

Actually, he sold the jiggle as well as the football. He gave us the cheerleader.

He also introduced the computer to professional football. “Opposite poles, aren’t they?” he said Thursday. He put the warm flesh of the Cowboys’ cheerleaders next to the chill of the calculators, but he made it work.

He was so good at being a Texan that he could push his innovations through the opposition the way Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson did in Congress. “Branch Rickey is a comparison I’d feel good about,” Schramm said.

Like Rickey, Rayburn or LBJ, Schramm could bully people into admiring him for the ideas they opposed.

He made the Cowboys America’s Team and made everybody else grit their teeth. Until Tuesday, he was the best president they ever had.

“With Tex, sometimes your view as a dissenter was seen as anti-patriotic,” said George Young, general manager of the New York Giants and a frequent adversary. “Doers tend to step on toes; non-doers tend to make people fall asleep.”

Schramm brought the 30-second clock to the scoreboard; he put the white border around the field, and he put the field mike on the referee so the fans wouldn’t have to read sign language to know what the penalty was. He made it easier to follow in the stadium and on TV.

He thought four four-team divisions would sustain fan interest better than two eight-team divisions and pushed that idea through in 1967.

And he gave us the cheerleader. Of course, he didn’t invent the art. The Giants had cheerleaders back in the 1950s, but they dressed as if it were cold outside. Schramm sold sizzle, remember.

His cheerleaders dressed for warm response. Even in the Bible Belt, the appeal was greater than the opposition. And the television cameras were magnetized.

College football had always been big in Texas, and college football had its good ol’ boys and it’s cheerleaders in short skirts to tell the good ol’ boys they were still young. People who didn’t recognize the link between a pretty girl and football missed the point.

“Fans didn’t respond to cheers the way they did at college or high school,” Schramm said. “So we said the heck with that. Let’s just make it fun, make it entertainment.

“And there’s nothing wrong with being sexy if you’re not cheap and smutty. So we brought sex into the clean sports environment, and it was a different thing.”

It’s not reaching to note that the popularity chart of the National Football League is virtually parallel with the birth and growth of the Dallas Cowboys. Schramm capitalized on America’s favorite pastime and made his team into America’s Team.

The Cowboys have thoroughly whipped the rest of the league in souvenir sales around the country.

In 1957, Schramm resigned as general manager of the Rams to become assistant director of sports at CBS-TV. In 1960, he put together the first telecast of the Winter Olympics, an event marked by the first Miracle on Ice as the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets for the gold medal.

Schramm’s headquarters in Squaw Valley was in the same building as the IBM computer station. Schramm wandered in and investigated how to make the new wonder work for football. “A man from India at San Jose State -- never heard of football -- said he could do it,” Schramm said.

So for years, the Cowboys drafted better than anybody. The system identified football talent in Cornell Green, a college basketball player, and Bob Hayes, who was the world’s fastest human at the time but hadn’t played football since high school.

Schramm also pointed his scouts to little schools nobody else noticed. So the Cowboys got Rayfield Wright from Fort Valley State and Jethro Pugh from Elizabeth City State.

He took an expansion franchise and made it dominant. The Cowboys finished first or second 20 times in 29 seasons; over one stretch it was 20 times in 21 seasons. “You can’t market a bad product,” he said. “Once we won, we could do a lot more with it than others did.”

Schramm helped create the concept adopted by “Wide World of Sports” and evolved that into a weekly 30-minute Dallas Cowboys TV magazine show. He developed the Cowboys Weekly newspaper with 45,000 national circulation. He sold radio and television rights to Mexico, for goodness sake.

The lure of the Cowboys didn’t stop at the state line. The Cheerleaders -- they’re entitled to capital letters -- have been unfurled on calendars all across this land and in footlockers of servicemen continents apart. The Cheerleaders currently are on their 19th world tour for the USO.

The movies burlesqued them in “Debbie Does Dallas.” Playboy did its parody. Other teams copied them, but not nearly as well. At one point they became such an issue that the league considered formal guidelines. That was at the meeting in 1978, when the Rams interrupted by announcing they were moving from Los Angeles to Anaheim.

And Pete Rozelle, the commissioner who got his first football job working for Schramm with the Rams, told the group it had more important work to do. “My wife,” he announced, “will be glad to hear that I have decided to keep hands off the cheerleaders.”

Schramm, at 68, is now in charge of developing the International Football League, with half its dozen teams to play in Europe. “It will happen,” Schramm said.

What he said he’d like to be remembered for is “that I had a role in making history.”

What I’d like to do is volunteer for the first road trip to the South of France.