Landry Practices What He Preaches

Put a tape measure on Tom Landry and, from every angle of approach, he’s an authentic, bona fide, genuine thoroughbred. The Dallas Cowboys rode him and his distinctive coaching skills to 270 victories, 18 playoff appearances and five Super Bowl visitations in the 29 years he gave so much to the sport, the team and the city he represented.

Never one to court favor or take a cheap shot, Landry didn’t know how to be artificial or deal in the con. When he smiled, you knew he meant it. Trying to gain a psychological edge by some ploy or contrived manipulation never occurred to him.

“I was too busy getting a team prepared to play a game than to bother with anything like that,” he said Wednesday while on a speaking engagement in Baltimore, where an appreciative crowd at a Maryland Chamber of Commerce gathering in the Hyatt Regency Hotel all but lifted the roof off the building with stand-up applause.

The manner in which the Cowboys’ new ownership terminated his services didn’t please him but there’s absolutely no bitterness. That’s not the Landry style. Vindictiveness, to him, is a waste of time. Besides, a rock-hard belief in God and a strong spiritual awareness elevates him above all that. So he goes his way, witnessing to the goodness of The Mighty Power and fulfilling the coveted goals he deems important, which, to him, are not of this world.

Landry, coming as the natural reaction of a man who put in almost three decades with one organization, still refers to the Cowboys as “our team,” “our players” and in “our locker room.” So it is difficult to mentally detach himself--not that he should.

The stoic countenance and the formal persona always mystified those wondering what made Tom Landry such a statue-like sideline figure, as if he had been carved out of marble, lacking emotion and expression. Now the explanation is available from the source himself.

“I tried to pattern myself after Ben Hogan,” he said. “Hogan was a perfectionist and blocked everything out of his mind. I worked to do the same thing. I believe you have to train yourself to concentrate and isolate on what’s important.”

Landry has been a success in all ways known on planet earth. A member of the National Honor Society in high school, co-captain at the University of Texas, decorated for 30 missions as a co-pilot over Germany in World War II (he volunteered for five more after reaching the maximum of 25 as his own personal memorial to a brother who had been killed when an Air Force plane exploded) and subsequently as a player and coach in the National Football League.

In his remarks to the Baltimore audience, Landry insisted sports are essential to a city economically and socially, plus making it feel good about itself. He pointed out how Dallas was condemned after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. It was almost as if Dallas had been responsible for the loss. Some fans, according to Landry, booed the Cowboys because Dallas represented the place where the young, vibrant leader was killed.

“National surveys showed the public associated Dallas with the murder of our president, but in a couple of years, similar poll-taking demonstrated the Cowboy team was the first thing people thought of when Dallas was mentioned and the Kennedy tragedy became a distant second.”

It was a way to illustrate how sports have become ingrained in our society. On other subjects, Landry covered the full field, praising Roger Staubach and how he brought the Cowboys from behind in 24 games during his career--14 in the last two minutes--and heaped commendations on Walt Garrison, Ed “Too Tall” Jones and the Baltimore Colts’ championship teams of 1958 and 1959 when he was an assistant coach of the New York Giants.

Then he recalled how difficult it was to coach the expansion Dallas team in 1960. He joked that opposing defensive linemen were already waiting in the backfield for quarterback Eddie LeBaron when he set up to pass. “Why it got so that Eddie, the great fellow he is, claimed he was going to signal for a fair catch as he took the snap from center.”

Landry smiled in relating how Deacon Dan Towler of the Los Angeles Rams hit the goal post head-on playing against the Giants, lost the ball and, temporarily, his senses. “Regaining consciousness, he gazed up at Dick Nolan, my good friend from Maryland, who was playing on the other side in our secondary. Towler wanted to know what happened. Dick looked at him and said, ‘Deacon, if you come my way again, I really am going to hit you. That was just a sample.’ ”

In a serious tone, he brought up Winston Churchill talking to the House of Commons and the courage and intensity he displayed when England was on the ropes in World War II. “You have to remember a crisis doesn’t last for always. But I also believe if you have integrity you can handle adversity.”

Where the Cowboys fit in football history and any assessment of his coaching worth are the furthest things from Landry’s mind. There’s no hypocrisy to be found in this man who literally practices what he preaches.