America’s Gleam : Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em, Cowboys Are Most Popular Team

While searching for “America’s team” along the open roads of northwest Dallas, we encounter an icon that resonates Americana:

The national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America.

It might seem just another clever marketing ploy by those adroit hucksters of the Dallas Cowboys, but Sun Belt suburbia really is big enough for two altogether different slices of American life.

Although the Cowboys no longer represent the old-fashioned, clean-cut Boy Scout image of the Tom Landry years, they may more closely reflect today’s spirit.

This is a hip professional sports franchise that has transcended traditional regional loyalties by saturating a fascinated public with colorful characters, eye-catching uniforms, showgirl cheerleaders, innovative game plans and, ultimately, one of the NFL’s most successful teams.

Almost two decades after it was invented, the sobriquet sticks. If the Cowboys are not “America’s Team,” then who dares make the claim?

Well, the World Series champion Atlanta Braves do in their TV advertising but they actually run fourth in popularity, behind the Cowboys, the Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers and the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls, according to the ESPN/Chilton Sports poll, a year-round telephone polling service started in 1994.

So, this made-for-TV moniker belongs to the Cowboys, who will play host to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday in an NFC playoff semifinal at Texas Stadium. In a nation where substance has often been overwhelmed by style, these modern-day Cowboys have invented a Texas-sized persona.

“Most teams are very gray,” said Skip Bayless, a Dallas journalist who has written two books about the Cowboys. “Dallas was never gray. Something is always happening. Either something is very wrong or something is very right.”

Either way, it does not matter to Jerry Jones, owner and promoter of the latest edition of “America’s Team.” The son of an Arkansas entrepreneur, Jones has perpetuated the Cowboy myth beyond the prairie.

He revels in national attention even if many snicker at his feud with former coach Jimmy Johnson, his hiring of the bumbling Barry Switzer or the recent rift between Switzer and star quarterback Troy Aikman.

All of it makes for good theater, and the Cowboys are sports’ longest-running soap opera.

“These guys embody these metaphors and similes of American life,” said Brian Murphy, editor of the Connecticut-based Sports Marketing Newsletter.

Although Richard Luker, executive director of the ESPN poll, said the Cowboys’ percentage of popularity--10%--is not enough to suggest that they truly are America’s team, other indicators prop up the image.

Fox television’s three highest-rated programs are Cowboy games--two against the 49ers and the other against the Green Bay Packers. In all 10 instances that Fox offered regional coverage this season, the Cowboys went to the largest percentage of the country.

During the last four seasons, the Cowboys have been the highest rated team on “Monday Night Football,” slightly edging the 49ers. And in the last three years, they have been the NFL’s top-selling team for licensed products such as caps, sweat shirts, T-shirts, pennants, parkas, posters, bumper stickers and mugs emblazoned with team emblems.

A recent Phoenix Gazette survey of local football fans found that the home-town Cardinals edged the Cowboys by 1% in popularity.

“The Cowboys have avid fans,” Luker said. “They are much more vocal and visible. But it’s artificial. They don’t have a dead lock on [being] America’s team.”

Luker said that Texas’ being the country’s most athletic state fuels the Cowboys’ larger-than-life image. Indeed, being located in a land of American mystique has added to the cachet. From servings at restaurants to big, bold buildings downtown, Dallas does everything on a grand scale.

Margie Reese, director of the Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, said the Cowboys personify the city’s extra effort to amount to something.

“We don’t have oceans or mountains or ski resorts,” Reese said. “So we have to will ourselves into being a great city. We continually redefine ourselves.”

Isn’t that what Jones did when he paid $135 million for the team and $60 million for the lease at Texas Stadium in 1989?

“It’s the fundamental way in this country,” Jones said. “You roll up your sleeves and get after it.”

The team has been an antidote for a city so often remembered for the tragic shooting of John F. Kennedy and the fictional shooting of J.R. Ewing. Perhaps that is why the 1995 Cowboys have 37 radio and TV gigs and strength coach Mike Woicik does commercials.

Even Bayless, a former daily sports columnist who now publishes the “Insider” fax newsletter emphasizing Cowboy tidbits, cannot escape. As an ESPN commentator, Bayless’ face is known by star-struck Dallas fans across the country. When he travels to cover the team, Bayless has been mobbed like a rock star.

“A whole lot of people have my autograph, and it is worth about nothing,” he said.

All of this makes Jones smile as he fidgets with his diamond-studded Super Bowl ring while talking to reporters.

For Texans, it was difficult to accept this Arkansas outsider and his millions from gas, oil, insurance and poultry ventures. But after some woeful seasons, the Cowboys once again attained Super Bowl success in 1993. Jones, 53, has earned begrudging respect around cow town.

And like the Cowboys of old, Jones’ teams are a cult of personalities.

“But instead of Roy Rogers, it’s a little like Jessie James,” lamented Blackie Sherrod of the Dallas Morning News. “Instead of flying the old Stars and Stripes, they might be flying a skull and crossbones. I don’t think they fill the bill like they used to be thought of.”

Team surveys show that if Dallas is not the most popular team, it is the most hated, Jones said proudly.

“We take very seriously that this is a business, but it is not a business,” he said.

Jones understands the importance of winning--he played football at Arkansas, after all--but he said the national distinction might just be his most important commodity.

Financial World magazine listed the Cowboys as professional sports’ most valuable franchise since 1993 with an estimated worth of $238 million, and that says something.

“We can’t run this like General Motors,” Jones said. “The sizzle and issues on and off the field . . . affect my [business] decisions.”

They prompted Jones to spend $25 million over seven years, including a $13-million signing bonus on Deion Sanders, a defensive back whose personality is the mother of invention.

“That’s what the Dallas Cowboys would do,” Jones boasts.

That’s the way Tex Schramm did it for almost three decades. As general manager of the Cowboys, he assembled a cast of characters who inspired fiction writers to help embellish the image in such novels as “Semi-Tough,” and “North Dallas Forty.” There were Don Meredith, Bob Hayes, Lance Rentzel, Ed “Too Tall” Jones, Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, Bob Lilly, Drew Pearson, Tony Dorsett and Roger Staubach.

When NFL Films made a highlight of the Cowboys’ 1978 season, it wanted to title it “America’s Team.” Schramm agreed, then stamped the name on 100,000 posters advertised in the Dallas Cowboys Weekly, the first of its kind of team publication that today has a circulation of 50,000.

The old Cowboys introduced the flex and doomsday defenses, revived the shotgun offense and brought out cheerleaders wearing hotpants and white boots. The team developed an extensive radio network that reaches much of Mexico and metallic blue-and-white uniforms with a simple blue star on the helmet designating the Lone Star state.

In Bosnia last weekend, a team of U.S. and British officers played against NATO soldiers for a GI’s helmet painted with that blue star.

Only a piece of “America’s Team” would be worth the trouble.

Scout’s honor.

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Cowbow Mania

Who is “America’s Team” and what makes it so? The ESPN / Chilton Sprots telephone poll seems to indicate that fans are still captivated by the Dallas Cowboys.

Favorite NFL teams (percent picking)

Dallas Cowboys: 14.5%

San Francisco 49ers: 8%

Pittsburgh Steelers: 3.8%

Miami Dolphins: 3.5%

Chicago Bears: 3.5%

Fan interest by age group (percent picking)

Cowboys; U.S. pop. * Source: ESPN Chilton Sports Poll of 28.434 people nationwide, taken January 1994 to August 1995. Random sampling used, for respondents age 12 and over. Margin of error less than 1%.