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JOHN JEANSONNE.john.jeansonne@newsday.com November 11, 2007
That "America's Team" brand may stick in the craw of plenty of NFL fans, but the tag is accurate and instructional. The Dallas Cowboys, today making their annual appearance in the nation's media capital, remain the de facto champs of U.S. sports familiarity and can-do symbolism.
An October Harris Poll reinforced what has been true most of the 28 years since NFL Films conferred the "America's Team" label: Among adults who follow professional football, the Cowboys are No. 1, ahead of the Indianapolis Colts, Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears, New England Patriots and Giants, in that order. (The Jets, if you must know, are No. 17.)
According to NFL Shop, the league's online merchandise outlet, the Cowboys are first in memorabilia sales. (The Bears are second, the Steelers third.) In three divisions - men's, women's and kids' jerseys - Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo's No. 9 replica shirt has outsold all others this year.
Plus, the so-called "Cowboys Factor" lives on in television programming: Until last weekend's New England-Indianapolis matchup went to the top of the list with 33.8 million viewers, the five most-watched Sunday regular-season NFL telecasts since 1995 featured the Cowboys. Of the five most-watched regular-season games (including Monday nights and Thanksgiving) in the past 20 years, four involved the Cowboys.
This, decades after veteran football historian and commentator Beano Cook sagely advised TV executives, "When in doubt, give them the Cowboys."
The Cowboys, after all, win most of the time, with more trips to the Super Bowl (eight) than any other team. They stand for an audacity of hope at overcoming odds (Las Vegas and otherwise); a no-holds-barred capitalism; a manly Wild West ruggedness - tough, gritty football guys juxtaposed to their pin-up cheerleaders (right out of a Gunsmoke saloon, the first of their kind in pro sports).
The Cowboys are America's Team because "America doesn't like losers," said Duke University cultural anthropology professor Orin Starn, a 49ers fan as a youth. "We never were going to root for, say, the Houston Oilers.
"The NFL is different from baseball in that way. It's about winning and smashing your opponent, so there's never been the equivalent of the Cubs or Boston Red Sox, beloved losers for so long."
Starn sees the Texas connection, too, in that "Americans always have wanted to be Texans. We have an idea that Texas is the purest form of being American, the myth of the tough cowboy and the possibility of getting rich quick. Money, big slabs of meat, sexy cheerleaders."
NFL publicity chief Greg Aiello, who previously worked in that capacity for the Cowboys, cited a 1978 Newsday Super Bowl advance as the first piece chronicling "Cowboys Have Become a National Team." It reported the team's massive out-of-town and out-of-state following, the league's first Spanish-language network, a pervasive TV presence that included former Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith's homey work on Monday Night Football, a decade of consistently leading the NFL in souvenir sales, a celebrity connection fostered by years of staging summer training camps just outside of Los Angeles. Not to mention the cheerleaders.
The actual phrase "America's Team" appeared a year later on the Cowboys' 1979 highlight reel after NFL Films executive Bob Ryan and Doug Todd, then the Cowboys' publicist, were casting around for a title and discarded "U.S. Cowboys" and "Champions Die Hard" and "Cowboys a National Team."
"It is interesting," Starn noted, "that the Cowboys grew into 'America's Team' at the time the soap opera was becoming a big national thing" - a reference to the hit TV series "Dallas," which debuted in 1978.
Predictably, there was a backlash (still out there) to the perceived arrogance of the "America's Team" claim. But a 1997 book, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys, And Who Elected Them America's Team, Anyway?" is an anthology of talk radio-like ranting that mostly hints at Cowboys envy, as is "The Dallas Cryboys" anti-fan Web site.
Football historian Jim Campbell compared such overheated blathering to that of Yankee- and Notre Dame-haters. In coming to know the Cowboys' front-office staff while he was working for the NFL Hall of Fame and the NFL Properties merchandising arm in the 1970s and '80s, Campbell found "those guys were just such classy people that you started rooting for them."
Besides, there never was any threat to the America's Team image by non-Cowboys fans. On the contrary, "a sports team benefits when it has greater visibility and can be hated as well as loved," Starn said. "As a 49ers fan, I saw the Cowboys as symbols of crassness and commercialism, but we're always interested in a team that polarizes and divides us."
And what is more American than the Cowboys' latest marketing strategy, announced last week, of an agreement with the Mattel toy company to produce Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader dolls, "just in time for the holiday season"?
That "America's Team" brand may stick in the craw of plenty of NFL fans, but the tag is accurate and instructional. The Dallas Cowboys, today making their annual appearance in the nation's media capital, remain the de facto champs of U.S. sports familiarity and can-do symbolism.
An October Harris Poll reinforced what has been true most of the 28 years since NFL Films conferred the "America's Team" label: Among adults who follow professional football, the Cowboys are No. 1, ahead of the Indianapolis Colts, Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears, New England Patriots and Giants, in that order. (The Jets, if you must know, are No. 17.)
According to NFL Shop, the league's online merchandise outlet, the Cowboys are first in memorabilia sales. (The Bears are second, the Steelers third.) In three divisions - men's, women's and kids' jerseys - Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo's No. 9 replica shirt has outsold all others this year.
Plus, the so-called "Cowboys Factor" lives on in television programming: Until last weekend's New England-Indianapolis matchup went to the top of the list with 33.8 million viewers, the five most-watched Sunday regular-season NFL telecasts since 1995 featured the Cowboys. Of the five most-watched regular-season games (including Monday nights and Thanksgiving) in the past 20 years, four involved the Cowboys.
This, decades after veteran football historian and commentator Beano Cook sagely advised TV executives, "When in doubt, give them the Cowboys."
The Cowboys, after all, win most of the time, with more trips to the Super Bowl (eight) than any other team. They stand for an audacity of hope at overcoming odds (Las Vegas and otherwise); a no-holds-barred capitalism; a manly Wild West ruggedness - tough, gritty football guys juxtaposed to their pin-up cheerleaders (right out of a Gunsmoke saloon, the first of their kind in pro sports).
The Cowboys are America's Team because "America doesn't like losers," said Duke University cultural anthropology professor Orin Starn, a 49ers fan as a youth. "We never were going to root for, say, the Houston Oilers.
"The NFL is different from baseball in that way. It's about winning and smashing your opponent, so there's never been the equivalent of the Cubs or Boston Red Sox, beloved losers for so long."
Starn sees the Texas connection, too, in that "Americans always have wanted to be Texans. We have an idea that Texas is the purest form of being American, the myth of the tough cowboy and the possibility of getting rich quick. Money, big slabs of meat, sexy cheerleaders."
NFL publicity chief Greg Aiello, who previously worked in that capacity for the Cowboys, cited a 1978 Newsday Super Bowl advance as the first piece chronicling "Cowboys Have Become a National Team." It reported the team's massive out-of-town and out-of-state following, the league's first Spanish-language network, a pervasive TV presence that included former Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith's homey work on Monday Night Football, a decade of consistently leading the NFL in souvenir sales, a celebrity connection fostered by years of staging summer training camps just outside of Los Angeles. Not to mention the cheerleaders.
The actual phrase "America's Team" appeared a year later on the Cowboys' 1979 highlight reel after NFL Films executive Bob Ryan and Doug Todd, then the Cowboys' publicist, were casting around for a title and discarded "U.S. Cowboys" and "Champions Die Hard" and "Cowboys a National Team."
"It is interesting," Starn noted, "that the Cowboys grew into 'America's Team' at the time the soap opera was becoming a big national thing" - a reference to the hit TV series "Dallas," which debuted in 1978.
Predictably, there was a backlash (still out there) to the perceived arrogance of the "America's Team" claim. But a 1997 book, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys, And Who Elected Them America's Team, Anyway?" is an anthology of talk radio-like ranting that mostly hints at Cowboys envy, as is "The Dallas Cryboys" anti-fan Web site.
Football historian Jim Campbell compared such overheated blathering to that of Yankee- and Notre Dame-haters. In coming to know the Cowboys' front-office staff while he was working for the NFL Hall of Fame and the NFL Properties merchandising arm in the 1970s and '80s, Campbell found "those guys were just such classy people that you started rooting for them."
Besides, there never was any threat to the America's Team image by non-Cowboys fans. On the contrary, "a sports team benefits when it has greater visibility and can be hated as well as loved," Starn said. "As a 49ers fan, I saw the Cowboys as symbols of crassness and commercialism, but we're always interested in a team that polarizes and divides us."
And what is more American than the Cowboys' latest marketing strategy, announced last week, of an agreement with the Mattel toy company to produce Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader dolls, "just in time for the holiday season"?
