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I usually like to check out ProQuest for articles, and I found some article that intrigued me.
They were from the mid-80s, when the Cowboys slowly declined in Landry's later years and the Mavericks rose up in their only era of greatness before Cuban came along.
Cowboys are watching over a restless herd in Dallas (November 4, 1984)
Bag it. That stuff about America's Team simply doesn't fly anymore. Lately, it seems, the Cowboys aren't even Dallas' favorite team.
Last Sunday afternoon in suburban Irving, the Cowboys played the Indianapolis Colts at Texas Stadium before a crowd that was more than 7,000 short of a sellout. A few hours later, downtown at Reunion Arena, the NBA's Dallas Mavericks tipped off against the Los Angeles Lakers to a raucous sellout crowd.
Granted, as visiting attractions, the Lakers are a much easier sell than the Colts. Obviously, 17,000 tickets should go faster than 65,000. But this is Texas, podnah, and they like their ball with pointy ends. Football is king, queen, jacks and aces. Football puts 15,000 fans in the bleachers at Plano High on a Friday night, jillions more in college stadia from Austin to College Station to Waco. The Cowboys, of course, are the epitome of Texas football.
According to Texans, basketball was always something best left to foreign countries, like New York. Hoops? They were for circus performers. The NBA? An acronym for Nobody Blitzes Anybody.
But look here. The Cowboys, the model franchise of professional football, are being upstaged in their own town. The Mavs are young, fresh, dynamic, exciting, harmonious -- everything the Cowboys are not. They're like new money in the bank, the Metroplex's new gusher. They've become the event in Dallas, a town that thrives on events. People in Reunion Arena do un-Dallas-like things -- like paint their faces half-green, half-blue. They get ugly and curse and cheer and just generally make spectacles of themselves.
That sort of thing never would go in Texas Stadium.
"I love going to Mavs games," says basketball junkie Doug Donley. "Their crowds are different from the crowds that go to Cowboy games. Mavs fans get loose. They're crazy."
Donley, it should be noted, plays wide receiver for the Cowboys.
So it has come to this. Sure, the shifting focus in Dallas is tribute to the lovability of the Mavs, but it also provides further testimony that something's slightly amiss at 6116 North Central Expressway. That "something" starts on the ground floor at the ticket office and climbs to the Cowboys' 11th-floor office.
The Cowboys' record is OK -- probably better than could be expected. Six and three is still good enough for a share of first place in the NFC East, the conference's toughest division. This the Cowboys have accomplished while undergoing what for any other team would be considered a rebuilding season.
But there are other hints of trouble in paradise.
The team was sold by founder Clint Murchison to an 11-member group headed by Dallas businessman H.R. "Bum" Bright, which was a bit of a disruption, a major break in Cowboys tradition.
Team president and general manager Tex Schramm suggests the Cowboys have been victimized more by their own complacency than anything else. Now the squad is torn, like Democrats and Republicans, into Danny White and Gary Hogeboom camps.
Coach Tom Landry, canonized and capitalized in the Dallas media guide as "The Only Coach the Cowboys Have Ever Had," is being second- guessed from within his own ranks. At a team meeting early last week, Landry threatened his players with $1,000 fines and suspensions for any statements critical of each other or the Dallas coaching staff. All that did was leave the players with another gripe ... something about freedom of speech.
Dallas hasn't been to the Super Bowl since the 1978 season, its fifth visit to the National Football League championship game. In Dallas, six years without a Super Bowl is akin to six days without three-alarm chili: unthinkable. People are losing interest.
The Cowboys sold out 44 consecutive home dates before the players strike of 1982, and 13 straight afterward. Their policy is to cut off season-ticket sales at 50,000, saving 15,101 seats for walk-up and mail-order sales. This year, for the first time since 1977, the Cowboys have failed to sell out the stadium 72 hours before a game - - a situation that allows a local television blackout.
They sold out the home opener against the Philadelphia Eagles after the deadline, but not the next game against Green Bay, nor last week's Colts game. Two weeks ago, there were 14,135 no-shows for the Cowboys-Saints game, televised nationally as a Sunday night special.
That, as it turned out, was the only Dallas game this season with any serious drama. It also may have been the pivotal point of the Cowboys' season. All anybody knew while tickets were on sale for that game, though, was that Dallas was 4-3 and looking worse every week.
"You have to keep the attendance in perspective," Schramm said. "The barometer of a sellout is not whether you sold out, but whether you sold out by Thursday -- in time to make the telecast. We sold out the one game, and we were only 400 short on the other. We were fearful of the Indianapolis game from the beginning, because of all the negative publicity and the negative image so many people have of the Colts."
But winless teams have played to capacity crowds at Texas Stadium before.
"It might be because we're not undefeated and we're not killing people," said Hogeboom, the starting quarterback in Dallas' first eight games. "They're fickle here. We've had such good teams in the past that they're spoiled."
That's more like it. Schramm acknowledges as much, eventually. A cheeseburger is getting cold on his desk, but he's finishing a cigarette now, peering out over Dallas from his office suite in the Expressway Tower.
"They're great fans, but we've been successful for so long," Schramm said, still looking out the window. "Consequently, more might be expected of us than other teams. That's the price you pay. It's like what happens to people after they start getting older. They don't want to be reminded of their birthday. But celebrating a birthday beats the hell out of the alternative. Success is a tough burden, too, but that also beats the hell out of the alternative."
If indeed the Cowboys have turned off their fans, it's pretty easy to pinpoint how -- and when. No, it was not the day Roger Staubach retired, though Dallas certainly hasn't been the same since. Even without Staubach, the Cowboys were 7-0 at the start of last season, then 12-2 with two games remaining.
It was then, Schramm says, that the Cowboys developed a collective head problem.
"We slipped into an attitude where we just expected to win, that our winning was a forgone conclusion," Schramm said. "It can be said that we've been down three or four years, simply because it's been that long since we've been to the Super Bowl. Three out of four years we went to the NFC championship game, which in most places would be great seasons. But with us, the emphasis was on `Why can't the Cowboys get to the Super Bowl?' So we developed the attitude that we're automatically going to get to the playoffs and the conference championship. We forgot that it takes 18 or 19 games to get to that point."
The Cowboys made it to the playoffs last year, but not as division champions, having lost those last two games to Washington and San Francisco. Lost isn't the word, really. The scores were 31- 10 and 42-17. With attendance of 43,521 at Texas Stadium, the Cowboys fell 24-17 to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC wild-card game.
"I just don't think, down deep, we felt we were going to be challenged in any of those three games," Schramm said. "It's hard to believe, but we'd beaten Washington in Washington, and now we had them on our own field. The last game (San Francisco) had no bearing on the playoffs, and we played that way. Our first playoff game was against the Rams, who'd barely made the playoffs. Well, we wake up Sunday night and we're out of the playoffs.
"Remember, we were 12-2 at one point, but it was looked upon as a bad season because we lost the last three. And it was."
This is Dallas, after all. Twelve and two would be considered a dream season this year, however, for a Dallas club that looked around and saw a room full of strangers. Twelve players from last year's squad -- including the likes of Harvey Martin, Drew Pearson, Pat Donovan, Billy Joe DuPree and Robert Newhouse -- were retired, traded, waived, or lost to the United States Football League. That's 82 years worth of Cowboys.
Early injuries claimed others -- Tony Hill, Herb Scott and Jim Cooper -- for various lengths of time. Cooper became a symbol of the Cowboys' misfortunes when he broke a foot -- by slipping on confetti while walking across the dance floor in a Dallas night club. Bob Breunig has played, albeit dreadfully, with a strained lower back.
The lineup has been dotted with names like Pozderac, Titensor and Lockhart. Small wonder the Cowboys don't get called America's Team too often anymore. Nobody recognizes them. Doomsday II has evolved into Doomsday Who?
Yet Landry won't call it a rebuilding season. The man who introduced the word "flex" to football has another new piece of terminology.
He says the Cowboys are in the process of "reshaping" themselves.
"In Dallas, there is no allowance for rebuilding," said defensive tackle John Dutton. "Never has been. People here think, `Oh, you lost 12 players? Lost nine starters? Well, hey, just ship in 12 more.' "
Hogeboom: "We're expected to do something regardless of injuries and retirements. It's hard because the Cowboys in the past have had a tendency to keep their first-stringers in a lot longer than most teams, no matter how many points we're winning a game by. The idea is to get the starters ready for the playoffs. That's Landry's way. The result is that our backups don't get the experience they need to have when they become starters."
Hogeboom refuses to use himself as a case in point. That's been one of the major Dallas hassles this season. White-Hogeboom. Hogeboom-White. Now, again, White-Hogeboom. Naturally, the Cowboys say the controversy is media-created, never mind that a few of the players openly have supported Hogeboom's claim to the starting quarterback job.
Schramm said the quarterback duel has been a "tremendous distraction." But he makes it sound like a positive negative, as if this, too, is merely a continuation of tradition.
"Historically, whenever we've had a quarterback controversy, the Cowboys have done well once the starter was chosen," Schramm said. "We've had two very big ones. There was (Don) Meredith-(Craig) Morton in the mid-'60s. Landry decided on the veteran (Meredith), and we went to two championship games against the Green Bay Packers. Then it was Morton-Staubach, a veteran and a glamourous and talented challenger. It seems that the controversy fragments the team, but when the decision is made, we've come out stronger. It's quite obvious now that White has much more support from his teammates and the fans than could've been possible if the change hadn't been made."
The franchise appeared to have hit rock bottom in the third quarter of the New Orleans game. The two previous weeks, Dallas had been drubbed by St. Louis and Washington. When the Saints assumed a 27-6 lead, Meredith, sounding embarrassed from the ABC booth, said he thought the Cowboys just didn't have the horses anymore.
New Orleans was rubbing Dallas' face in the dirt, adding its final score on an interception by linebacker Dennis Winston. Hogeboom, the Dallas starter from Day One, injured his hand on a Saint's helmet after throwing the ball. Danny White came in and, as Randy White put it, "We woke the place up, didn't we?" The Cowboys scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns to tie the game, then won in overtime on Rafael Septien's 41-yard field goal.
That fourth quarter may have been the turning point. Then again, it may not have been. The Cowboys still haven't beaten anybody of note, save the Rams on opening day. Their next two games -- today against the New York Giants and next week against the emerging St. Louis Cardinals -- are crucial to the division race and the Cowboys' overall picture.
"The next two weeks," Landry said, "will tell us where we're going."
Signs are good. Gradually, the battered bodies are mending and returning to the lineup. As Schramm noted, the team has responded to the command of Danny White. Tony Dorsett, who hadn't had a 100- yard game in 11 chances, finally broke one last week. When Dorsett gets his hundred, the Cowboys win.
And signs are bad. Dallas' defense has yet to show the ability to stop the league's top runners, in a division that includes John Riggins and Ottis Anderson. There's still in-fighting. Landry wants no more of it. Hence, the gag order.
"One of the signs of a championship team is that you don't criticize others," Landry said. "There are enough critics in the world. If they understand that, maybe we'll get back to the Super Bowl someday."
This being north central Texas, The Wave took longer to reach Irving. When it hit, the concussion nearly knocked Skip Bayless right out of the press box.
Bayless, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, says he was stunned that Cowboys fans would even consider taking part in the newest national pastime. Cowboys crowds are unlike those found in most stadia. They're above such fanaticism.
"They never stand for anything, including Cowboy touchdowns," Bayless wrote after the Colts game. "Who wants to stand when you have a battery-operated Sony and catered feast in your lap? ... For sure, Cowboy fans never, ever would stand and throw up their arms. They'd sooner throw up their pate."
It goes back to 1971, the year the Cowboys transferred from the Cotton Bowl to Texas Stadium. The Cotton Bowl is southside, Texas Stadium north, and the difference in economic strata is total. Cowboys crowds, then and now, reflect the difference.
"It's a matter of selective process," said Dr. Don Beck, head of the National Values Center in Denton. Dallas season-ticket holders, Beck noted, had to purchase bonds (to help pay for the new stadium) in order to get tickets.
"So it's a stacked deck as far as a psychological profile," he said. "Cowboy crowds have fewer taxi drivers, waiters -- the rough- and-tumble set you find in places like Philadelphia. Often, the people at a Cowboys game are just there to be seen. They're the perfect printout of North Dallas."
San Diego fans catch a lot of guff for their quiche and white wine image, inaccurate or no. In Dallas, it's more like champagne and caviar. Old money and knockout blondes. Giorgio Armani suits and rhinoceros-skin boots. Pass the ball, ol' son, but first pass the truffles.
South Dallas can't relate anymore. South Dallas remembers when the Cowboys were a football team. Now, a Cowboys game is more like a night at the opera. Dorsett scored? How lovely. A sack for Too Tall? Splendid.
A fumbled snap, however, will send even these Cowboys fans through the hole in the Texas Stadium roof.
"They're different than any fans I've been around," said Donley, perhaps recalling the delirious crowds at Ohio State. Dallas fans are "not as vocal as most, but they can be pretty critical. They boo Danny. They boo Gary. They booed our punt-return man (Gary Allen) just because he fair-caught a ball."
That, too, fits the psychological profile.
"They're more sophisticated and more fickle," said Beck, who has done studies for a number of NFL teams. "Cowboy fans are the type that only back a winner, because they're winners themselves. They can't stand anything short of success in themselves, and they can't stand it in their football team."
Schramm: "They don't express the same exuberance you see at other stadiums. There's always more intensity in a crowd where the home team has a challenge and is trying to scale a mountain. Our fans have experienced a lot of success, so they don't enjoy the excitement of the underdog role very often."
Which brings us back to the Mavs. As an expansion team, they're still considered underdogs, even if they have made the NBA playoffs and do knock off the Lakers with uncanny regularity. The Cowboys suddenly have a rival, not only for Dallas' affection, but also for its entertainment dollar. In their fifth season, the Mavericks are up to 12,500 in season-ticket sales. And their games are a lot more fun.
Donley, who is no psychologist, has a theory about all this. He's seen the crowds at Texas Stadium and the crowds at Reunion Arena. He wonders if maybe the difference isn't just a case of behavior modification.
"It's beer," Donley said.
Come again?
"They sell beer at Reunion Arena," Donley said with a smile. "They don't sell it at Texas Stadium. Think that doesn't make a difference?"
Here's another one:
Once-arrogant Cowboys are now big duds in `Big D' (November 25, 1987)
Let's get one thing straight about the team the Vikings will play on Thanksgiving Day.
It is no longer America's Team. It may not even be Dallas' team.
The Cowboys, you see, have fallen from grace.
The evidence is as clear as the fedora on Tom Landry's head. A comedian warms up a sellout crowd for Frank Sinatra at Dallas' Reunion Arena. He mentions the Mavericks, the local pro basketball team. He gets a cheer. He mentions the Sidekicks, the local pro soccer team. He gets another cheer. He mentions the Cowboys. He is practically booed off the stage.
The ironic part in all of this is how dramatically the pendulum swung for both teams after that.
By 1991, it was flip-flopped- Jimmy and the Triplets were poised for a glorious ride, while the Mavericks were free-falling into an oblivion worse than the one the Boys had in Landry's final year/Jimmy's first year.
By the time Dallas had won their first of three Super Bowls in the 90s, the Mavericks had become REALLY BAD.
Would you say that the disdain some of Dallas had for the 1987-89 free-falling Cowboys was comparable to the pre-Cuban Mavericks?
Don't forget also that the Mavs' rise to prominence under Cuban coincided with the not-so-great Campo years.
I thought it was very interesting when you think about it.
They were from the mid-80s, when the Cowboys slowly declined in Landry's later years and the Mavericks rose up in their only era of greatness before Cuban came along.
Cowboys are watching over a restless herd in Dallas (November 4, 1984)
Bag it. That stuff about America's Team simply doesn't fly anymore. Lately, it seems, the Cowboys aren't even Dallas' favorite team.
Last Sunday afternoon in suburban Irving, the Cowboys played the Indianapolis Colts at Texas Stadium before a crowd that was more than 7,000 short of a sellout. A few hours later, downtown at Reunion Arena, the NBA's Dallas Mavericks tipped off against the Los Angeles Lakers to a raucous sellout crowd.
Granted, as visiting attractions, the Lakers are a much easier sell than the Colts. Obviously, 17,000 tickets should go faster than 65,000. But this is Texas, podnah, and they like their ball with pointy ends. Football is king, queen, jacks and aces. Football puts 15,000 fans in the bleachers at Plano High on a Friday night, jillions more in college stadia from Austin to College Station to Waco. The Cowboys, of course, are the epitome of Texas football.
According to Texans, basketball was always something best left to foreign countries, like New York. Hoops? They were for circus performers. The NBA? An acronym for Nobody Blitzes Anybody.
But look here. The Cowboys, the model franchise of professional football, are being upstaged in their own town. The Mavs are young, fresh, dynamic, exciting, harmonious -- everything the Cowboys are not. They're like new money in the bank, the Metroplex's new gusher. They've become the event in Dallas, a town that thrives on events. People in Reunion Arena do un-Dallas-like things -- like paint their faces half-green, half-blue. They get ugly and curse and cheer and just generally make spectacles of themselves.
That sort of thing never would go in Texas Stadium.
"I love going to Mavs games," says basketball junkie Doug Donley. "Their crowds are different from the crowds that go to Cowboy games. Mavs fans get loose. They're crazy."
Donley, it should be noted, plays wide receiver for the Cowboys.
So it has come to this. Sure, the shifting focus in Dallas is tribute to the lovability of the Mavs, but it also provides further testimony that something's slightly amiss at 6116 North Central Expressway. That "something" starts on the ground floor at the ticket office and climbs to the Cowboys' 11th-floor office.
The Cowboys' record is OK -- probably better than could be expected. Six and three is still good enough for a share of first place in the NFC East, the conference's toughest division. This the Cowboys have accomplished while undergoing what for any other team would be considered a rebuilding season.
But there are other hints of trouble in paradise.
The team was sold by founder Clint Murchison to an 11-member group headed by Dallas businessman H.R. "Bum" Bright, which was a bit of a disruption, a major break in Cowboys tradition.
Team president and general manager Tex Schramm suggests the Cowboys have been victimized more by their own complacency than anything else. Now the squad is torn, like Democrats and Republicans, into Danny White and Gary Hogeboom camps.
Coach Tom Landry, canonized and capitalized in the Dallas media guide as "The Only Coach the Cowboys Have Ever Had," is being second- guessed from within his own ranks. At a team meeting early last week, Landry threatened his players with $1,000 fines and suspensions for any statements critical of each other or the Dallas coaching staff. All that did was leave the players with another gripe ... something about freedom of speech.
Dallas hasn't been to the Super Bowl since the 1978 season, its fifth visit to the National Football League championship game. In Dallas, six years without a Super Bowl is akin to six days without three-alarm chili: unthinkable. People are losing interest.
The Cowboys sold out 44 consecutive home dates before the players strike of 1982, and 13 straight afterward. Their policy is to cut off season-ticket sales at 50,000, saving 15,101 seats for walk-up and mail-order sales. This year, for the first time since 1977, the Cowboys have failed to sell out the stadium 72 hours before a game - - a situation that allows a local television blackout.
They sold out the home opener against the Philadelphia Eagles after the deadline, but not the next game against Green Bay, nor last week's Colts game. Two weeks ago, there were 14,135 no-shows for the Cowboys-Saints game, televised nationally as a Sunday night special.
That, as it turned out, was the only Dallas game this season with any serious drama. It also may have been the pivotal point of the Cowboys' season. All anybody knew while tickets were on sale for that game, though, was that Dallas was 4-3 and looking worse every week.
"You have to keep the attendance in perspective," Schramm said. "The barometer of a sellout is not whether you sold out, but whether you sold out by Thursday -- in time to make the telecast. We sold out the one game, and we were only 400 short on the other. We were fearful of the Indianapolis game from the beginning, because of all the negative publicity and the negative image so many people have of the Colts."
But winless teams have played to capacity crowds at Texas Stadium before.
"It might be because we're not undefeated and we're not killing people," said Hogeboom, the starting quarterback in Dallas' first eight games. "They're fickle here. We've had such good teams in the past that they're spoiled."
That's more like it. Schramm acknowledges as much, eventually. A cheeseburger is getting cold on his desk, but he's finishing a cigarette now, peering out over Dallas from his office suite in the Expressway Tower.
"They're great fans, but we've been successful for so long," Schramm said, still looking out the window. "Consequently, more might be expected of us than other teams. That's the price you pay. It's like what happens to people after they start getting older. They don't want to be reminded of their birthday. But celebrating a birthday beats the hell out of the alternative. Success is a tough burden, too, but that also beats the hell out of the alternative."
If indeed the Cowboys have turned off their fans, it's pretty easy to pinpoint how -- and when. No, it was not the day Roger Staubach retired, though Dallas certainly hasn't been the same since. Even without Staubach, the Cowboys were 7-0 at the start of last season, then 12-2 with two games remaining.
It was then, Schramm says, that the Cowboys developed a collective head problem.
"We slipped into an attitude where we just expected to win, that our winning was a forgone conclusion," Schramm said. "It can be said that we've been down three or four years, simply because it's been that long since we've been to the Super Bowl. Three out of four years we went to the NFC championship game, which in most places would be great seasons. But with us, the emphasis was on `Why can't the Cowboys get to the Super Bowl?' So we developed the attitude that we're automatically going to get to the playoffs and the conference championship. We forgot that it takes 18 or 19 games to get to that point."
The Cowboys made it to the playoffs last year, but not as division champions, having lost those last two games to Washington and San Francisco. Lost isn't the word, really. The scores were 31- 10 and 42-17. With attendance of 43,521 at Texas Stadium, the Cowboys fell 24-17 to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC wild-card game.
"I just don't think, down deep, we felt we were going to be challenged in any of those three games," Schramm said. "It's hard to believe, but we'd beaten Washington in Washington, and now we had them on our own field. The last game (San Francisco) had no bearing on the playoffs, and we played that way. Our first playoff game was against the Rams, who'd barely made the playoffs. Well, we wake up Sunday night and we're out of the playoffs.
"Remember, we were 12-2 at one point, but it was looked upon as a bad season because we lost the last three. And it was."
This is Dallas, after all. Twelve and two would be considered a dream season this year, however, for a Dallas club that looked around and saw a room full of strangers. Twelve players from last year's squad -- including the likes of Harvey Martin, Drew Pearson, Pat Donovan, Billy Joe DuPree and Robert Newhouse -- were retired, traded, waived, or lost to the United States Football League. That's 82 years worth of Cowboys.
Early injuries claimed others -- Tony Hill, Herb Scott and Jim Cooper -- for various lengths of time. Cooper became a symbol of the Cowboys' misfortunes when he broke a foot -- by slipping on confetti while walking across the dance floor in a Dallas night club. Bob Breunig has played, albeit dreadfully, with a strained lower back.
The lineup has been dotted with names like Pozderac, Titensor and Lockhart. Small wonder the Cowboys don't get called America's Team too often anymore. Nobody recognizes them. Doomsday II has evolved into Doomsday Who?
Yet Landry won't call it a rebuilding season. The man who introduced the word "flex" to football has another new piece of terminology.
He says the Cowboys are in the process of "reshaping" themselves.
"In Dallas, there is no allowance for rebuilding," said defensive tackle John Dutton. "Never has been. People here think, `Oh, you lost 12 players? Lost nine starters? Well, hey, just ship in 12 more.' "
Hogeboom: "We're expected to do something regardless of injuries and retirements. It's hard because the Cowboys in the past have had a tendency to keep their first-stringers in a lot longer than most teams, no matter how many points we're winning a game by. The idea is to get the starters ready for the playoffs. That's Landry's way. The result is that our backups don't get the experience they need to have when they become starters."
Hogeboom refuses to use himself as a case in point. That's been one of the major Dallas hassles this season. White-Hogeboom. Hogeboom-White. Now, again, White-Hogeboom. Naturally, the Cowboys say the controversy is media-created, never mind that a few of the players openly have supported Hogeboom's claim to the starting quarterback job.
Schramm said the quarterback duel has been a "tremendous distraction." But he makes it sound like a positive negative, as if this, too, is merely a continuation of tradition.
"Historically, whenever we've had a quarterback controversy, the Cowboys have done well once the starter was chosen," Schramm said. "We've had two very big ones. There was (Don) Meredith-(Craig) Morton in the mid-'60s. Landry decided on the veteran (Meredith), and we went to two championship games against the Green Bay Packers. Then it was Morton-Staubach, a veteran and a glamourous and talented challenger. It seems that the controversy fragments the team, but when the decision is made, we've come out stronger. It's quite obvious now that White has much more support from his teammates and the fans than could've been possible if the change hadn't been made."
The franchise appeared to have hit rock bottom in the third quarter of the New Orleans game. The two previous weeks, Dallas had been drubbed by St. Louis and Washington. When the Saints assumed a 27-6 lead, Meredith, sounding embarrassed from the ABC booth, said he thought the Cowboys just didn't have the horses anymore.
New Orleans was rubbing Dallas' face in the dirt, adding its final score on an interception by linebacker Dennis Winston. Hogeboom, the Dallas starter from Day One, injured his hand on a Saint's helmet after throwing the ball. Danny White came in and, as Randy White put it, "We woke the place up, didn't we?" The Cowboys scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns to tie the game, then won in overtime on Rafael Septien's 41-yard field goal.
That fourth quarter may have been the turning point. Then again, it may not have been. The Cowboys still haven't beaten anybody of note, save the Rams on opening day. Their next two games -- today against the New York Giants and next week against the emerging St. Louis Cardinals -- are crucial to the division race and the Cowboys' overall picture.
"The next two weeks," Landry said, "will tell us where we're going."
Signs are good. Gradually, the battered bodies are mending and returning to the lineup. As Schramm noted, the team has responded to the command of Danny White. Tony Dorsett, who hadn't had a 100- yard game in 11 chances, finally broke one last week. When Dorsett gets his hundred, the Cowboys win.
And signs are bad. Dallas' defense has yet to show the ability to stop the league's top runners, in a division that includes John Riggins and Ottis Anderson. There's still in-fighting. Landry wants no more of it. Hence, the gag order.
"One of the signs of a championship team is that you don't criticize others," Landry said. "There are enough critics in the world. If they understand that, maybe we'll get back to the Super Bowl someday."
This being north central Texas, The Wave took longer to reach Irving. When it hit, the concussion nearly knocked Skip Bayless right out of the press box.
Bayless, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, says he was stunned that Cowboys fans would even consider taking part in the newest national pastime. Cowboys crowds are unlike those found in most stadia. They're above such fanaticism.
"They never stand for anything, including Cowboy touchdowns," Bayless wrote after the Colts game. "Who wants to stand when you have a battery-operated Sony and catered feast in your lap? ... For sure, Cowboy fans never, ever would stand and throw up their arms. They'd sooner throw up their pate."
It goes back to 1971, the year the Cowboys transferred from the Cotton Bowl to Texas Stadium. The Cotton Bowl is southside, Texas Stadium north, and the difference in economic strata is total. Cowboys crowds, then and now, reflect the difference.
"It's a matter of selective process," said Dr. Don Beck, head of the National Values Center in Denton. Dallas season-ticket holders, Beck noted, had to purchase bonds (to help pay for the new stadium) in order to get tickets.
"So it's a stacked deck as far as a psychological profile," he said. "Cowboy crowds have fewer taxi drivers, waiters -- the rough- and-tumble set you find in places like Philadelphia. Often, the people at a Cowboys game are just there to be seen. They're the perfect printout of North Dallas."
San Diego fans catch a lot of guff for their quiche and white wine image, inaccurate or no. In Dallas, it's more like champagne and caviar. Old money and knockout blondes. Giorgio Armani suits and rhinoceros-skin boots. Pass the ball, ol' son, but first pass the truffles.
South Dallas can't relate anymore. South Dallas remembers when the Cowboys were a football team. Now, a Cowboys game is more like a night at the opera. Dorsett scored? How lovely. A sack for Too Tall? Splendid.
A fumbled snap, however, will send even these Cowboys fans through the hole in the Texas Stadium roof.
"They're different than any fans I've been around," said Donley, perhaps recalling the delirious crowds at Ohio State. Dallas fans are "not as vocal as most, but they can be pretty critical. They boo Danny. They boo Gary. They booed our punt-return man (Gary Allen) just because he fair-caught a ball."
That, too, fits the psychological profile.
"They're more sophisticated and more fickle," said Beck, who has done studies for a number of NFL teams. "Cowboy fans are the type that only back a winner, because they're winners themselves. They can't stand anything short of success in themselves, and they can't stand it in their football team."
Schramm: "They don't express the same exuberance you see at other stadiums. There's always more intensity in a crowd where the home team has a challenge and is trying to scale a mountain. Our fans have experienced a lot of success, so they don't enjoy the excitement of the underdog role very often."
Which brings us back to the Mavs. As an expansion team, they're still considered underdogs, even if they have made the NBA playoffs and do knock off the Lakers with uncanny regularity. The Cowboys suddenly have a rival, not only for Dallas' affection, but also for its entertainment dollar. In their fifth season, the Mavericks are up to 12,500 in season-ticket sales. And their games are a lot more fun.
Donley, who is no psychologist, has a theory about all this. He's seen the crowds at Texas Stadium and the crowds at Reunion Arena. He wonders if maybe the difference isn't just a case of behavior modification.
"It's beer," Donley said.
Come again?
"They sell beer at Reunion Arena," Donley said with a smile. "They don't sell it at Texas Stadium. Think that doesn't make a difference?"
Here's another one:
Once-arrogant Cowboys are now big duds in `Big D' (November 25, 1987)
Let's get one thing straight about the team the Vikings will play on Thanksgiving Day.
It is no longer America's Team. It may not even be Dallas' team.
The Cowboys, you see, have fallen from grace.
The evidence is as clear as the fedora on Tom Landry's head. A comedian warms up a sellout crowd for Frank Sinatra at Dallas' Reunion Arena. He mentions the Mavericks, the local pro basketball team. He gets a cheer. He mentions the Sidekicks, the local pro soccer team. He gets another cheer. He mentions the Cowboys. He is practically booed off the stage.
The ironic part in all of this is how dramatically the pendulum swung for both teams after that.
By 1991, it was flip-flopped- Jimmy and the Triplets were poised for a glorious ride, while the Mavericks were free-falling into an oblivion worse than the one the Boys had in Landry's final year/Jimmy's first year.
By the time Dallas had won their first of three Super Bowls in the 90s, the Mavericks had become REALLY BAD.
Would you say that the disdain some of Dallas had for the 1987-89 free-falling Cowboys was comparable to the pre-Cuban Mavericks?
Don't forget also that the Mavs' rise to prominence under Cuban coincided with the not-so-great Campo years.
I thought it was very interesting when you think about it.
