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How a nation lost its team
SUNDAY STEW | They were 'America's Team' for plenty of wrong reasons, and now the Cowboys lack that special quality that made them great
September 23, 2007
BY RICK TELANDER Sun-Times Columnist
'America's Team.'' Really? You have to be an old-timer like Mr. Sunday Stew to understand how and why the Dallas Cowboys got that moniker, and how nonsensical such a nickname is today.
There was a time back in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when the Tom Landry- and Roger Staubach- and Drew Pearson- and Tony Dorsett- and Randy White- and Golden Richards- and, yes, even Mike Ditka-led Cowboys always seemed to be on TV and always winning and always somehow in the public's mind.
The brilliant, quasi-patriotic simplicity of the single-starred helmet and blank-faced Landry's fedora captured the nation in a visceral, down-home way that only TV symbols could.
At a time when the Western frontier long had been settled, modern Dallas came to be seen as the oil-fueled, ever-expanding, rough-and-ready mythical American cowboy town that had transformed itself into a shining new-age metropolis of steel, glass, hedonism and good-old violence.
It was no coincidence that the athletic, ever-smiling and ''wholesome'' Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders embodied nothing but raw sexuality or that the hugely popular TV show ''Dallas'' was the soap-opera equivalent of America's most power-hungry, vindictive and sex-crazed mythology.
The Cowboys were America's Team not just because they were good and apparently had God on their side -- Landry and so many of his underlings were outspoken ''Jesus freaks'' -- but because of the rampant, quintessentially American hypocrisy at the core of the image.
Duane Thomas, Hollywood Henderson and numerous other Cowboys were anything but traditional heroes.
Former wide receiver Pete Gent wrote the book North Dallas Forty, wherein the lead character smokes more dope than Bob Marley and marvels at the brutality and dehumanization of the fraudulent, image-crazed game.
And Pro Bowl wide receiver Lance Rentzel, married to blond movie actress Joey Heatherton, fell the lowest of all Cowboys when he exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl, a crime that caused TV commentator Walter Winchell to state, ''All good Americans should stop and beware of the biggest menace to the morals of American youth: Lance Rentzel.''
Despite everything, the image of being something special continued for the Cowboys into the '90s with Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith. But the full equalization of America had occurred, and when one team after another wins the Super Bowl, Dallas is just another spoke in the wheel.
Still, I remember fondly my numerous sit-down chats with late Cowboys president Tex Schramm -- real first name: Texas -- and listening to the eager executive expound on how special his team was and how he wanted to turn the franchise and its grounds into something on par with Disneyland.
''Our country needs certain things,'' he told me. ''It needs for the Cowboys to be good and the Raiders to be bad. That just works. It's not a good thing if either of us become irrelevant.''
Al Davis still keeps the Raiders in that ''dark side'' corner, but, sadly, his team has fallen into disarray and, worse, irrelevance.
The Cowboys are no longer America's Team -- quick, who is their tailback, their middle linebacker, their coach, even? -- but they are a decent team with an owner, Jerry Jones, who has not grown irrelevant with age.
They're not the Jaguars or the Titans. But they're sure not ''The 300,'' either.
http://www.suntimes.com/sports/telander/570058,CST-SPT-rick23.article
SUNDAY STEW | They were 'America's Team' for plenty of wrong reasons, and now the Cowboys lack that special quality that made them great
September 23, 2007
BY RICK TELANDER Sun-Times Columnist
'America's Team.'' Really? You have to be an old-timer like Mr. Sunday Stew to understand how and why the Dallas Cowboys got that moniker, and how nonsensical such a nickname is today.
There was a time back in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when the Tom Landry- and Roger Staubach- and Drew Pearson- and Tony Dorsett- and Randy White- and Golden Richards- and, yes, even Mike Ditka-led Cowboys always seemed to be on TV and always winning and always somehow in the public's mind.
The brilliant, quasi-patriotic simplicity of the single-starred helmet and blank-faced Landry's fedora captured the nation in a visceral, down-home way that only TV symbols could.
At a time when the Western frontier long had been settled, modern Dallas came to be seen as the oil-fueled, ever-expanding, rough-and-ready mythical American cowboy town that had transformed itself into a shining new-age metropolis of steel, glass, hedonism and good-old violence.
It was no coincidence that the athletic, ever-smiling and ''wholesome'' Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders embodied nothing but raw sexuality or that the hugely popular TV show ''Dallas'' was the soap-opera equivalent of America's most power-hungry, vindictive and sex-crazed mythology.
The Cowboys were America's Team not just because they were good and apparently had God on their side -- Landry and so many of his underlings were outspoken ''Jesus freaks'' -- but because of the rampant, quintessentially American hypocrisy at the core of the image.
Duane Thomas, Hollywood Henderson and numerous other Cowboys were anything but traditional heroes.
Former wide receiver Pete Gent wrote the book North Dallas Forty, wherein the lead character smokes more dope than Bob Marley and marvels at the brutality and dehumanization of the fraudulent, image-crazed game.
And Pro Bowl wide receiver Lance Rentzel, married to blond movie actress Joey Heatherton, fell the lowest of all Cowboys when he exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl, a crime that caused TV commentator Walter Winchell to state, ''All good Americans should stop and beware of the biggest menace to the morals of American youth: Lance Rentzel.''
Despite everything, the image of being something special continued for the Cowboys into the '90s with Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith. But the full equalization of America had occurred, and when one team after another wins the Super Bowl, Dallas is just another spoke in the wheel.
Still, I remember fondly my numerous sit-down chats with late Cowboys president Tex Schramm -- real first name: Texas -- and listening to the eager executive expound on how special his team was and how he wanted to turn the franchise and its grounds into something on par with Disneyland.
''Our country needs certain things,'' he told me. ''It needs for the Cowboys to be good and the Raiders to be bad. That just works. It's not a good thing if either of us become irrelevant.''
Al Davis still keeps the Raiders in that ''dark side'' corner, but, sadly, his team has fallen into disarray and, worse, irrelevance.
The Cowboys are no longer America's Team -- quick, who is their tailback, their middle linebacker, their coach, even? -- but they are a decent team with an owner, Jerry Jones, who has not grown irrelevant with age.
They're not the Jaguars or the Titans. But they're sure not ''The 300,'' either.
http://www.suntimes.com/sports/telander/570058,CST-SPT-rick23.article
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