The Evolution Of Hate - The Dallas Cowboys

[cajuncocoa]

Great post!! Gave me goosebumps.

 

[Roadtrip635]

Great post!
As a kid growing up in the 70's, I remember there was a lot of hate for the Cowboys. Most of it came just because the team was successful, but it wasn't just about winning it was also about how we won. We handed out a lot of improbable and heart-breaking losses to other teams. Ask any long time 49er fan, we knocked them out of the playoffs 3 straight years with that final one just an absolute heartbreaker. Staubach comes off the bench and overcomes a 12 point deficit in the final two minutes.

The "Hail Mary" game was every bit as controversial then as this Lion's game has become today. There was a near riot in the stands, fans tossing all kinds of stuff and refs getting hit with bottles. I think Tarkenton's father died of a heart attack during the game.

Then there was George Allen, who had some sort of primal hate for the Cowboys and let everybody know about it. He put bounties on players, before that sort of thing was frowned upon, he'd cuss Dallas players on the sidelines and even challenged Tom Landry to a fist fight... Tom Landry!

Success breeds contempt. There's a lot of old hate, handed down generation to generation. Like they said in earlier posts, Embrace the Hate!

 

[Fletch]

When I saw this post I thought maybe I would channel a little Hostile and provide some insight to younger fans on how all this Cowboy hate evolved. I'm sure others my age can add some things to the thread or their opinions on how the whole Cowboys mystique happened --

A snapshot in the evolution of hate.

When NFL Films proclaimed the Cowboys America's Team in 1977 it wasn't just a tag line - we were. There was an almost cult like following and admiration for Staubach and Lily and Coach Landry. Watching the Cowboys on Sunday afternoons was an extension of going to church. It's what everybody in America just did and even if you didn't root for the Cowboys, you couldn't root against Captain America.

The city of Dallas was a also popular, coming out of the shadows of the Kennedy assassination, it became a city of excess. It was Dallas in the 70's before it was Miami in the 80's. The Dallas mystique was perpetuated through the hugely popular television show Dallas and a widely acclaimed movie about Landry's Cowboys, North Dallas Forty, that glorified the sex, drugs, greed and wealth associated with Dallas. Texas was booming, oil was king, people line-danced to country music and Gilley's was the most famous bar in the country. Things really were bigger. There's a great line from the movie Urban Cowboy where a smoking hot girl says to John Travolta,
"My daddy's in oil (pause) and all that that implies." Hell...yeah.

The cheerleaders were America's sweethearts who got cruises on the Love Boat - THE Love Boat, and the franchise captured the imagination of the country like no other sports team since the 1920's Yankees. As kids, we grew up on the CBS Today pregame show with Brent Musberger, Irv Cross, Phyllis George (who just looked like Dallas) and Jimmy the Greek as they readied us for a 4:00 start at RFK, with the sun setting, the stadium shaking and there we are in those glorious blues as America settled in for the best rivalry in football.

As time went on, the team's popularity led to contempt by other players in the NFL who resented the label and attention. As the 80's were ushered in, teams couldn't wait to beat the Cowboys. The Catch made us cry, Philly finally won something and "We Want Dallas" got us in Washington. Losing three straight Championship games kept the Cowboys in the spotlight but without the success. Fair weather fans left, our heroes were retiring. Danny just couldn't get it done and then the bottom fell out. In the mid to late 80's the team became more irrelevant by the year, Tom just didn't look right in glasses and we became a national punchline on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson--

"Will the mother who reported her children lost please report to the field - they're beating the Cowboys fourteen to nothing."

They still had the star on the helmet, but nothing else was the same. It's true, the Dallas Cowboys were...irrelevant.

Then everything changed.

There's no doubt the signature turning point that turned the tide of national perception towards the Cowboys was the arrival of Jerry and Jimmy. It was the perfect storm before the real one. Jerry's handling of Tom (who was viewed as a sympathetic figure and still an American icon), Jimmy's notorious past in Miami with the Canes and the cast of characters led by Michael Irvin. They created a dynasty, then rubbed everybody's nose in it.

The Cowboys just didn't come back, they kicked the door in and screamed it to the world. The fair weather fans jumped back in the saddle, a new generation fell in love with the team and the fans who never left, (you know - those of us who cheered like hell when Herschel ran for an overtime TD against the Patriots), were brought to tears by their return. It all made for tremendous television ratings, record merchandise sales, stadium takeovers and glorious times.

But...and this is a big one -- unlike the 70's, this version of America's Team had nothing to do with Sunday church. This team bred contempt and disdain. These were the "Crackboys" who partied at "The White House" led by Jed Clampett who loaded up the truck and moved to Big D, and forever more - people drew the line in the sand. You either loved the Dallas Cowboys or hated 'em.

Really hated 'em.

At the same time another paradigm shift was taking place in the media. ESPN was (and to an extent still is) known for hiring a lot of northeastern college graduates, fans of the Giants, Yankees, Red Sox, Knicks, etc who grew up ever loyal to their teams as kids. Anything west of Pittsburgh, to them, just didn't count and that especially included the Cowboys. I know, I went to college with a lot of them. Skip Bayless made a name for himself by airing the Cowboys dirty laundry with best selling books and the advent of sports talk radio brought notoriety to national hosts like "Papa" Joe Chevalier and Tony Bruno whose schtick was to hate the Cowboys. Who knew you could make a living hating a team? Even a kids movie portrayed the Cowboys as the big bad bullies in "Little Giants." Ex-players were given national platforms on all the networks to make a name for themselves. The stronger the opinion the more they got noticed and what better way to get noticed than to perfect the dogging of the Cowboys.

Enter the internet age where "everybody" was given a voice and people used it, mocking the Cowboys 20 year drought, the string of good college baseball players but horrible NFL quarterbacks and the slick owner who symbolized their futility.

And now here we are.

A new time, a new stadium, a new generation of fans who join the generation before them and the generation before them. And to our great delight, this generation knows how to invade Danny's house with the best of us.

Even Jerry's company has evolved from a Sultan on the sidelines to a Governor in the suite.

Oil prices ain't what they used to be.

No matter what happens in Green Bay, it's been a great year and we saw great things we thought we might never see. A coach who survived his own process to emerge as the leader he always knew he was, a quarterback who survived his own mistakes and national ridicule to hear chants of MVP and an owner who has a new Great Wall because he was finally ready to try it from the inside out.

So now that you have an understanding of the hate - why let it get to you? It's 50 years in the making. Internet memes, Twitter, message boards, comment threads and kids in college, writing blogs that get picked up by national media outlets all write the false narratives (or flat out lies) and the public buys it. Nothing we can do - except keep winning.

The media (not all, but most) revel in cheap shots and disingenuous headlines, editors perfect their biased highlight packages and writers cling to tired cliches based on past performance. My favorite being the widely used "Tony Romo has struggled in December until this year..."

December passer rating of 107.0 over the past six seasons -- best in the NFL.

They need to do some damn homework. The Cowboys need to keep winning.

They try to convince America that we are really not America's Team with sketchy polls and cut away shots of Steeler fans while America continues to prove them wrong with historic television ratings. We don't play in a stadium we play in a destination, our party bus has bought the refs and unlike any other team, when we finally lose, it's because WE were an accident waiting to happen.

Never mind that that Super Bowl favorite Saints accident that happened in October - not their fault.

Hear that? It's the sound of fear. You can hear it all the way from south Philly to the Meadowlands. You can hear it in waving towels, in Twitter taps, and in computer keyboards of columnists. You can hear it in the halls of the NY Post, WIP, ESPN, the NFL Network, NBC sports and Peter's King's MMQB office.

It's the fear and loathing that the evil empire could indeed be back, led by Voldemort himself, ruling his house of Slytherin from his suite high above the destination. One year isn't quite enough to know for sure, but if I was a betting man, and I am, I like the next three years.

Hear that? Fear sounds great, doesn't it!

Freakin Bravo! Absolutely grabbed my attention, and took me for a ride in a frickin time machine. Well done!

We are America's Team!!!

 

[ThreeandOut]

Great post! Cowboys hatred as a cottage industry really started when ESPN came on the scene with its strong East Coast bias. That hatred has only intensified with new media (Twitter, NFL Network).

I think FOX has made a very conscious decision to skew negative towards the Cowboys whenever they are the marquee game of the week with the Buck and Aikman broadcast team. You can pretty much count on Buck finding something negative to dwell on (beat into the ground) during a Cowboys game.

Unlike the NBA and MLB which heavily promote their flagship franchises, the NFL and related media have decided that there is more to be gained by catering to the Cowboy haters. That's why as a Cowboys fan, I've become very discerning about who I follow in the media for Cowboys information.