I ran across this old article. A great, great read.
http://www.sportingnews.com/archives/landry/coach.html
Landry: America's coach
By Bill Minutaglio
For The Sporting News
The man in the fedora made the Cowboys winners, and Dallas was able to overcome the stigma of being the city where JFK was shot.
When Thomas Wade Landry alighted in Dallas, he hadn't planned on shifting the nation's gaze away from a nightmarish November day in that city in 1963 . . . shifting it toward something much more simple and sweet . . . shifting it toward a boy's game played by grown men in the pale light that comes before winter.
Landry, 75, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and coach of the Dallas Cowboys for the better part of three decades, died Saturday in Dallas from complications of leukemia. He had been hospitalized, on and off, for the last several months -- a period in which he received a steady round of visits, calls and notes from the dozens of stars he had coached over the years.
Until his death, Tom Landry valued consistency more than anything in life. Consistency in demeanor, preparation, execution and even dress -- and he refused to abandon his famous fedora long after it had gone out of fashion. The hat, of course, became a symbol; some said it was a sign that he had refused to change with the times.
One thing was clear: He continued to wear it even after he was stripped of the team he had nurtured for 29 years, the team that had defined his very existence.
He had come home to Texas and taken the helm of an expansion outfit awash in chaos, and then he became the focus of a city about to be engulfed in angst. But when he finally molded the Cowboys, when he ultimately presided over their ascension toward winners and the sometimes-controversial title of America's Team, he also helped lay to rest that city's awful burden as a place of violence and death.
Well beyond his inflexibly conservative religion and politics, well beyond his coldly calculating 4-3 defense and shotgun formation, he chose his life's work in a place blamed for the killing of a president . . . and then with each consistent Sunday, each eternal moment from Roger Staubach, Mel Renfro, Randy White, Tony Dorsett and Bob Lilly, he allowed his city to wear something other than grief on its sleeve.
Landry helped Dallas to win Super Bowls and, in so doing, helped the city to recover from its lingering image as the place where President John F. Kennedy had lost his life. That inadvertent rehabilitation of the city's psyche was one of his greatest accomplishments, said some of his heralded players.
"Our city was mired in this black cloud. It was where our president was shot," says defensive stalwart Charlie Waters. "Landry turned it around for us. He orchestrated it, he was the conductor that brought this city out of its doldrums."
* * *
If that is all true, then Landry started out life as the unlikeliest of band leaders.
He was born September 11, 1924, in Mission, Texas, deep in the soul of the Rio Grande Valley, a place where so many things are constant and where people are constantly resigned to them: the parched earth, the unrelenting heat, the grinding poverty, the entire sense that the Valley is an isolated island hanging for dear life onto the underbelly of the United States. He played tackle football in dirt lots and then joined the Army Air Corps, serving as a co-pilot and gunner in a B-17.
He was the unflappable, stone-faced co-captain of the University of Texas football team. In 1949, as professional football lurched forward in the U.S., he played defensive back, running back and punted as a member of the New York Yankees in the All-America Football Conference.
He played the same positions the next six years for the New York Giants, an indelible participant in the last days of an old-school, bruising, black-and-blue version of the game that men such as George Halas and Vince Lombardi knew all too well -- but he also was someone who seemed destined to take the game to another, maybe more cerebral level.
He played in the Pro Bowl after the 1954 season, but he also was moving toward coaching -- he was a player-coach in 1954 and 1955 and then an assistant coach with the Giants from 1956 to '59. At night, in the hotels, the assistant coach would call out to Sam Huff and anybody else passing in the hallway -- begging, cajoling, demanding that they come in and see this new X, this new O, this new four-men-up-front and three-men-back scheme that he was tinkering with, probably without realizing that it would revolutionize the way defense was played.
Steve Owen, his coach his first four years with the Giants, had said the words that would linger and percolate in Landry's fertile mind:
"The best offense can be built around 10 basic plays, the best defense on two. All the rest is razzle-dazzle, egomania and box office."
It was, Landry decided, the only way to view life both on and off the field.
It was, he also decided, a wise idea to incorporate every single bit of Owen's admonition, including the razzle-dazzle, into the Thomas Wade Landry Playbook.
* * *
After New York, there was the chance to come back home to Texas, where, perhaps, things could be more predictable . . . constant. Tom Landry liked that idea and in 1960, he was named head coach of the new expansion team in Dallas. His first grinding year, he went 0-11-1, and only his wife, Alicia, understood what it meant for him to earn that tie, on the next-to-last game of the season against the Giants. It took seven seasons before Landry fielded a winning team -- and long anxious moments wondering whether he would get another year to coach . . . or even another team to coach.
In 1963, the year President Kennedy was killed, it was almost a given that Landry would be gone. But instead, Clint Murchison Jr., the crew cut-wearing, oil-man owner, did the unthinkable: After another losing season and only 13 victories in Landry's first four years, Murchison gave his coach an unheard of 10-year contract extension. And when it happened, it was clearly all about consistency.
And when Landry finally had a winning team, he went ahead and had another one, another one, and another one, until there were 20 straight winning seasons. As the dogged victory patterns took shape, so did the habits of style: He was the man in the hat and the tie, the man who felt an obligation to impart a sense of morality in what he perceived to be increasingly immoral times. He didn't smoke. He didn't curse. He might drink wine if he was forced to be at a function at the home of the team's owner.
He was, some said, one of the last coaching autocrats. "He, in an odd way, along with Lombardi, symbolized the old age when a coach had complete authority," says author David Halberstam.
He was emotionally flatlined in meetings, practices, on the sideline. His face, his voice, his carriage never seemed to twist with any discernible passion. The ones who wanted to bend more with the times -- Pete Gent, Duane Thomas and Bob Hayes -- thought he was distant and robot-like for a 1960s and '70s world that was hellbent on celebrating ambiguity.
"I believed he was plastic, he was unemotional, he was unavailable," says linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, someone who frequently tested Landry's boundaries but later came to deeply admire the man. "I found him to be cold, stoic, unreachable and almost sort of scary. He wasn't a touchy-feely coach. He treated you like you were working at a factory."
But on the field, there was something far beyond ambiguity. Landry, if anything, seemed drained of personal spontaneity because he had thrown it all on the field. For a rigid man who made a cigar store Indian look like a convulsing Jerry Lewis, Landry stunned his players with his schemes and dreams on the chalkboard:
Somewhere in the refuse heap of football wisdom he had seen something bright and shiny, something discarded probably because it was considered too gaudy for that nuts-and-bolts world from which he emerged in the '50s. But when Landry dusted off the shotgun formation and whispered about it to Roger Staubach . . . Captain America . . . he had found just what he was looking for.
Call it controlled chaos. Call it an amphetamine-paced chess game. One thing was clear. To do it, and to do it right, you had to be consistent. Everyone had to know his place. Everyone had to execute. It had everything to do with Landry's credo: Faith. Training. A Goal. The Will.
It wasn't anything different, really, from his days as a kid in the desperate Rio Grande Valley, his days as a gunner, his days convincing Sam Huff and all the others that he had these interesting ideas about how to play football better than the other guys.
Tom Landry was an undeniable innovator, one of the men who ushered in the modern, icily efficient, computerized era of pro football, and he uncorked his mathematical approach to the game well before anybody was using computers. He had studied engineering in college and was one of the first men in football to chart opposing offensive patterns, studying exactly how many times a team ran to the right, left and up the middle, studying it so hard that he knew when it would happen again.
He had perfected the flex defense, a way of forcing the play back against itself -- ordering his linebackers and defensive backs to move the opposing chess pieces where they really didn't want to go. He was one of the first modern-era coaches to dictate that stealth, quickness and speed often were the bedrocks of a good player and a great team. He was among the first, maybe the first, to overhaul a defensive scheme on the fly with signals from the sideline.
There were backdoor plays, fake punts and gadgetry that seemed even more startling because of their source. Opposing players, coaches and fans looked at the unemotional man in the hat and then looked at the consistent, controlled havoc he was unleashing on the field, and simply marveled. In the end, his most ironic gift to football was an unpredictable style of play that often seemed completely out of sync with his personality.
His gift to a city, once his system took hold, was a sense of unbridled exhilaration. The city, the state, had never really had anything approaching a professional, national winner. And with it came something else -- that sense of closure with the Kennedy tragedy.
In the wake of the assassination, the city was so vilified that when the Cowboys traveled to other cities, baggage handlers refused to handle their luggage -- simply because the players were from Dallas.
"Anyone who was from Dallas was blamed as a conspirator in the death of John F. Kennedy," says author Peter Golenbock, who has written extensively about the team. But that image began changing when the team began winning. "No longer was it Dallas -- the city that killed John F. Kennedy," says Golenbock. "It was Dallas -- home of the Dallas Cowboys. America's Team."
Along with those 20 straight winning seasons, there were the two Super Bowl wins, the five NFC championships, the 13 division titles and the 270 victories (including postseason), third- most in NFL history. There was the endless parade of stars, characters, convicts and rock-ribbed warriors: Dandy Don Meredith, Jethro Pugh, Chuck Howley, Calvin Hill, Charlie Waters, Billy Joe DuPree, Golden Richards, Preston Pearson, Pettis Norman, Eddie LeBaron, Lance Rentzel. There were the Cowboys cheerleaders, the ultimate incongruity gyrating right behind the proper Christian coach. And through it all -- the toy-gun toting sideline mascot Crazy Ray, the over-the-top Texas millionaire owners such as Murchison and Bum Bright, the Hail Mary passes -- there was always only one certifiable consistency on the Cowboys.
Thomas Wade Landry.
"My God, he was like a surgeon when he stood at the chalkboard and charted plays. No matter what questions we had, he had answers," says Waters. "He was flawless. He was stoic, poised, dignified. He certainly had an impersonal style, but that was because he had developed a calloused demeanor so he could do his job well. He ran it like an office. He was a coach's coach, not a player's coach. He was very, very disciplined."
Then, as time wore on and perhaps as he sensed his own mortality, he slowly began to preach a slightly different life formula.
This time, as the great Bob Lilly has said, Landry had begun to tell his players that there were only three important things in life, and in this order: God, family and football.
By the late '80s, toward the end of his time as coach, there were almost unfathomable whispers that football was such a distant third on his list that Dallas didn't need him anymore. That, really, time had slipped by him when the team went 3-13 in 1988. That his innovations had been borrowed by others, stood upside down, reinvented and re-sculpted to the point where it wasn't that important to have the one constant on the Dallas sideline . . . the only constant in the team's entire history:
The man in the hat.
The whispers reached to Arkansas when, in 1989, someone from that state had either the bravery or the effrontery to buy the Cowboys and tell their only coach that it was time to leave. The bittersweet twin tugs of familiarity with the past and freedom for the future washed over the city.
Landry distanced himself from new owner Jerry Jones, tried not to show his sense of betrayal. He settled into a citizen emeritus role in Texas, crisscrossing the state and appearing at hundreds of charity dinners, golf tournaments and fund-raisers. He continued to jog and lift weights, just as he had done almost every day that he had coached. He went to his 1990 induction in Canton and read the stories comparing him to Lombardi, Don Shula, Paul Brown and the others who had essentially invented modern football.
His players, when they saw him on the nostalgia circuit, still dutifully called him Coach or Mr. Landry. He still wore the hat, even up to the moment he began his battle with something even more consistent than the coach's playbook -- the leukemia that led to the pneumonia, chemotherapy and a series of extended stays in the hospital.
By then, a retired Hollywood Henderson had come to see Landry in a different light: "Landry was easy to dislike. He was easy to criticize. He was easy to make fun of. But when it is all said and done, you want to be like him."
-more below
http://www.sportingnews.com/archives/landry/coach.html
Landry: America's coach
By Bill Minutaglio
For The Sporting News
The man in the fedora made the Cowboys winners, and Dallas was able to overcome the stigma of being the city where JFK was shot.
When Thomas Wade Landry alighted in Dallas, he hadn't planned on shifting the nation's gaze away from a nightmarish November day in that city in 1963 . . . shifting it toward something much more simple and sweet . . . shifting it toward a boy's game played by grown men in the pale light that comes before winter.
Landry, 75, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and coach of the Dallas Cowboys for the better part of three decades, died Saturday in Dallas from complications of leukemia. He had been hospitalized, on and off, for the last several months -- a period in which he received a steady round of visits, calls and notes from the dozens of stars he had coached over the years.
Until his death, Tom Landry valued consistency more than anything in life. Consistency in demeanor, preparation, execution and even dress -- and he refused to abandon his famous fedora long after it had gone out of fashion. The hat, of course, became a symbol; some said it was a sign that he had refused to change with the times.
One thing was clear: He continued to wear it even after he was stripped of the team he had nurtured for 29 years, the team that had defined his very existence.
He had come home to Texas and taken the helm of an expansion outfit awash in chaos, and then he became the focus of a city about to be engulfed in angst. But when he finally molded the Cowboys, when he ultimately presided over their ascension toward winners and the sometimes-controversial title of America's Team, he also helped lay to rest that city's awful burden as a place of violence and death.
Well beyond his inflexibly conservative religion and politics, well beyond his coldly calculating 4-3 defense and shotgun formation, he chose his life's work in a place blamed for the killing of a president . . . and then with each consistent Sunday, each eternal moment from Roger Staubach, Mel Renfro, Randy White, Tony Dorsett and Bob Lilly, he allowed his city to wear something other than grief on its sleeve.
Landry helped Dallas to win Super Bowls and, in so doing, helped the city to recover from its lingering image as the place where President John F. Kennedy had lost his life. That inadvertent rehabilitation of the city's psyche was one of his greatest accomplishments, said some of his heralded players.
"Our city was mired in this black cloud. It was where our president was shot," says defensive stalwart Charlie Waters. "Landry turned it around for us. He orchestrated it, he was the conductor that brought this city out of its doldrums."
* * *
If that is all true, then Landry started out life as the unlikeliest of band leaders.
He was born September 11, 1924, in Mission, Texas, deep in the soul of the Rio Grande Valley, a place where so many things are constant and where people are constantly resigned to them: the parched earth, the unrelenting heat, the grinding poverty, the entire sense that the Valley is an isolated island hanging for dear life onto the underbelly of the United States. He played tackle football in dirt lots and then joined the Army Air Corps, serving as a co-pilot and gunner in a B-17.
He was the unflappable, stone-faced co-captain of the University of Texas football team. In 1949, as professional football lurched forward in the U.S., he played defensive back, running back and punted as a member of the New York Yankees in the All-America Football Conference.
He played the same positions the next six years for the New York Giants, an indelible participant in the last days of an old-school, bruising, black-and-blue version of the game that men such as George Halas and Vince Lombardi knew all too well -- but he also was someone who seemed destined to take the game to another, maybe more cerebral level.
He played in the Pro Bowl after the 1954 season, but he also was moving toward coaching -- he was a player-coach in 1954 and 1955 and then an assistant coach with the Giants from 1956 to '59. At night, in the hotels, the assistant coach would call out to Sam Huff and anybody else passing in the hallway -- begging, cajoling, demanding that they come in and see this new X, this new O, this new four-men-up-front and three-men-back scheme that he was tinkering with, probably without realizing that it would revolutionize the way defense was played.
Steve Owen, his coach his first four years with the Giants, had said the words that would linger and percolate in Landry's fertile mind:
"The best offense can be built around 10 basic plays, the best defense on two. All the rest is razzle-dazzle, egomania and box office."
It was, Landry decided, the only way to view life both on and off the field.
It was, he also decided, a wise idea to incorporate every single bit of Owen's admonition, including the razzle-dazzle, into the Thomas Wade Landry Playbook.
* * *
After New York, there was the chance to come back home to Texas, where, perhaps, things could be more predictable . . . constant. Tom Landry liked that idea and in 1960, he was named head coach of the new expansion team in Dallas. His first grinding year, he went 0-11-1, and only his wife, Alicia, understood what it meant for him to earn that tie, on the next-to-last game of the season against the Giants. It took seven seasons before Landry fielded a winning team -- and long anxious moments wondering whether he would get another year to coach . . . or even another team to coach.
In 1963, the year President Kennedy was killed, it was almost a given that Landry would be gone. But instead, Clint Murchison Jr., the crew cut-wearing, oil-man owner, did the unthinkable: After another losing season and only 13 victories in Landry's first four years, Murchison gave his coach an unheard of 10-year contract extension. And when it happened, it was clearly all about consistency.
And when Landry finally had a winning team, he went ahead and had another one, another one, and another one, until there were 20 straight winning seasons. As the dogged victory patterns took shape, so did the habits of style: He was the man in the hat and the tie, the man who felt an obligation to impart a sense of morality in what he perceived to be increasingly immoral times. He didn't smoke. He didn't curse. He might drink wine if he was forced to be at a function at the home of the team's owner.
He was, some said, one of the last coaching autocrats. "He, in an odd way, along with Lombardi, symbolized the old age when a coach had complete authority," says author David Halberstam.
He was emotionally flatlined in meetings, practices, on the sideline. His face, his voice, his carriage never seemed to twist with any discernible passion. The ones who wanted to bend more with the times -- Pete Gent, Duane Thomas and Bob Hayes -- thought he was distant and robot-like for a 1960s and '70s world that was hellbent on celebrating ambiguity.
"I believed he was plastic, he was unemotional, he was unavailable," says linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, someone who frequently tested Landry's boundaries but later came to deeply admire the man. "I found him to be cold, stoic, unreachable and almost sort of scary. He wasn't a touchy-feely coach. He treated you like you were working at a factory."
But on the field, there was something far beyond ambiguity. Landry, if anything, seemed drained of personal spontaneity because he had thrown it all on the field. For a rigid man who made a cigar store Indian look like a convulsing Jerry Lewis, Landry stunned his players with his schemes and dreams on the chalkboard:
Somewhere in the refuse heap of football wisdom he had seen something bright and shiny, something discarded probably because it was considered too gaudy for that nuts-and-bolts world from which he emerged in the '50s. But when Landry dusted off the shotgun formation and whispered about it to Roger Staubach . . . Captain America . . . he had found just what he was looking for.
Call it controlled chaos. Call it an amphetamine-paced chess game. One thing was clear. To do it, and to do it right, you had to be consistent. Everyone had to know his place. Everyone had to execute. It had everything to do with Landry's credo: Faith. Training. A Goal. The Will.
It wasn't anything different, really, from his days as a kid in the desperate Rio Grande Valley, his days as a gunner, his days convincing Sam Huff and all the others that he had these interesting ideas about how to play football better than the other guys.
Tom Landry was an undeniable innovator, one of the men who ushered in the modern, icily efficient, computerized era of pro football, and he uncorked his mathematical approach to the game well before anybody was using computers. He had studied engineering in college and was one of the first men in football to chart opposing offensive patterns, studying exactly how many times a team ran to the right, left and up the middle, studying it so hard that he knew when it would happen again.
He had perfected the flex defense, a way of forcing the play back against itself -- ordering his linebackers and defensive backs to move the opposing chess pieces where they really didn't want to go. He was one of the first modern-era coaches to dictate that stealth, quickness and speed often were the bedrocks of a good player and a great team. He was among the first, maybe the first, to overhaul a defensive scheme on the fly with signals from the sideline.
There were backdoor plays, fake punts and gadgetry that seemed even more startling because of their source. Opposing players, coaches and fans looked at the unemotional man in the hat and then looked at the consistent, controlled havoc he was unleashing on the field, and simply marveled. In the end, his most ironic gift to football was an unpredictable style of play that often seemed completely out of sync with his personality.
His gift to a city, once his system took hold, was a sense of unbridled exhilaration. The city, the state, had never really had anything approaching a professional, national winner. And with it came something else -- that sense of closure with the Kennedy tragedy.
In the wake of the assassination, the city was so vilified that when the Cowboys traveled to other cities, baggage handlers refused to handle their luggage -- simply because the players were from Dallas.
"Anyone who was from Dallas was blamed as a conspirator in the death of John F. Kennedy," says author Peter Golenbock, who has written extensively about the team. But that image began changing when the team began winning. "No longer was it Dallas -- the city that killed John F. Kennedy," says Golenbock. "It was Dallas -- home of the Dallas Cowboys. America's Team."
Along with those 20 straight winning seasons, there were the two Super Bowl wins, the five NFC championships, the 13 division titles and the 270 victories (including postseason), third- most in NFL history. There was the endless parade of stars, characters, convicts and rock-ribbed warriors: Dandy Don Meredith, Jethro Pugh, Chuck Howley, Calvin Hill, Charlie Waters, Billy Joe DuPree, Golden Richards, Preston Pearson, Pettis Norman, Eddie LeBaron, Lance Rentzel. There were the Cowboys cheerleaders, the ultimate incongruity gyrating right behind the proper Christian coach. And through it all -- the toy-gun toting sideline mascot Crazy Ray, the over-the-top Texas millionaire owners such as Murchison and Bum Bright, the Hail Mary passes -- there was always only one certifiable consistency on the Cowboys.
Thomas Wade Landry.
"My God, he was like a surgeon when he stood at the chalkboard and charted plays. No matter what questions we had, he had answers," says Waters. "He was flawless. He was stoic, poised, dignified. He certainly had an impersonal style, but that was because he had developed a calloused demeanor so he could do his job well. He ran it like an office. He was a coach's coach, not a player's coach. He was very, very disciplined."
Then, as time wore on and perhaps as he sensed his own mortality, he slowly began to preach a slightly different life formula.
This time, as the great Bob Lilly has said, Landry had begun to tell his players that there were only three important things in life, and in this order: God, family and football.
By the late '80s, toward the end of his time as coach, there were almost unfathomable whispers that football was such a distant third on his list that Dallas didn't need him anymore. That, really, time had slipped by him when the team went 3-13 in 1988. That his innovations had been borrowed by others, stood upside down, reinvented and re-sculpted to the point where it wasn't that important to have the one constant on the Dallas sideline . . . the only constant in the team's entire history:
The man in the hat.
The whispers reached to Arkansas when, in 1989, someone from that state had either the bravery or the effrontery to buy the Cowboys and tell their only coach that it was time to leave. The bittersweet twin tugs of familiarity with the past and freedom for the future washed over the city.
Landry distanced himself from new owner Jerry Jones, tried not to show his sense of betrayal. He settled into a citizen emeritus role in Texas, crisscrossing the state and appearing at hundreds of charity dinners, golf tournaments and fund-raisers. He continued to jog and lift weights, just as he had done almost every day that he had coached. He went to his 1990 induction in Canton and read the stories comparing him to Lombardi, Don Shula, Paul Brown and the others who had essentially invented modern football.
His players, when they saw him on the nostalgia circuit, still dutifully called him Coach or Mr. Landry. He still wore the hat, even up to the moment he began his battle with something even more consistent than the coach's playbook -- the leukemia that led to the pneumonia, chemotherapy and a series of extended stays in the hospital.
By then, a retired Hollywood Henderson had come to see Landry in a different light: "Landry was easy to dislike. He was easy to criticize. He was easy to make fun of. But when it is all said and done, you want to be like him."
-more below
