The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul

by Chad Millman; Shawn Coyne

  Meanwhile, down in Louisiana, Bradshaw was realizing a lifelong dream. Johnny Unitas had told him he was expecting big things. So had Y. A. Tittle. Don Shula said he was willing to trade six draft picks to get him. But Bradshaw was going to Pittsburgh. When asked how he felt, he replied, "Thrilled. I wanted to go with a loser."

  He got his wish.

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  BUYING INTO THE NFL WAS NO BARGAIN. THERE WAS THE $600,000 Murchison shelled out for the rights to the Dallas franchise. And there was the low-man-on-the-totem-pole treatment from his fellow owners. They insisted that Murchison's new team begin play immediately, to compete with Hunt's AFL franchise. Established too late to participate in the 1960 draft, Murchison's new team would be built solely from cast-offs the other NFL teams didn't want.

  But Murchison didn't care. Chicago Bears owner George Halas had already recommended a close friend--and former boss of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle--to help Murchison run the new Dallas franchise. Texas Schramm Jr.--named after his Texan father, but raised in Los Angeles--entered professional football as the head of publicity for the Los Angeles Rams in 1947. A graduate of the University of Texas with a degree in journalism, he'd often write and edit different Rams coverage stories for L.A.'s five competing newspapers. Pro football was of such ancillary interest at the time that not one of the papers had a writer on staff to cover it.

  Schramm was like a carnival barker--selling his team to the public--and the work paid off in larger crowds and a local television deal. Soon after joining the team, Schramm was named the Rams GM and became the right-hand man to the mercurial Rams owner, Dan Reeves. He hired an old friend, Tex Maule, to shore up the PR department and eventually put a fresh-faced PR apprentice, Pete Rozelle, on staff. (Maule would go on to become the lead pro football writer at a startup magazine called Sports Illustrated.)

  Reeves, the son of privilege, had dreamed of owning a football team. After buying the Rams in 1941, he stayed out late in L.A. talking football with whoever would listen and fired coaches as frequently as he changed shirts. He was intimately involved in managing the day-to-day activities of the team, and Schramm realized that no matter how creative he was, the team would never truly be his. He was an employee, and he had ambition for more. When he resigned in 1957 to take a job at CBS Sports, Pete Rozelle took his place.

  For three years, Schramm learned the television business, negotiating CBS's contracts with the NFL to broadcast the games. He stayed close with the owners, and one of them, George Halas, sensed that Schramm missed the concentrated, full-bore effort it took to run a football team. When Clint Murchison Jr. asked Halas whom he should hire to put together his new football team, Halas gave him one name. "Tex." Murchison loved the symmetry.

  And Schramm loved Murchison's management strategy. During their first meeting, he looked Murchison straight in the eye and said, "The only person the players should be responsible to is the coach, and the only person the coach is responsible to is the general manager." The Murchison family bought new toys all the time. But they didn't put them together. They hired someone else to do that. In an extraordinary acknowledgment of his power, Murchison agreed to let Schramm attend all league meetings and vote for the Cowboy franchise.

  Schramm got right to work. He hired a Texas-born head coach, Tom Landry, a full month before the Cowboys became an official NFL franchise. A colleague of New York Giants offensive coordinator Vince Lombardi, Landry headed up the Giants' game-changing defense. A former all-pro defensive back, Landry had an exceptional strategic and tactical mind. While he acknowledged the necessity of being fundamentally flawless with superior blocking and tackling (the Lombardi credo), he also anticipated the day when physical excellence would not be enough. Beating your opponent with your mind would be the margin of victory in the future. With expert forethought and planning, a team that created a strategic advantage (a system that would adapt to the tactical strengths of an opponent) would be able to outflank a better team and win. He had already turned theory into practice when he devised the run-stopping 4-3 defensive scheme for the Giants, which made the middle linebacker the central figure. With four down linemen engaging the offensive line, the unblocked middle linebacker would scan the offensive backfield and meet the running back at the line of scrimmage. With Landry's innovation, the Giants had the best defense in the NFL in both 1958 and 1959. With the Cowboys, Schramm was giving Landry the chance to mold a champion in his own image.

  Gil Brandt, a former scout for the Los Angeles Rams during Schramm's tenure, was hired to sort out player personnel and negotiate contracts. A former children's portrait photographer in Milwaukee, Brandt was affable, an enthusiast. He liked to be liked. As a Big Ten scout for Schramm at the Rams, he had developed a network of college and high school coaches who would evaluate talent and send him detailed reports. Jack Elway, father of legendary quarterback John Elway, used to scout for Brandt in Washington State. Brandt would go to the annual college all-star game and throw a big party for the college coaches, their assistants, and his scouts to make sure that his men got preferential treatment on campus. He was also the master of the birthday card for any coach's kid that came along with free Dallas Cowboy paraphernalia.

  Brandt's network was rich and deep, almost too deep, because he and Schramm found the player data that came in to be overwhelming. Schramm thought about how best to sift the data into a definitive and clean recommendation. After watching an IBM computer tabulate and update the results of the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Schramm contacted IBM to do something similar for the Cowboys' scouting problem. They put him in touch with a lead scientist at one of their subsidiaries, Service Bureau Corporation in Palo Alto, California. Indian-born Salam Quereishi, who would today be called a software programmer, answered the call. Despite serious language barriers--with accompanying red-faced Schramm exasperation, Quereishi and Schramm devised a brilliant evaluation process to find the best prospects for the Cowboy system. Fifteen different categories defined each player. He would be given a numeric grade between 1 and 9, with 3 being average. Schramm understood that performance at the professional level was so competitive that a small edge separated outstanding from extraordinary. With five levels of above average, he demanded that scouts think harder about what truly made each player special.

  After four years and millions of dollars invested in the system, Schramm's computer finally went online just before the 1964 college draft. In a dramatic culmination of money, time, and systematic management, the IBM 7090/7094 spit out the fifteen best professional prospects in that year's draft. It did not select the Heisman Trophy winner, John Huarte from Notre Dame, or his runner-up, Jerry Rhome from Tulsa. The first name on the list was Alabama quarterback Joe Namath. Huarte and Rhome would never become pro football stars. Namath would become, well, Namath. Schramm's computer was right on the money. And in that first draft, it helped the Cowboys select three Hall of Famers: Mel Renfro, Bob Hayes, and Roger Staubach.

  With its space-age computer system, the Dallas Cowboys' system became the most efficient, regimented, and machine-like operation in professional football. Schramm was the central power, the big brother whom Landry and Brandt would bring in when they disagreed. The former PR man ran the day-to-day and made it his mission to sell the franchise to the people of Dallas and, ultimately, to the entire country. A bit over six feet tall, he was a burly, thick-necked presence, jowly and chubby-cheeked. His thinning hair, cold-eyed squint, and pursed expression put people on edge. For good reason. He had a very short fuse and would turn red with rage whenever things didn't go his or the Cowboys way. But he also liked to share time and a glass of whiskey and conversation. When he needed to be, he was very charming. One Cowboy once described him as "dishonest, sick, and demented," to which Schramm responded, "He got two out of three."

  Perfectly in tune with the city's status as home to the freewheeling ten-gallon-hat millionaire, Schramm took a page from Stanley Marcus of Dallas's retail mecca, Neiman Marcus, and up-marketed the C
owboys to Dallas's nouveau riche. Most NFL teams kept their offices in the bowels of their stadiums or in beat-up office space in town. But in 1966, with Murchison's blank check, Schramm oversaw the build-out of the new Cowboy headquarters on the North Central Expressway. On the eleventh floor of a modern fifteen-story tower built and owned by Murchison, the office space was the most expensively constructed in Dallas. Schramm loaded it with terrazzo and Italian marble and state-of-the-art sunscreens. The message to the city and the country was that the Cowboys organization was new and fresh, far different from the dusty and generic industrial teams.

  The Cowboy uniform also evolved. The helmets went from white, which had a tendency to get scuffed and dirty, to silver. The lone star became more clearly defined with an additional border detail. The pants morphed from traditional white to better-stain-hiding metallic blue. And their home uniforms, instead of featuring a signature color, were white. The silver sheen of their helmets reflected class and wealth, and the purity of their uniform reinforced the image. The Cowboys conjured adventure and success. They were the good guys, and win or lose, in the long run, their rightful place was at the top.

  Schramm also anointed himself a league counselor to his former protege, Rozelle. Other franchise owners referred to him in private as "Mr. Vice-Commissioner." His primary concern was competition with the AFL. Convinced that the salary wars between the two would increase the pay scale of players and further threaten the Cowboys' bottom line (of which Murchison gave him a vested interest in the form of ownership options), Schramm, along with Rozelle, made plans to negotiate a merger. Merger had been discussed several times in previous years, but the terms the NFL imposed on the upstarts never got any meaningful discussion off the ground. The NFL wanted to move the Jets and the Raiders out of New York and Oakland, and they were asking for $50 million for reparations. But after the riches handed out to college players at the AFL and NFL draft, Schramm thought the timing couldn't be more perfect. First, Rozelle secured informal approval from Congress that the merger wouldn't violate any antitrust laws (he promised Louisiana Senator Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs a New Orleans expansion franchise). Then Schramm was tasked with working it out with Hunt.

  The two met in secret at the Texas Ranger statue at Love Field airport in Dallas. Hunt agreed with Schramm about the impending doom that both leagues would confront if players' salaries continued to escalate. Hunt also agreed that the two leagues together would create something much more powerful than apart. Ever since the AFL's coming of age in 1962 with its fifty million-plus championship viewers, the networks and the public had clamored for a true championship that would pit the AFL winner against the NFL winner. Plus the television package that the combined league would be able to demand could take professional football to a whole new level. In further talks at Hunt's home, they ironed out the AFL reparations and whittled the number down to $18 million.

  The final sticking point was the NFL's requirement that the AFL's Raiders and Jets relocate. Giants owner Wellington Mara finally caved on the issue. Kicking Joe Namath out of New York would not enamor him to New York's pro football fan base. "If I try to get the Jets moved," he said, "I'll be crucified." Schramm found the perfect solution. Eight million of the $18 million in payments would go to San Francisco, and $10 million would go to the Giants.

  In June 1966, Hunt, Schramm, and Rozelle held a press conference and announced the merger. The leagues would have a common draft of college players beginning in 1966. And by the 1970 regular season, all ten AFL teams would integrate with the sixteen NFL franchises and begin interleague play. At the end of the 1966 season, a professional championship game would be played between the champion of the AFL and the champion of the NFL at a neutral site. This was the announcement that pro football fans had been awaiting for six years.

  Just six years into his reign as GM of the Cowboys, Schramm negotiated on behalf of NFL owners who'd held franchises for more than forty years, and he delivered one of the best deals in the history of the league.

  Rozelle rewarded Schramm with the most influential committee positions--head of the NFL's competition committee, which changes the rules of the game when it deems necessary, and executive and president of the NFL Executive Committee, which negotiates league-wide contracts with the NFL Players Association.

  But as a former CBS Sports executive, Schramm's greatest influence was on establishing the Cowboys as a broadcasting brand. He had connections and worked tirelessly to get his team as much national television exposure as possible. The Cowboys joined the Detroit Lions as hosts of an annual Thanksgiving game, and he successfully lobbied for preferential scheduling and in-depth coverage on NFL pregame shows. The Cowboy game became the predominant late-afternoon game, televised nationally as the second game of NFL doubleheader coverage after the local teams played at one o'clock. Schramm made the Cowboys the first to fund a weekly newspaper dedicated to all things Cowboys, and he always picked up the tab for the local press, on the road and off.

  On the field, the cobbled-together 1960 Cowboys had an ignominious start, going winless in their opening season. In fact, it wasn't until they faced the feckless Steelers in the first game of the 1961 season that they got into the win column. But Landry, like Noll, had plans and patience and surety of purpose. His team lacked a potent running threat. His raw offensive line, duct-taped together from past-their-prime veterans, was not the surest protector of his bright young quarterback Don Meredith. Landry knew that his best offense would be to confuse the opposition's defense. He needed to create a split second of uncertainty to give his team an edge.

  So he created multiple offensive formations and had his skill players roam back and forth along the line of scrimmage before the snap. But his greatest and most lasting innovation had nothing to do with play sets. It was nothing more than a show, but one that dazzled the crowd and bedeviled the defense. Just before snapping the ball, the Cowboys offensive line would, in unison, do a stand-up, get-down herky jerk. It was a last-second reset--and it completely erased any keys a defensive lineman might have been zeroing in on. The team might have stunk those first few years, but it was entertaining. By 1962, the stand-up, get-down gimmick was the pistol start for an offensive scheme that scored the second-most points in the NFL.

  The Cowboys had been potent enough that, in 1963, Lamar Hunt moved the AFL's Dallas Texans to Kansas City. The Cotton Bowl, the South Dallas stadium home to both teams, was half filled or less for both the Texans and the Cowboys, despite substantial marketing efforts. Hunt was losing close to $1 million a year; Murchison's losses averaged $500,000. But Hunt was trying to do more than make a team go, he was building a league. And he knew two franchises in Dallas couldn't last. In Kansas City, Hunt's Chiefs became a powerhouse of his emerging business.

  Murchison, meanwhile, shrugged off his losses. He was rumored to be worth north of $800 million. He saw the team as a plaything, not a source of income. But now, as the only game in town, his team's audience began to grow, with attendance rising steadily from an average of 27,417 in the first year to 67,625 in 1966. It helped that, with Landry's improving offense, the team got better year after year, winning four games in '63, five in '64, and seven in '65.

  By 1966, with shrewd drafting and consistent, mechanized "system" coaching--a philosophy that demands player adherence to game plans, not game plans devised to accommodate player strengths and weaknesses--the Cowboys won ten games and found themselves playing Landry's old colleague Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers at their home stadium, South Dallas's Cotton Bowl, for the NFL Championship. The winner would go on to the first Super Bowl between the two professional leagues. It was a fluke, really. The Cowboys had only one starter over thirty--linebacker Chuck Howley--and no one considered them to be among the league's first-class teams. And yet, playing Lombardi's fundamentally perfect machine of a team, they stayed close, losing by just a touchdown after Meredith's last-ditch effort was intercepted in the end zone.

  In 1967, the
Cowboys got back to the NFL Championship. But this time they played at Green Bay's Lambeau Field. It was -13 degrees outside, and in a game that would be dubbed "The Ice Bowl," the Cowboys trailed 14-10 in the fourth. That's when Landry risked a fumbling, bumbling end to the game by calling a halfback option, hoping his players' frozen fingers could hold on to the ball through the trick play. It worked. Halfback Dan Reeves threw a fifty-yard pass to wideout Lance Rentzel, and the Cowboys led 17-14.

  But the Cowboys defense couldn't hold the lead. With sixteen seconds left, Packers quarterback Bart Starr snuck across the goal line for the winning score. On the trip back to Dallas, Rentzel later said, "not one word was spoken the entire flight."

  The Cowboys continued to dominate in the regular season, winning their division each year while posting a combined 23-4-1 record in 1968 and 1969. But again, in the playoffs, they stumbled, losing twice to the Cleveland Browns in the first round. Schramm, Brandt, and especially Landry obsessed. A former employee of NFL films recalled, "Landry came in for something or other, and all of a sudden he just started talking about those two losses. He really wasn't talking to me--anyone would have done--it was just something he had to say. He said, 'It's a lack of character, in the team and in myself. We just don't have what it takes. Maybe we never will. Maybe I never will.'"

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