Ling joined a growing list of modern leaders driving the new American economy--Harold Geneen of International Telegraph and Telephone, Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf and Western, Troy V. Post of Great America Corporation, and John and Clint Murchison Jr. of Murchison Brothers. They were rogue dealmakers controlling billions of dollars' worth of American manufacturing. They owned mansions and traveled by jet. Ling's spread in Dallas, a Louis XV-like monstrosity, included reproductions of the grounds at Versailles.
Almost every product LTV Corp. made required some form of steel. The car industry was booming in Detroit, and demand had remained steady year after year since the end of World War II. Ling's research indicated that technological improvements at mills would increase productivity and reduce labor costs. Plus, the eleven major steel manufacturers basically set their own prices based on their costs. If costs rose, they just unilaterally raised the price of steel. The federal government also imposed tariffs on foreign imports of steel, so that the big steel manufacturers wouldn't lose customers. What better prize to add to a dazzling array of companies than a large stake in the American steel industry?
Ling's method to get J&L Steel would later be termed a leveraged buyout. He used LTV Corp.'s roster of subsidiary companies as collateral to secure $425 million in cash on credit. The $425 million bought him a majority 63 percent share in the steel manufacturer. J&L's board of directors--who had more than a hundred years of institutional memory between them--accepted Ling's offer and gave LTV Corp. the option to buy the remaining shares at a future date.
After conferring with Ling, J&L's chairman, Charles M. Beeghly, informed the board that, "there will be no management or personnel changes at Jones and Laughlin."
That was the good news. The bad news was that, after the takeover, managers no longer owned shares and did not participate in the profits of the company. The tension inherent in their relationship with the workforce slackened, as their new cars and vacations were no longer dependent on J&L productivity and profits. Their lives became about punching a clock, in essence, as they hoped to get through the day with as little turmoil as possible.
With little pressure to perform, the J&L steelworkers slackened their pace. The monotony involved in much of the work--shovel this here, move it over there, pick this up, dump it over there, press this lever, pour it into the molds, tap the blast, etc.--is at best mind-numbing. What held the men up was the united effort for a common goal. When massive orders came in and demand exceeded supply, the men responded and quickened their pace. But that energy was short-lived and came with consequences. When demand slowed, workers were laid off. Almost always, in the "last hired, first fired" tradition of the unions, it was the younger guys. Their attitude became: Why bust my ass and work myself out of a job? "You wear two to three shirts a day, it's so hot. There's lots of gas, smoke, dirt. Some guys just tell the foreman 'No' and then rely on the union to protect their jobs," Ronald Koontz, a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, steelworker told The New York Times.
When James Ling diversified LTV Corp. with the purchase of J&L Steel, two and two seemed to add up to five. It would soon be more like zero.
21
THE 1971 OFF-SEASON UPENDED THE TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Duane Thomas in a way he'd not thought possible. The coach he respected and admired had singled him out as the bad cog in the machine. How had he gone from the key to Dallas's success to the rotten core of the Cowboy failure? He expected Landry to recognize his contributions, even if they disagreed about his role in the Super Bowl loss. It remained crystal clear in Thomas's mind: "Tom never once called me in and said, 'Duane, you had a great year.' That was all I ever asked," Thomas said. "Instead, what I got from him was this . . . and this . . . and this . . . the face, the chin, the compressed lips."
A season that he had spent trying to ignore his personal life so that he wouldn't be distracted from his professional life had come to a head. His divorce was proceeding. The IRS claimed he owed $10,000 in back taxes. His agent cashed his checks and paid none of his bills. Now he had to fix his financial mess himself. The first time he met Gil Brandt--before he'd been signed--Thomas asked him how a man can make a good living playing professional football. Brandt had told him, "By producing."
No one produced like Duane Thomas had in 1970. The evidence was incontrovertible. He'd asked other players in the league about their financial packages and discovered that just being Rookie of the Year on the Kansas City Chiefs was worth $50,000. He was Rookie of the Year for the entire NFL, and his bonus was just $10,000. Even the Oakland Raiders' owner Al Davis would tear up a contract if the player outperformed his salary. And Davis was known as the most business savvy owner in football. Thomas steadied himself and went to speak with Schramm and Brandt.
"The day that Duane went in to renegotiate, I was waiting in the outer office," Calvin Hill recalled. "I was getting ready to see them about redoing my own contract. I saw Duane walk out and storm to the elevator. I didn't know what Tex and Gil had said to him, but it scared me so much that I turned around and went home without even seeing them."
As a matter of policy, the Cowboy organization did not renegotiate signed contracts. Drafted rookies were expected to sign three-year deals with a signing bonus. Thomas had signed a deal that gave him $25,000 upon signing; salaries of $20,000 for 1970, $20,000 for 1971, and $22,000 for 1972; the $10,000 bonus for NFL Rookie of the Year; $5,000 for being named All-Pro; and $5,000 for rushing for more than six hundred yards. His 1969 predecessor, Yale's Calvin Hill, had signed a similar deal. "He came in with two Ivy League lawyers from Yale," Gil Brandt remembered. "It was like taking candy from a baby."
"From the first to the tenth rounds, I'll bet the pay wasn't more than $500 out of line on Cowboy contracts," said former Dallas lineman Blaine Nye. "We were in perfect lockstep. The difference came in the bonus money. But the base was always low. Maybe that's why we tried so hard to make the playoffs every year--for the money."
Brandt explained to Thomas that the best that they could do was to extend Thomas's deal another year and increase his annual salary. "I told him we'd rewrite his contract and tack on an extra year, and we'd pay him $40,000, $45,000 and $50,000 [he'd asked for $70,000 and $75,000 for his last two years]. We had a scale to follow. Hell, Bob Lilly [a Hall of Fame defensive lineman who was considered the finest in the game] was only making around $42,000 at the time," said Brandt. Thomas had two choices, the same ones that most Cowboy players faced eventually. Take the security of the new deal. Or "play out his option" and sign with another team three years later.
The NFL had twenty-six owners controlling the entire professional football market in 1971, and the option clauses in player contracts made sure wages stayed artificially low. Playing out an option for an NFL player required him to abide by the initial contract he signed (for Thomas a three-year deal) and then play an additional year at the "option" price set by the league's owners, a punishing 90 percent of their previous salary. If the player played out his option, he was allowed to sign as a free agent with any other team in the league.
But there was a catch. In 1963, Baltimore Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom signed wideout free agent R. C. Owens from the San Francisco 49ers. Commissioner Pete Rozelle was concerned that Rosenbloom's move would encourage other NFL owners to begin poaching players from one another. Competition from the AFL was already escalating player salaries, and Rozelle didn't want infighting from his owners to do the same. So he came up with the NFL's compensation rule to discourage free agency. It effectively crushed the ability for a player post-AFL-NFL merger to attain his market value. Later called "the Rozelle Rule," it required one team to compensate another for signing one of its former players. If the two clubs could not come to a mutually agreeable exchange, the commissioner was given the power to assign players, draft picks, or money to the franchise that lost the player.
Thereafter, Rozelle took on the role of Solomon, tabulating what he believed was fair and then imposing his decision on the respective teams. A franchise
never knew if Rozelle would award one of their star players to compensate another team for signing one of their free agents, so very few deals were done. In the four years before the merger, only eleven of the forty-two players who had played out their option were signed by a different team.
Thomas understood that playing out his option was a ludicrous choice. The average career for an NFL player is less than five years. The Dallas Cowboys would get the best years of his football career, and then he'd still be at the mercy of the owners and their commissioner.
Thomas reconsidered their offer to extend his contract and realized that the new deal would cover his debts and alimony, but would leave him with only subsistence wages. He'd be a star on the field, but a lackey off of it. Sharing his personal problems with the Cowboys gave them the opportunity to punch his situation into one of their computers. It spit out the best possible deal for the organization--keeping its star running back under their thumb at the lowest possible price. Schramm and Brandt had him just where they wanted him--insecure about his position with his head coach and saddled with debt. Some of the greatest players in the history of professional football--Lee Roy Jordan, Bob Lilly, Rayfield Wright--had faced the same circumstances before Thomas had. They had cowered and taken the Cowboy contract extensions.
Thomas spoke with the other players and learned the dark truth. "We had to keep winning to make any kind of money at all. Practice times had even been readjusted so we couldn't work a second job in the evening and try to make some extra money. It wasn't just the black players who were getting screwed, it was all of them, even great players like Jordan and Lilly."
Finally, Thomas reached out to Tom Landry for help. But Landry refused to intervene. He just repeated the oft-spoken Cowboy management mantra: "We don't renegotiate contracts."
Thomas spoke with Schramm again and offered to sign a contract that paid him purely for his performance, so many dollars for so many yards rushed, etc., for the upcoming 1971 season. Schramm refused, telling Thomas, "We can't structure a contract that way." At his wits' end, Thomas called Gil Brandt in March 1971 and told him he was retiring. Later that night he told the Dallas CBS affiliate, too. Schramm called his cronies in the media and set the record straight. The newspapers, radio shows, and TV stations attacked Thomas for being ungrateful and disloyal to the franchise, adding more fuel to the fire. Month after month, Thomas refused to live by the terms of his contract. Other Cowboys watched the drama. "A lot of players supported him but were afraid to come out publicly. It makes no difference what kind of ability you have. If an organization wants to rid itself of you, it can do it. We knew there were plenty of players out there who could have been playing the game but were denied the chance. The whole system is based on insecurity," Rayfield Wright later commented.
Just before the start of the 1971 summer camp, Thomas reached out to his hero, the retired football great Jim Brown, to represent him. Brown agreed and arranged a meeting with the organization. Schramm, Landry, and Brandt met with Thomas and Brown at an Executive Inn across from Schramm's favorite meeting place, Love Field. Brown was unmoved by Schramm's rants, but when Tom Landry looked in Brown's eyes and said, "Look, we want him to play for us," the old player in Brown relented. Even Jim Brown crumbled across the table from a head coach. He told Thomas to play the 1971 season under his current contract, and that he'd go to bat for him again the following year.
Thomas went to camp and performed like he always had, flawlessly. The media kept on him all the while, calling him militant, unappreciative, and cocky. Thomas bottled it all inside himself and resolved to play that season in silent protest. On July 20, 1971, he called a press conference at the Thousand Oaks, California, training-camp facility to announce that he would not be speaking the rest of the season. Goaded by the beat writers to tell his side of the story, Thomas said that the Cowboys had never made it to a Super Bowl before him and would not go back again without him. He was rational and kept his cool until he was asked about the three men at the top of the Cowboy pyramid. He called Tex Schramm "dishonest, sick, and totally demented," and Brandt a flat-out "liar." But he saved the most vitriol for the man he had once respected the most. Tom Landry was nothing but "a plastic man, no man at all." Thomas had lost any semblance of composure--calling a press conference to announce that he wasn't going to speak and then attacking his employer made him look and sound almost as crazy as Schramm had characterized him to the press.
After the controversy, Thomas asked to be traded, but not before he freaked out the entire organization by parading around camp in a dashiki, "shadowed by a small, dark man with only one name," as one writer put it. "There was a rumor going around camp," Calvin Hill remembered, "that Duane and the Muslims were going to kidnap Tex. Next morning Tex had four or five guards around him. It was wild." Brandt was more than happy to get rid of him. They traded Thomas to an old scout of Brandt's who had become general manager of the former Boston, now New England Patriots, Bucko Kilroy. The Patriots got Thomas, backup lineman Halvor Hagen, and wide receiver Honor Jackson, while the Cowboys received halfback Carl Garrett and a first-round draft choice.
But just five days after the trade, Kilroy called Brandt and told him the deal was off. Thomas had refused to listen to head coach John Mazur and walked off the field after Mazur had him line up behind fullback Jim Nance in a three-point stance. "I told him I wanted to stay up because I was having trouble seeing. We were in an I-formation. The fullback in front of me was big Jim Nance, 245 pounds, wide, a broad ass. How was I going to see around that? It became a clash of wills. 'You'll do it because I say so!' I never liked that phrase," remembered Thomas. The Cowboys said a deal's a deal, but NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle stepped in and ruled in favor of New England after Thomas refused a physical and blood test. Rumors began in earnest that Thomas was addicted to drugs.
Thomas went to California and took the blood test and physical, which he passed without incident. He hired yet another agent to speak with Schramm, who again refused to budge. At last, Thomas reported back to the Cowboys in September. He was put on their inactive list. Despite all of Thomas's distractions, Landry wanted him back. He decided that he'd put up with his militancy and let him run rogue in the locker room. The truth was that Thomas had alienated many of his teammates. He didn't appear to have any followers.
Thomas shut down completely, refusing to speak to the media, his teammates and even Landry himself. But on the field, Thomas was spectacular. After losing to the Washington Redskins in the third game of the 1971 season with only eighty-two yards to show on the ground, Landry activated Thomas. His first game was against Landry's former employer, the New York Giants, on the evening of Monday, November 11, 1971. It was the very first game played in Clint Murchison's brand-new, $25 million Texas Stadium. In front of Dallas's finest citizens on Monday Night Football, it was a game Tom Landry could not afford to lose.
Landry put Thomas on special teams--the blue-collar units that covered kickoffs and blocked for kick returns. Even more dangerous than line-of-scrimmage play, kickoff coverage is a place to test a man's resolve. They gave Thomas the wing, the position closest to the sideline on kickoffs. And they put him in the wedge, the brutal impact zone for opposing tacklers on kickoff returns. Thomas sped down the field on the opening kickoff and made a textbook tackle that caused a Giant fumble. He made two more tackles on kickoffs and made a pivotal block--upending his man--to pave the way for Cliff Harris's twenty-seven-yard touchdown return. When Calvin Hill sprained his knee in the second half, Thomas took over at tailback. He ran for sixty yards on nine carries. The Cowboys won, 20-13.
Thomas was back and better than ever on the field. But he still refused to speak. Beat writers started calling him "The Sphinx." As his resistance to the organization grew, so did his influence on his fellow Cowboys. Calvin Hill recalled, "I suppose that in the deepest part of me was admiration. He was like the silent slave. He said nothing, but maybe he took the gear out of the machinery. Once Dr. Marvin Knight, our tea
m doctor, came into the trainer's room, looking for Duane. 'Where's Duane?' he said. Oh, there's the son of a bitch. How ya doing?' Duane said, 'When you learn how to address me, I'll tell you how I'm doing,' and he got in the whirlpool and turned his back. I felt like pounding on the table. 'Yeah! Yeah!'"
With Thomas, the Cowboys cruised through the season and compiled an 11-3 record. His play was so outstanding that even Landry reached out to shake his hand after one remarkable touchdown run. Thomas stared Landry down, refused to shake, and then bypassed the outstretched hands of teammates Rayfield Wright and Jethro Pugh. When player-coach Dan Reeves was tasked to take roll call at every meeting, Thomas refused to answer. Reeves was so incensed that he went to Landry for justice. But Landry ignored him. "I still have nightmares about that roll call. Duane made Landry bend to him and do something I thought was unfair, and I've never forgotten it," Reeves recalled.
The Cowboys beat the Vikings in the first round and the 49ers again in the NFC Championship to reach their second Super Bowl in a row. Thomas scored touchdowns in each of those games. Media day for Super Bowl VI spooked every journalist who walked past a corner of Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. There Duane Thomas sat, as he was ordered to do by his boss, for picture and interview day. He remained silent for his allotted twenty minutes, refusing to add more verbiage and hype to an already overblown American ritual. Pete Rozelle didn't dine out on this performance.
The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul Page 11