Post by scorpion42 on Nov 7, 2008 16:01:02 GMT -7
Bob Lilly remembers the day Tom Landry wept
By RAY BUCK
rbuck@star-telegram.com
Tom Landry rarely showed any emotion.
Star-Telegram Archives
Bob Lilly places a franchise tag on this next bit of Dallas Cowboys trivia.
Halloween 1965: "The Day Tom Landry Wept."
It happened 43 years ago last week and can easily be summed up as five minutes of raw emotion from a man who rarely showed any.
"That was the beginning of the Dallas Cowboys, really," Lilly said of Landry’s tearful speech after a 22-13 loss at Pittsburgh.
Bob Hayes was a celebrated rookie, at the time, headed to his first Pro Bowl. Don Meredith was hurling TD passes (22) at a rate of 2 1/2 times better than the season before (9).
Five members of Landry’s Doomsday Defense — Lilly, Andrie, Howley, Renfro and Green — were getting ready to punch their ticket to the Pro Bowl, including Mr. Cowboy himself for a third time in what would be an 11-time Pro Bowl career.
But nothing during that 7-7 season carried more clout than Landry’s words inside a crowded visitors locker room at old Pitt Stadium.
"I’ll never forget ’em," Lilly said of Landry’s words on Oct. 31, 1965. "They’re like printed on my mind."
Goblins filled the air
The ’65 Cowboys were a trendy preseason pick to win the Eastern Conference. By Halloween Day, however, the frost was off the pumpkin.
Dallas was 2-4, and riding a four-game losing streak into Pittsburgh to face a 1-5 Steelers team.
QB Bill Nelsen would suddenly get hot and fire a pair of second-quarter touchdown passes to Gary Ballman. thingy Hoak, a future Steelers coaching fixture for both Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher, added another TD on the ground.
The Steelers shocked the Cowboys 22-13, and now Dallas had lost five in a row.
"Afterward, Coach Landry was very down," Lilly said. "This was my fifth year in the league, and we had been picked to win the Eastern Conference by Sports Illustrated, I think it was. Then this ..."
In those days, there were few clunkers worse than a loss to Pittsburgh on any team’s schedule.
"We came into the locker room, and were just fixin’ to take a shower," recalled Lilly, "when Coach Landry asked everybody except players and coaches to leave."
Standing in the middle of the locker room, Landry began with a simple apology to everyone.
He told the team, "Y’all have worked hard; I just want you to know that. Y’all have done everything I’ve asked you to do ... [and] I just want to thank y’all for your cooperation and hard work.
"I probably won’t be here next year."
"I’ve let y’all down"
It was a painful thing to watch.
Landry explained how he and Vince Lombardi, a pair of former New York Giants assistants, had broken down film and studied every scheme known to man in the NFL before becoming head coaches themselves.
"I came up with the 'Flex’ defense and multiple offense, and I felt like these were going to be the offense and defense of the future," Landry told the team.
"I feel now that I’ve let y’all down."
With that, Landry began weeping.
"That [tearful] part lasted probably a minute or two," Lilly recalled. "But it seemed like an hour."
Landry’s outpouring of emotion rendered the same two conclusions to anyone inside that locker room that day: 1.) It wasn’t contrived and 2.) it profoundly touched everyone.
"I was a rookie at the time," said Dan Reeves, "and seeing tears in Coach Landry’s eyes showed me that he was a coach who really cared."
Said Lilly: "We hadn’t been around him all that long. We knew he was a brilliant tactician ... persistent ... had great integrity ... a fine man."
Lilly paused.
"What we didn’t know, until that day," Lilly added, "was that he was a very compassionate man."
The current Cowboys are experiencing some of the same things Lilly described of the ’65 team.
"Things just didn’t roll our way — and sometimes that happens in football," Lilly said. "It wasn’t like we weren’t trying ... and it wasn’t like Coach Landry wasn’t coaching.
"But then when it did come together, everything came together for a long time. The nucleus of that ’65 team became the nucleus of our first Super Bowl team."
Becoming a winner
The ’65 Cowboys went on to win five of their last seven games to finish 7-7.
That was the last time a Cowboys team didn’t play, or come within a game of earning a chance to play, for the NFL championship over the next eight years.
Beginning in ’66, Landry’s Cowboys made the playoffs 18 times in 20 years.
"I don’t know exactly what it did," Lilly said of Landry’s tears, "but it touched us. It touched our hearts. That was the beginning of the Dallas Cowboys; really ... that’s how I feel about it."
Cowboys players reached down and gave more effort to preparation, more focus to assignments, more diligence to winning, more effort to what Landry expected.
Lilly admitted, "I think [Halloween Day ’65] made us a lot more serious about what we were doing."
In their first five years, the Cowboys averaged 3.6 wins per year — all losing seasons. So, 7-7 in ’65 was a high-water mark for this franchise.
And now with the advent of the Super Bowl, Dallas lost back-to-back championship games (’66 and ’67) to Green Bay and back-to-back Eastern Conference title games (’68 and ’69) to Cleveland.
The Cowboys had gone from being a team that the coach thought he had let down to a team growing sick and tired being called "Next Year’s Champions."
Progress? Maybe, but one wasn’t any easier than the other to stand around and watch, if you were a Dallas Cowboy.
Lilly’s victory cigar
Roger Staubach once called winning Super Bowl VI "the happiest I’ve ever been as an athlete."
Lilly can’t argue.
The Cowboys had suffered a lot of big-game pain, the most recent one being a 16-13 loss to the Baltimore Colts in SB V.
That made the next year’s three-touchdown win over Miami in SB VI even sweeter, but nobody was thinking that way when rookie kicker Jim O’Brien’s 32-yard field goal sailed through the uprights with five seconds left in SB V.
Lilly still knows the agony and ecstasy of these two Super Bowls: SB V at Miami’s Orange Bowl and SB VI at New Orleans’ Tulane Stadium.
He took the same victory cigar to both places.
"Of course, I didn’t need it the first time. So, I kept the cigar in one of those glass-tube containers that it comes in," said Lilly, who wasn’t a cigar smoker/never has been a cigar smoker.
He returned home from Super Bowl V with the unlit cigar, and stuck it in the freezer.
"I took it with me to Super Bowl VI the next year, but by then the cigar was pretty rotten. It tasted bad. It smelled bad.
"I could hardly keep it together ... but I finally got it lit."
The cigar was a Cuban, or so he was told. It was gift from the late Bud Cooper, a Tyler businessman whom Lilly credits with "teaching me how not to lose money."
What really went up in smoke that day in New Orleans were a lot of bad memories of big-game losses by the Cowboys.
But it was about to change for this franchise.
And no one would shed a tear over that.
Up Next: Bob Lilly discusses his new book, A Cowboy’s Life.
By RAY BUCK
rbuck@star-telegram.com
Tom Landry rarely showed any emotion.
Star-Telegram Archives
Bob Lilly places a franchise tag on this next bit of Dallas Cowboys trivia.
Halloween 1965: "The Day Tom Landry Wept."
It happened 43 years ago last week and can easily be summed up as five minutes of raw emotion from a man who rarely showed any.
"That was the beginning of the Dallas Cowboys, really," Lilly said of Landry’s tearful speech after a 22-13 loss at Pittsburgh.
Bob Hayes was a celebrated rookie, at the time, headed to his first Pro Bowl. Don Meredith was hurling TD passes (22) at a rate of 2 1/2 times better than the season before (9).
Five members of Landry’s Doomsday Defense — Lilly, Andrie, Howley, Renfro and Green — were getting ready to punch their ticket to the Pro Bowl, including Mr. Cowboy himself for a third time in what would be an 11-time Pro Bowl career.
But nothing during that 7-7 season carried more clout than Landry’s words inside a crowded visitors locker room at old Pitt Stadium.
"I’ll never forget ’em," Lilly said of Landry’s words on Oct. 31, 1965. "They’re like printed on my mind."
Goblins filled the air
The ’65 Cowboys were a trendy preseason pick to win the Eastern Conference. By Halloween Day, however, the frost was off the pumpkin.
Dallas was 2-4, and riding a four-game losing streak into Pittsburgh to face a 1-5 Steelers team.
QB Bill Nelsen would suddenly get hot and fire a pair of second-quarter touchdown passes to Gary Ballman. thingy Hoak, a future Steelers coaching fixture for both Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher, added another TD on the ground.
The Steelers shocked the Cowboys 22-13, and now Dallas had lost five in a row.
"Afterward, Coach Landry was very down," Lilly said. "This was my fifth year in the league, and we had been picked to win the Eastern Conference by Sports Illustrated, I think it was. Then this ..."
In those days, there were few clunkers worse than a loss to Pittsburgh on any team’s schedule.
"We came into the locker room, and were just fixin’ to take a shower," recalled Lilly, "when Coach Landry asked everybody except players and coaches to leave."
Standing in the middle of the locker room, Landry began with a simple apology to everyone.
He told the team, "Y’all have worked hard; I just want you to know that. Y’all have done everything I’ve asked you to do ... [and] I just want to thank y’all for your cooperation and hard work.
"I probably won’t be here next year."
"I’ve let y’all down"
It was a painful thing to watch.
Landry explained how he and Vince Lombardi, a pair of former New York Giants assistants, had broken down film and studied every scheme known to man in the NFL before becoming head coaches themselves.
"I came up with the 'Flex’ defense and multiple offense, and I felt like these were going to be the offense and defense of the future," Landry told the team.
"I feel now that I’ve let y’all down."
With that, Landry began weeping.
"That [tearful] part lasted probably a minute or two," Lilly recalled. "But it seemed like an hour."
Landry’s outpouring of emotion rendered the same two conclusions to anyone inside that locker room that day: 1.) It wasn’t contrived and 2.) it profoundly touched everyone.
"I was a rookie at the time," said Dan Reeves, "and seeing tears in Coach Landry’s eyes showed me that he was a coach who really cared."
Said Lilly: "We hadn’t been around him all that long. We knew he was a brilliant tactician ... persistent ... had great integrity ... a fine man."
Lilly paused.
"What we didn’t know, until that day," Lilly added, "was that he was a very compassionate man."
The current Cowboys are experiencing some of the same things Lilly described of the ’65 team.
"Things just didn’t roll our way — and sometimes that happens in football," Lilly said. "It wasn’t like we weren’t trying ... and it wasn’t like Coach Landry wasn’t coaching.
"But then when it did come together, everything came together for a long time. The nucleus of that ’65 team became the nucleus of our first Super Bowl team."
Becoming a winner
The ’65 Cowboys went on to win five of their last seven games to finish 7-7.
That was the last time a Cowboys team didn’t play, or come within a game of earning a chance to play, for the NFL championship over the next eight years.
Beginning in ’66, Landry’s Cowboys made the playoffs 18 times in 20 years.
"I don’t know exactly what it did," Lilly said of Landry’s tears, "but it touched us. It touched our hearts. That was the beginning of the Dallas Cowboys; really ... that’s how I feel about it."
Cowboys players reached down and gave more effort to preparation, more focus to assignments, more diligence to winning, more effort to what Landry expected.
Lilly admitted, "I think [Halloween Day ’65] made us a lot more serious about what we were doing."
In their first five years, the Cowboys averaged 3.6 wins per year — all losing seasons. So, 7-7 in ’65 was a high-water mark for this franchise.
And now with the advent of the Super Bowl, Dallas lost back-to-back championship games (’66 and ’67) to Green Bay and back-to-back Eastern Conference title games (’68 and ’69) to Cleveland.
The Cowboys had gone from being a team that the coach thought he had let down to a team growing sick and tired being called "Next Year’s Champions."
Progress? Maybe, but one wasn’t any easier than the other to stand around and watch, if you were a Dallas Cowboy.
Lilly’s victory cigar
Roger Staubach once called winning Super Bowl VI "the happiest I’ve ever been as an athlete."
Lilly can’t argue.
The Cowboys had suffered a lot of big-game pain, the most recent one being a 16-13 loss to the Baltimore Colts in SB V.
That made the next year’s three-touchdown win over Miami in SB VI even sweeter, but nobody was thinking that way when rookie kicker Jim O’Brien’s 32-yard field goal sailed through the uprights with five seconds left in SB V.
Lilly still knows the agony and ecstasy of these two Super Bowls: SB V at Miami’s Orange Bowl and SB VI at New Orleans’ Tulane Stadium.
He took the same victory cigar to both places.
"Of course, I didn’t need it the first time. So, I kept the cigar in one of those glass-tube containers that it comes in," said Lilly, who wasn’t a cigar smoker/never has been a cigar smoker.
He returned home from Super Bowl V with the unlit cigar, and stuck it in the freezer.
"I took it with me to Super Bowl VI the next year, but by then the cigar was pretty rotten. It tasted bad. It smelled bad.
"I could hardly keep it together ... but I finally got it lit."
The cigar was a Cuban, or so he was told. It was gift from the late Bud Cooper, a Tyler businessman whom Lilly credits with "teaching me how not to lose money."
What really went up in smoke that day in New Orleans were a lot of bad memories of big-game losses by the Cowboys.
But it was about to change for this franchise.
And no one would shed a tear over that.
Up Next: Bob Lilly discusses his new book, A Cowboy’s Life.