How a nation lost its team
SUNDAY STEW | They were 'America's Team' for plenty of wrong reasons, and now the Cowboys lack that special quality that made them great
There was a time back in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when the Tom Landry- and Roger Staubach- and Drew Pearson- and Tony Dorsett- and Randy White- and Golden Richards- and, yes, even Mike Ditka-led Cowboys always seemed to be on TV and always winning and always somehow in the public's mind.
The brilliant, quasi-patriotic simplicity of the single-starred helmet and blank-faced Landry's fedora captured the nation in a visceral, down-home way that only TV symbols could.
At a time when the Western frontier long had been settled, modern Dallas came to be seen as the oil-fueled, ever-expanding, rough-and-ready mythical American cowboy town that had transformed itself into a shining new-age metropolis of steel, glass, hedonism and good-old violence.
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The Cowboys were America's Team not just because they were good and apparently had God on their side -- Landry and so many of his underlings were outspoken ''Jesus freaks'' -- but because of the rampant, quintessentially American hypocrisy at the core of the image.
Duane Thomas, Hollywood Henderson and numerous other Cowboys were anything but traditional heroes.
Former wide receiver Pete Gent wrote the book North Dallas Forty, wherein the lead character smokes more dope than Bob Marley and marvels at the brutality and dehumanization of the fraudulent, image-crazed game.
And Pro Bowl wide receiver Lance Rentzel, married to blond movie actress Joey Heatherton, fell the lowest of all Cowboys when he exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl, a crime that caused TV commentator Walter Winchell to state, ''All good Americans should stop and beware of the biggest menace to the morals of American youth: Lance Rentzel.''
Despite everything, the image of being something special continued for the Cowboys into the '90s with Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith. But the full equalization of America had occurred, and when one team after another wins the Super Bowl, Dallas is just another spoke in the wheel.
Still, I remember fondly my numerous sit-down chats with late Cowboys president Tex Schramm -- real first name: Texas -- and listening to the eager executive expound on how special his team was and how he wanted to turn the franchise and its grounds into something on par with Disneyland.
''Our country needs certain things,'' he told me. ''It needs for the Cowboys to be good and the Raiders to be bad. That just works. It's not a good thing if either of us become irrelevant.''
Al Davis still keeps the Raiders in that ''dark side'' corner, but, sadly, his team has fallen into disarray and, worse, irrelevance.
The Cowboys are no longer America's Team -- quick, who is their tailback, their middle linebacker, their coach, even? -- but they are a decent team with an owner, Jerry Jones, who has not grown irrelevant with age.
They're not the Jaguars or the Titans. But they're sure not ''The 300,'' either.
• • The Cubs might win their division?
Can it be?
It can.
That they are even looking over their shoulders at the Brewers is almost pathetic.
To the Cubs' credit, they play in the only division in baseball with six teams, and so they have to do a bit more than anybody else to make the postseason.
All the other divisions have five teams, except the American League West, which has but four.
Moreover, the Brewers were an AL team until 1998, and if they still were playing in the other circuit, the Cubs would be in the lead over the Cardinals by 9½ games.
But that's just an old Cubs observer talking and being a fool.
When you've seen it all, from black cats to Moises Alou, you get that way.
But imagine if the Cubs actually can hold on for seven games and win the National League Central, and then can beat, say, the Mets and Diamondbacks and then the nauseating Red Sox and win their first World Series title in 99 years.
Could you stand it?
Or would you be like me and think: I don't know if this is even right.
This seems wrong.
This doesn't compute.
With a title, the Cubs are like so many other teams -- like the Twins and Marlins and even White Sox. Modern-day winners.
That would take a lot more getting used to than seeing them go into the tank and start talking about the perennial next year.
• • College football.
Have the players ever seemed more like pampered prisoners?
An Iowa player, backup safety Lance Tillson, gets arrested on suspicion of drunken driving shortly after 2 a.m. last Sunday in Iowa City, and coach Kirk Ferentz goes batty.
Ferentz orders a seven-day-a-week curfew for all his players, meaning they must be out of the downtown area by 10 p.m. every night and in the residence where they sleep by midnight.
Now, we all know nothing good happens after midnight (except in your own bed, occasionally), but how are college athletes -- some of them 22 or 23 years old -- supposed to develop into responsible adults if they are treated like campers?
Ferentz makes millions of dollars a year, and of course he wants to protect his domain and keep his unpaid workers healthy, crime-free and eligible.
But since when does a free American -- a whole team of free Americans -- have to pay the price for another's stupidity?
Total lockdown might be the wave of tomorrow in D-I ball.
And we wonder why college football players grow up to act like children.