An Ode to Dandy Don
By: Sal Maiorana
Tags: Fiction, NFL, Historical Fiction, Dallas Cowboys, Don Meredith

1968 — A HISTORICAL NOVEL: CHAPTER 21

An Ode to Dandy Don

After back-to-back NFL championship game losses to the Packers, Cowboys QB Don Meredith believed it was Dallas’ time in 1968 Sal Maiorana Follow Dec 20, 2020 · 10 min read

Don Meredith played his entire nine-year career for the Cowboys, but never won a championship.

Don Meredith made Tom Landry cry. Twice.

“Bullshit,” Jack said to the fun-loving quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.

“Jack, you known me how many years?” Meredith said in his Texas twang. “You think I’d bullshit you? Y’all sayin’ you shot 82 at Pebble Beach is bullshit, but this ain’t no bullshit, I’ll tell ya.”

Having watched Landry, the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, standing stoically on the sideline on Sunday afternoons at the Cotton Bowl, his face perpetually set in consternation, a seemingly bloodless, emotionless robot in his suit and tie and omnipresent Stetson fedora looking more like a business executive than a football genius, Jack found this proclamation hard to fathom.

It was also utterly delectable as a journalist.

So, as Jack sat across from the always unfiltered and fun-loving Meredith at a table in the quarterback meeting room at the Cowboys training camp on the campus of California Lutheran College, he eagerly scribbled these juicy Landry details in his notebook.

True, the crux of the NFL preview issue cover story Jack was crafting would be centered on the personable Dallas quarterback who entered the 1968 season feeling like it was time he and the Cowboys finally dethroned Vince Lombardi’s Packers for NFL supremacy. But Tom Landry crying? Twice?

“You gonna use that?” Meredith asked, knowing full well what Jack’s answer would be. “Aw, fuck it. What’s he gonna do, cut me?”

Jack had flown into San Francisco on this latest trip out West, and after a week in the Bay Area covering the Sonny Liston fight, visiting with Kathleen and Daisy, and shelling out fifteen dollars to play a round of golf at the fabulous Pebble Beach Golf Links, he rented a car and headed south toward Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway, first to his sister Mary’s house, and then to meet Meredith.

Jack had made this drive from San Fran to LA before, and though it took about eight hours, Jack couldn’t get enough of the majestic scenery, the ocean waves pounding into the jagged left edge of the country, and the quaint little seaside towns where life just seemed to move at a slower pace.

With the car window open and the salty air tingling his nose, Jack chuckled to himself thinking about how happy the evil keepers of the SportsWorld expense accounts must have been when they learned he was driving and not flying, as if the money saved was going directly into their pockets. And then he thought how pissed they were going to be when that lesser line item would be offset by the sure-to-be exorbitant bill he’d be submitting for treating Meredith to dinner and drinks.

Jack’s light mood was altered once he became engulfed in the congestive nightmare that was Los Angeles’ freeway system, traffic that was even worse than anything he’d encountered on the Long Island or Deegan expressways back home. When he finally arrived at Carl and Mary’s home in Anaheim for his second visit in two months, there was much-needed food and wine, a dip in the pool, and conversation long into the night about their daughters and what they were doing in hippie land USA. Jack, per Daisy’s request, did not share with her parents the story of her stitched-up head. “They’re fine,” Jack said.

The next day, he weaved his way back through the snarl and the smog to Thousand Oaks, a posh town about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles where the Cowboys had been training since 1963. He watched Landry, dressed in his standard issue training camp attire — white t-shirt, gym shorts, whistle around his neck, baseball cap covering his balding pate — put the Cowboys through a two-hour workout under a penetrating sun yielding temperatures that peaked in the high 80’s.

When it was through and Meredith had showered off the stench of practice, he greeted Jack with a hearty Texas handshake and led him to the meeting room where they would talk for nearly an hour.

“I did shoot 82, and I could have broken 80 if I hadn’t dunked two into the ocean at seven,” Jack said, knowing that Dandy Don had played Pebble before.

“That itty-bitty hole? That’s barely a hundred yards, ain’t it?” Meredith said of the short par-3 hole that juts out into the Pacific.

“Wind got me, both times,” Jack said. “So, enough about that. When exactly did you make the Teflon man cry?”

It happened in 1965. The Cowboys were in their sixth year of existence, all of them with Landry as coach and Dandy Don as quarterback, and they were barely making headway in their pursuit of an elusive playoff berth. Meredith had slipped and fallen in a training camp dormitory in the summer and suffered injuries to his throwing shoulder and elbow, and while he played through the discomfort — as he had his entire career — his preseason passes were more erratic than a meteor shower.

The problem carried into the start of the regular season, and though the Cowboys won two of their first three games, Landry benched Meredith in favor of rookie Craig Morton. That move proved disastrous as Dallas lost three in a row, so in Week 7, Landry turned back to Meredith when Dallas traveled to Pittsburgh to take on the Steelers.

“The worst game I ever played in my life,” Meredith said recalling a grisly 22–13 loss during which he completed only 12 of 34 passes for 187 yards with two touchdowns and one interception. “After the game I saw Tom Landry cry. He wasn’t crying so much about the game as he was crying about me. He had been fair, more than fair, to his mind, and he wanted so much for me to do well, and I was awful. I’m no good at pep talks, but I got up in the locker room, that dismal locker room at Pittsburgh. The players had their heads down, couldn’t do anything, couldn’t remember how to take off their uniforms. I told them I was going to work harder and we were going to win.”

Landry was at a crossroads. The pressure was on in Big D. Never mind the fact that the franchise was only six years old; Cowboy fans had grown tired of losing, and they were starting to wonder if it was ever going to end with Landry calling the plays for Meredith. Landry had to decide whether to push forward with Meredith or move on to Morton or another rookie, Jerry Rhome.

He thought about it on that Sunday night flight from the Steel City back to Texas and all day Monday before coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t time to scrap more than five years of investment in Dandy Don. He called Meredith into his office Tuesday, told him, “You’re my quarterback.” And then Landry cried again, and so did Meredith, and from that point, the Cowboys’ fortunes turned.

They earned a place in the consolation Playoff Bowl in 1965, then advanced to the NFL championship game in 1966 and 1967, losing both times to the Packers in a pair of classic, down-to-the-last-minute games, crushing defeats that lingered in Meredith’s craw like a bad batch of Red Man chaw.

Jack asked Meredith about those games, and he could tell they were still a sore spot, even now in the shadow of the start of a new, promising 1968 season. The emotion was almost as palpable as it was a few months back when Meredith had agreed to fly out to Los Angeles to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show with Green Bay quarterback Bart Starr, by now a five-time NFL champ and two-time Super Bowl winner.

Carson asked Starr about the most recent title game and his dramatic, game-winning quarterback sneak where he lunged over the frozen goal line behind a perfect block by guard Jerry Kramer. Would the Packers, who were out of timeouts with 16 seconds to go, have had time for another play if Starr hadn’t scored. Starr, never a man to gloat or brag, said he wasn’t sure, but Meredith chimed in, “You sure wouldn’t have.”

That defeat at Lambeau Field, on a day only a polar bear could love, the coldest game to that point in NFL history — “I can’t describe how cold it was; all I can say is it hurt just to breathe,” Meredith said — had come almost one year to the day after Green Bay’s first title game conquest of the Cowboys, a far different 34–27 victory at the balmy Cotton Bowl.

Meredith passed for 238 yards, including a 68-yard touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter to Frank Clarke that pulled Dallas within seven points. The Cowboys got the ball back at the Green Bay 47 with 2:12 remaining, and Meredith marched them to the 2, but on fourth-and-goal, he rolled out to his right and was quickly pressured by Packers linebacker Dave Robinson. He managed to get a pass away in the general direction of Bob Hayes, but safety Tom Brown intercepted it. Game over.

Dallas thought it was the better team in both games, but especially in 1967 when it was clear the Packers were aging, and their dynasty was nearing its end. However, Dallas’ 9–5 regular-season record, partly due to Meredith missing three games early in the year with pneumonia, wasn’t good enough to secure home-field advantage in the championship game. The Cowboys had to trek into the arctic, and that wreaked havoc with Landry’s dynamic offense which relied on skill and precision as opposed to the brute strength that powered Lombardi’s three yards and a cloud of dust, or in this case, ice chips, running game.

“That field was so bad,” Meredith said. “We thought we had an advantage in our speed, our quickness, our multiple formations. We had studied hard and knew what to do. Suddenly we couldn’t do anything we had done all season. Our game plan was gone down the ice.”

In an interview with another national magazine, Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm had been somewhat critical of his long-time quarterback’s work habits in the offseason.

“When you’ve got your future riding on one guy, a quarterback, you like to have him be a little serious,” Schramm was quoted as saying. “You say be dedicated, pay the price, and he says, ‘I’m not Bart Starr, I’m Don Meredith.’ Well, we know we’ll never make Don Meredith into Bart Starr. They’re different personalities. Starr is the epitome of a hardworking, dedicated athlete. Meredith is like a Babe Ruth or a Bobby Layne. If Starr is Stan Musial, Meredith is Mickey Mantle. I understand that, but sometimes I get annoyed at his flippancy. Last spring I told him he had to join the adult world. He got mad and stormed out of my office. The next day he came back and said, ‘I’m not gonna join your adult world. I’ll live in my world and you live in yours.’”

Meredith laughed when he recalled the exchange, and then said to Jack, “Don’t tell ol’ Tex, but I’ve been acting like an adult this year.”

It was true. Meredith wasn’t at the Cowboys facility throwing passes every day in the epoch between the Ice Bowl and training camp. He’d still spent plenty of time flying around the country making appearances, filming commercials, checking on some of his business holdings including his new restaurant in Dallas called Dandy’s, and playing in pro-am golf tournaments. But the loss to the Packers hurt almost as much as his frozen limbs that day. So he spent more time working out, watching his diet, staying in tune with the playbook, and, yes, throwing passes. He even quit smoking.

Meredith admitted there were times when he wondered why he was still playing football, taking the punishment. “Sometimes when I’m lying on the ground at Yankee Stadium or someplace, and some guy like Sam Huff is pounding my poor thin body, I tell myself, ‘Dandy, why did you ever take this up as a career? Why don’t you get a decent job? You’re too nice a person for this to be happening to, Dandy. Why don’t you go back to East Texas where you belong? Let the other fellows play football. You don’t need it.’”

But as the 1968 season was approaching, those two losses to the Packers still festering, and every masculine bone in his body craving to prove his detractors wrong and lead the Cowboys to glory, Meredith knew that playing football is exactly what he should be doing. The commercials, the business deals, the possibility of acting on television or in movies, maybe going into broadcasting, would all be there in a year, or two, or three, when his new contract would expire. For now, he was a football player, a quarterback, still the big man on campus in Big D.

“Do you think you should be considered the equal of Bart Starr, or Johnny Unitas?” Jack asked Dandy Don.

“I don’t feel a Starr or Unitas could do a better job with the Cowboys than I can,” he said. “I mean this simply because I’ve been with Landry for eight years and I know his system and therefore I’m more adaptable. I know how he thinks and how he wants things done. And I think we’ll all agree Landry has proved his is a pretty good way to think.”



In closing, Jack asked Dandy Don if he’d know when to quit, or did he think he would keep pushing forward, much the way Unitas had the last couple years, even though his once prodigious skills had begun to erode with age.

Meredith said, “Pardner, when my time is right …” before crooning in a melodic, country voice that he used to put on display back in the old days when he was performing in one-act plays or, on a whim, cutting an album, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over. They say all good things, must end …”