Landry's Boys: An Oral History of a Team and an Era
Tom Landry was a highly respected but little-known assistant coach for the New York Giants before being named the first head coach of the expansion Dallas Cowboys. Stoic and unprepossessing on the sidelines but brilliant and unyielding off the field, Landry guided the Cowboys for their first 29 years, leading them from league laughingstock to 18 playoff appearances, five Super Bowls, and two world championships. So sustained was their success and so magnetic was the way the franchise was run that the Cowboys became known as America’s Team. How did it happen? In Landry’s Boys, best-selling author Peter Golenbock goes directly to the source: the men who made it happen. In this oral history of the Dallas Cowboys during the Landry years, Golenbock interviewed the players, coaches, and front office personnel who forged the Cowboys legacy. Revealing, engaging, and evocative interviews include such Cowboys luminaries as Don Meredith, Roger Staubach, Bob Lilly, Drew Pearson, Lee Roy Jordan, Bob Hayes, Calvin Hill, Chuck Howley, Randy White, Mel Renfro, Eddie LeBaron, Frank Clark, Tex Schramm—and Landry himself. Landry’s Boys tells how Landry shaped the Cowboys, with exacting precision, to become the dominant team in the NFL; how the assassination of President Kennedy in the team’s home city of Dallas seemed to place a curse on the fortunes of the Cowboys; how, in the end, the Cowboys helped to pull the town out of its civic hell; how quarterback Craig Morton almost led the Cowboys to the mountaintop, but was cast down to the shadows by the rise of his successor, Roger Staubach; how Duane Thomas rallied the team to two Super Bowls while waging a war against the game’s racial double standard. It’s all here, from the Cowboys’ bumbling beginning at the Cotton Bowl in the early sixties to the team’s misses later in the decade, its ultimate victory in the seventies, and the crumbling of the dynasty in the eighties. Landry’s Boys is the definitive oral history of America’s Team through its first three decades.