The Last Cowboy: A Life of Tom Landry

by Mark Ribowsky

Overview

A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2013

An action-packed biography of a man, his team, and the league he helped create—in the tradition of Maraniss’s When Pride Still Mattered.

Tom Landry, the coach during professional football's most fabled era, transformed the gridiron from a no-holds-barred battlefield to the technical chess match it is today. With his trademark fedora and stoic facade, "God’s Coach" was a man of faith and few words, for twenty-nine years guiding "America's Team" from laughingstock to well-oiled machine, with an unprecedented twenty consecutive winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles. Now, more than a decade after Landry's death, acclaimed sports biographer Mark Ribowsky finally takes a fresh look at this much-misunderstood legend, giving us a distinctly American biography that tells us as much about our country's fascination with football as it does about Landry himself.

While his coaching years are set against the backdrop of a nation roiling with racial and political turmoil—and the anything-goes partying constantly threatening the all-American mystique—The Last Cowboy begins amid the dusty roads of Mission, Texas, where Tom Landry’s childhood played out like a homespun American fable. It then takes us to the war-torn skies over western Europe, where the straight-A student and high school football star piloted a B-17 through thirty harrowing, at times near-fatal, missions. And finally back to a booming Texas, where he continued his faithful march toward gridiron immortality.

In between, however, we learn that Landry was an infinitely more complex figure than his legions of fans and critics could have ever imagined. Indeed, for all his restrained emotions and old-world courtliness, he was a man of great reach and curiosity: an art and wine connoisseur, a world traveler, a collector of first-edition old-West literature. Drawing from dozens of exclusive interviews, Ribowsky reveals that Landry was anything but "cold," and it was actually his depth as a human that positioned him to become an avatar of change, first as the civil rights movement spilled onto the field and, later, as the game of football transformed into something unrecognizable to those who had come before him.

But Landry's virtues notwithstanding, he was hardly perfect and nor were his players. From the unending quarterback controversies between Roger Staubach and Craig Morton to the locker room battles with Duane Thomas and Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson to the heartbreaking loses suffered at the hands of Landry’s only true rival, Vince Lombardi, The Last Cowboy becomes a fascinating portrait of a fiercely Christian man desperately trying to stay the course in a city whose flamboyance mirrored that of the team he built.

The result is a definitive biography that will frame its subject within a larger American panorama while also reintroducing us to a legend whose impact on the NFL, and the sport itself, is nothing short of immeasurable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871403339
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/04/2013
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	688,924
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Mark Ribowsky is a New York Times acclaimed, best-selling author of fifteen books, including biographies of Tom Landry, Al Davis, Hank Williams, and most recently, In the Name of the Father: Family, Football, and the Manning Dynasty. He lives in Florida.lorida.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part I You Can't Get the Hell Out of Texas

Prologue: "It's a Texas Thing" 3

Chapter 1 Missionary Man 11

Chapter 2 A Grim Reaper 30

Chapter 3 Big Man on Campus 49

Chapter 4 A Texas Yankee 68

Chapter 5 "Okay, Tom, You Explain It" 85

Chapter 6 "Sam's My Man" 105

Chapter 7 "As Different as Daylight and Dark" 121

Chapter 8 "Lord, I Need Your Help Today" 139

Part II If You're Gonna Play in Texas

Chapter 9 Big Dog 161

Chapter 10 "Is There a Team in Dallas?" 182

Chapter 11 A Virtue Out of Weakness 205

Chapter 12 "It Wasn't Dallas. It was Dante's Inferno" 226

Chapter 13 "We're Ready to Contend" 247

Chapter 14 "The Baser Instincts of Men" 268

Chapter 15 Less Than Zero 288

Part III The Devil Lives in Dallas

Chapter 16 "We Need to Reverse This Trend" 307

Chapter 17 The Lord Taketh … 331

Chapter 18 "A Vehicle for Corporate Ego" 354

Chapter 19 … And the Lord Finally Giveth 376

Chapter 20 "A Big Transmitter to God" 398

Chapter 21 The Last Happy Ending 425

Chapter 22 Hollywood Babylon 446

Chapter 23 America's Team-or the Antichrist? 473

Chapter 24 Staring into the Dark 499

Chapter 25 Living on a Prayer 528

Chapter 26 "Assault on Mount Landry" 559

Chapter 27 "You've Taken My Team Away From Me" 588

Epilogue: The Apostle 617

Acknowledgments 633

Notes 637

Index 671

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/23/2013
rom 1960 to 1988, Tom Landry was the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, taking the football team from expansion joke to a big, bad cultural empire now known as “America’s Team.” In Ribowsky’s authoritative biography, Landry appears more stoic king than coach, his ever-present fedora serving as a crown. He ruled with an unrelenting rigidity, whether it was viewing players (including legends) as replaceable parts or sticking with his landmark offensive and defensive systems, even as the game outgrew those once-novel innovations. At the same time, Landry was a devout Christian who lived by a simple code of honor—he essentially agreed to coach at one point on a handshake deal—only to get squeezed out by the growing corporate nature of pro football. Ribowsky’s thorough examination of a surprisingly complicated man offers original reporting, which serves here as merely a complement to this impressively researched work. But in looking back at the legendary Landry’s life (1924–2000), Ribowsky (Howard Cosell) reveals how much the game has changed since the coach’s heyday while providing an eloquent, honest tribute to a football genius. 16 pages of illustrations. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] huge and hugely entertaining biography…. Extraordinary…. That Ribowsky, an outstanding biographer with books on Al Davis, Satchel Paige and Howard Cosell to his credit, doesn’t idolize Landry across the book’s 640 pages makes his judgment all the keener."

Dallas Morning News - Allen Barra

Tom Landry spent 40 years in professional football, most notably 29 years as the original coach of the oft-celebrated Dallas Cowboys. Landry was one of the most innovative and influential coaches in NFL history, essentially inventing his own offensive and defensive systems that spread throughout the league. Beginning as the defensive coach of the Giants in the 1950s, the cool technician from Texas was the polar opposite of that team's volatile offensive coach, Vince Lombardi, who would be his chief rival in the 1960s. Although Ribowsky (Howard Cosell) is gratuitously snarky about Landry's religious and political beliefs at times, he recounts Landry's life honestly, avoiding both distortion and hagiography while portraying a stoic, flawed man of honor. The one failing of the book is that there is little about Landry's family life during the time he was coaching. VERDICT Nonetheless, this is a triumph of extensive research and interviews. It will be welcomed by all football fans.

Library Journal

2013-09-28
A prolific sportswriter submits a meaty biography of one of the NFL's legendary coaches. Except for his World War II service and 10 years spent in New York, most notably as a player, then as defensive coach for the Giants, Tom Landry (1924–2000) was all Texas. Born, raised and educated in the Lone Star State, Landry returned in 1960 to coach the expansion Dallas Cowboys for a record 29 years. After a rocky start, the stoic Landry, among the game's most influential innovators, turned the franchise into a consistent winner and a huge source of pride for a football-obsessed state and an up-and-coming city looking to live down the shame of the JFK assassination. Although he was revered by fans and the media until new owner Jerry Jones unceremoniously fired him, Landry's buttoned-up life poses difficulties for any biographer. Ribowsky (Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports, 2011, etc.) solves most of them by coming at the coach from all angles: thoroughly exploring the Texas connection; interviewing his widow for personal and family stories that open a window on the interior life of the closemouthed coach; examining his complex relationships with some of his greatest stars--Don Meredith, Roger Staubach, Bob Hayes--who vainly sought his approval; delineating his role in the Cowboy organization that featured swashbuckling owner Clint Murchison, shrewd president Tex Schramm and super scout Gil Brandt; explaining the complex schemes behind Landry's exciting brand of football; teasing out his tortured handling of troubled players like Hollywood Henderson and Duane Thomas; measuring the family man and devout Christian against the seemingly bloodless coach who appeared to prize his system over people, who turned a blind eye to the decidedly heathen lifestyle of so many of his players. If Ribowsky never quite penetrates to Landry's core, he still provides as complete a picture of "God's Coach" as we're likely to get. A must-read for fans of "America's Team" and, given Landry's impact on the game, for Cowboy haters too.

Kirkus Reviews

"Fascinating…. Readers looking for a recap of one of football’s greatest innovators and coaches will be enthralled."

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