CONFESSIONS OF A COWBOYS FAN
Dallas Cowboys Fan
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
CONFESSIONS OF A COWBOYS FAN
by Adam Carroll Draper
“I grew up a-dreamin’ of bein’ a cowboy, lovin’ the cowboy ways.” Hearing Waylon Jennings sing that song has always made think of the Dallas Cowboys. I know Willie released the single, but Waylon did it first (and it was written by a woman, so there). I love John Wayne and all, but I did not grow up wanting to ride the range. I loved dem Boys: Roger Staubach, Randy White, Harvey Martin, Drew Pearson, Bob Lilly, Jethro Pugh, Tony Dorsett, Too Tall Jones... and I loved that man in the hat, Tom Landry. I loved Calvin Hill, although his son, Grant (who I forgive for his obvious shortcomings) broke my heart and went to that school from New Jersey, eight miles away from Chapel Hill.
The Dallas Cowboys of my youth were America’s Team. “One grey night it happened,” as another song goes. Tom Landry found out from the TV that he had been fired by a man named Jerry Jones, who bought my Cowboys. That was unthinkable. I won’t ever, ever forget it – or get over it. That was like waking up to find out that Carolina had a janitor kick Dean Smith out of the Dean Dome. I hear that some old men in Brooklyn still won’t dignify “dem bums” move by calling them the Los Angeles Dodgers. I get that.
By now, you can tell that I throw around a lot of song lyrics in these musings, so you might be able to guess which one is coming about Jerry Jones: “You play a pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the devil his due.” I don’t really mean that. I do not know Jerry Jones personally. But I do not like what he did. He may have bought up every good player north of the Rio Grande, and the Cowboys did win three (count them – THREE) Super Bowls in four years. However, this thing happened in 1994 called a salary cap. Jerry was so convinced that the wins came from money that he figured he could prove it by letting his long time friend, Jimmy Johnson, go and hiring Barry Switzer. The core players held on to win the Super Bowl in 1996, but by then the salary cap had created a new reality requiring a general manager and coaches who could recognize talent before throwing money at it. Thus ended Jerry’s reign as the George Steinbrenner of the NFL. They haven’t won Jack %&*@ since then.
America’s Team, my hairy butt! (with a nod to John Boy and Billy).
I am still a Cowboys fan and I always will be, but Tom Landry even said that his loyalty was not to a name or a symbol. They wear the uniform, but this franchise is not the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys I knew came back and won. They would score two touchdowns in the last two minutes of a game and pull it out. No matter how bad a game got, it was never over. They were always poised. This current iteration of those who wear the star is a talented team, but they lack what made America’s Team – character.
Character starts at the top. ‘Nuff said!
This pains me to say (I mean down to the depths of my heart it pains me), but the team that plays like my Cowboys (like America’s Team) now is the New England Patriots.
I know, I can hear you say it, “Great Brady’s balls! You don’t mean that!” I am afraid I do. My Cowboys were not cheaters and Peeping Toms, so it is not the same, but the Patriots play and win year in and year out like America’s Team. They play with heart. They play like a team.
I will watch the Cowboys play the Giants on Monday Night Football because they are my team. I hope they pull this dysfunctional group of individuals together and find an actual team in there that will shock the world and consistently win against the league’s most talented teams (a group which clearly does not include the Giants). It would be so nice to see the Cowboys even go to the NFC Championship game after nearly a quarter century of either not going to the playoffs or getting ignominiously dismissed therefrom as irrelevant posers. What I have seen from Jerry’s Kids, however, is something shameful to any real cowboy; they are all hat and no cattle. That starts with the owner, who seems to think that money can buy everything. Think about that beautiful stadium in Arlington, Texas. It is a truly spectacular home for the mediocre. All hat and no cattle!
So why am I still a Dallas Cowboy fan? I’ll just go back to the song: “My heroes have always been Cowboys, and they still are it seems, sadly in search of and one step in back of themselves and their slow movin’ dreams.”