Ten-Gallon War

John Eisenberg

Description

“It’s every bit as fascinating to read about the battles between the Cowboys and the Texans as it is to follow today’s never-ending NFL dramas.” —Mike Florio, ProFootballTalk

In the 1960s, on the heels of the “Greatest Game Ever Played,” professional football began to flourish across the country—except in Texas, where college football was still the only game in town. But in an unlikely series of events, two young oil tycoons started their own professional football franchises in Dallas the very same year: the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and, as part of a new upstart league designed to thwart the NFL’s hold on the game, the Dallas Texans of the AFL. Almost overnight, a bitter feud was born.
 
The team owners, Lamar Hunt and Clint Murchison, became Mad Men of the gridiron, locked in a battle for the hearts and minds of the Texas pigskin faithful. Their teams took each other to court, fought over players, undermined each other’s promotions, and rooted like hell for the other guys to fail. A true visionary, Hunt of the Texans focused on the fans, putting together a team of local legends and hiring attractive women to drive around town in red convertibles selling tickets. Meanwhile, Murchison and his Cowboys focused on the game, hiring a young star, Tom Landry, in what would be his first-ever year as a head coach, and concentrating on holding their own against the more established teams in the NFL. Ultimately, both teams won the battle, but only one got to stay in Dallas and go on to become one of sports’ most quintessential franchises—”America’s Team.”
 
In this highly entertaining narrative, rich in colorful characters and unforgettable stunts, Eisenberg recounts the story of the birth of pro-football in Dallas—back when the game began to be part of this country’s DNA.

Sujets

• History of Texas
• Texas Longhorns football
• Culture of Texas
• List of NFL franchise owners
• Sports in Texas

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 02 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780547607818
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
PART I
“Would you be interested in starting up a new league?”
“Those Texas Millionaires”
“You’re going to break us all”
“Son, that league isn’t going to make it”
“Is Big D big enough . . . for two teams?”
PART II
“I trained on biscuits and gravy”
“Someone is going to get hurt here”
“This is not a harassment situation”
“It’s going to take time for this thing to grow”
“They thought the Texans were a lot more fun”
“We’ve scared off every fan we have”
Photos
PART III
“They should play each other”
“Did you wear mouse ears or a helmet?”
“They shouldn’t be able to do this to us”
PART IV
“Let’s beat their asses”
“We are staying”
“We will kick to the clock”
PART V
“It’s nice to be wanted”
“There’s something I want to visit with you about”
“Did Vince really say that?”
Epilogue
Author’s Note on Sources
Index
Sample Chapter from THE STREAK
Buy the Book
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2012 by John Eisenberg

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Eisenberg, John, date. Ten-gallon war : the NFL’s Cowboys, the AFL’s Texans, and the feud for Dallas’s pro football future / John Eisenberg. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-547-43550-3 1. Dallas Cowboys (Football team)—History. 2. Houston Texans (Football team)—History. I. Title. GV 956. D 3 E 58 2012 796.332'6409764—dc23 2012016241

Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover photographs © Getty Images (Don Meredith); © Corbis (Abner Haynes)

e ISBN 978-0-547-60781-8 v3.0517
For Mary Wynne, with love
Prologue


T HE SELLOUT CROWD crammed into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 11, 2009, was taken aback when the Dallas Cowboys and Kansas City Chiefs took the field wearing “throwback” uniforms from a half-century earlier, when they represented the same city, played in rival leagues, and fought bitterly for the hearts and minds of the same fans.
What was this? Putting aside their famous metallic-blue colors for a day, the Cowboys wore dark blue jerseys with white numerals, white pants, and white helmets with dark blue stars on the sides—their uniform from the early sixties, when they were a pitiful expansion team rather than one of the most popular sports franchises on the planet. The Chiefs wore white pants, bright red jerseys, and bright red helmets with the state of Texas outlined on either side—their attire from when they were known as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League.
Their surprising apparel was part of the National Football League’s yearlong celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the AFL’s birth—an ironic commemoration in a way, considering the AFL had been the NFL’s fierce adversary at first, an upstart seeking to muscle in on the established league’s turf. The two had stabbed each other in the back, told lies, fought over players, gone to court, and practically pushed each other to bankruptcy before agreeing to merge. But all that was ancient history now. They had long ago joined hands to become America’s preeminent sports league.
A half-century later, the NFL readily admitted that the AFL had contributed enthusiasm, bright ideas, and some damn good football teams to the merger and willingly commemorated its birth. During the 2009 season, former AFL teams such as the Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, and Buffalo Bills were donning replicas of their old uniforms to play each other in what were being called “AFL Legacy Games.” The Cowboys, now an iconic franchise known as “America’s Team,” were the only pre-merger NFL team playing in such a game, the league having decided it simply couldn’t pass up an opportunity to pit the franchises that had once fought over Dallas.
The Cowboys and Texans had shared a home stadium for three years in the early sixties, playing on alternate Sundays at the Cotton Bowl, the concrete colossus then known as one of college football’s grandest stages. Both teams drew meager crowds, sometimes giving away as many tickets as they sold. They never faced each other on the field, but they battled in every other way, resorting to trickery and lawsuits to try to gain an edge, fighting over players, and stealing each other’s ideas as they sought to elbow the other out of town. Both franchises were owned by young men from oil-rich families unaccustomed to failure.
Spotting the AFL Legacy Game on their 2009 schedule, the Chiefs had run with the idea, selling it as “The Game That Never Was,” a reprise of the Cowboys-Texans battle. Sadly, most of the frontline warriors from those rollicking days were gone. Lamar Hunt, the sports pioneer who founded the AFL and owned the Texans, had died, as had Clint Murchison Jr., the Cowboys’ original owner. Both coaches, the Cowboys’ Tom Landry and the Texans’ Hank Stram, were gone. So was Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ general manager, who had battled as fiercely as anyone.
Much of the bitterness from those days was gone too. The franchises had operated in different cities for more than four decades, dulling the distrust and dislike that boiled over back in the day. When Lamar Hunt was alive, he lived near Cowboys owner Jerry Jones on Preston Road in Dallas, and when their teams played, they lightheartedly competed for the “Preston Road Trophy.” Their teams had played a handful of regular-season games against each other over the years as part of the NFL’s regular schedule rotation.
But while games between the Cowboys and Chiefs had become routine to most people, there were exceptions—old lions from the early sixties who, like southerners who still pledged allegiance to Dixie, swore they would “never forget.”
Sitting in his den in Dallas on that October afternoon in 2009, a seventy-two-year-old car salesman named Jack Spikes watched on television as his former team took on the Cowboys in the uniform he had worn when he was a hard-hitting fullback for the Texans in the early sixties. He worked at a BMW dealership now, occasionally selling expensive cars to Cowboy players, some of whom he liked. But his dislike for their high-and-mighty franchise, which dated to when he played for the other team in town, had never abated. He didn’t like the Cowboys one bit.
I hope to hell the Chiefs beat the crap out of them, Spikes thought, just like we would have back then.
The sight of the teams in their old uniforms startled Mike Rhyner, a well-known sports radio talk-show host in Dallas, who was ten years old when the Cowboys and Texans started up a half-century earlier. Rhyner had sided with the Texans at first, mostly because his father demanded it, but later switched to the Cowboys. Having lived through those days, he knew this wasn’t just any game from a historical standpoint.
Wow. Too bad they never played like this, in those uniforms, all those years ago, he thought. That would have been some war.
Watching the game in person, from a private box at Arrowhead, Chris Burford had the same thought. Like Spikes, he had played for the Texans and continued with the franchise when it moved to Kansas City. He had been a pass-catching fiend in those days, a wily receiver whose meticulous routes and sure hands befuddled opponents. Now seventy-one, a spry and sharp Bay Area lawyer, he had put football behind him, but he enjoyed coming back and mingling with other former Chiefs at the franchise’s annual alumni weekend. That occasion had brought him to Arrowhead on this Sunday.
To most of the other former Kansas City players in the box, a game against the Cowboys carried no extra significance. But Burford felt a tingling in his stomach. The smug preeminence of the Cowboys and their fans irritated him, as it did Spikes and the other former Texans who had fought the Cowboys long ago.
The game that never was? Sheee-it.
This one, in 2009, wasn’t a fair fight, Burford thought. The struggling Chiefs were 0-4. The Cowboys were perennial playoff contenders.
But that wasn’t the case when they shared Dallas in the early sixties and everyone had wanted them to settle their differences on the field.
“‘The game that never was’ . . . what a bunch of horse crap,” Burford snorted later when asked about sitting at Arrowhead that day. “We would have kicked the shit out of the Cowboys back then. I would have loved to have played them every week. We were the better team. No one thought so, but we would have whipped them.”
Hell, yeah, he remembered those days.
 
PART I
1
“Would you be interested in starting up a new league?”


L AMAR H UNT WAS AT 30,000 feet, his head literally in the clouds, when the idea of starting a new professional football league came to him. “The lightbulb just came on,” he would say later. That it did so in the sky, on an American Airlines flight, seemed entirely appropriate, for the idea was, if anything, a flight of fancy.
As Hunt flew from Miami to his hometown of Dallas on a February evening in 1959, the National Football League had never been more popular. After grinding along for almost four decades in the shadow of Major League Baseball, the NFL was suddenly taking off like a Russian rocket. Six weeks earlier, a television audience of 40 million had watched NBC’s broa