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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Tom Landry was the coach of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys for the team's first 29 years, compiling an unprecedented 20 consecutive winning seasons and two Super Bowl championships. Landry laid the foundation for the modern NFL, using computers to help analyze player data, scouting small and historically black colleges, and instituting the now-common practice of having the coaches call the plays, among other innovations. Landry was viewed by players, coaches, fans, and the press as aloof, intellectual, and, more often than not, inscrutable. In 600-plus pages, Ribowsky does little to penetrate the veil. Despite exhaustive research, there is little insight into Landry the man, but there are endless and often fascinating details of his playing career, his time as a bomber copilot in WWII, and, of course, his three decades leading the Cowboys. Readers looking for insight into the private Landry will be disappointed; readers looking for a recap of one of football's greatest innovators and coaches will be enthralled.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
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 (19242000) 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xi |
Part I You Can't Get the Hell Out of Texas | |
Prologue: "It's a Texas Thing" | p. 3 |
Chapter 1 Missionary Man | p. 11 |
Chapter 2 A Grim Reaper | p. 30 |
Chapter 3 Big Man on Campus | p. 49 |
Chapter 4 A Texas Yankee | p. 68 |
Chapter 5 "Okay, Tom, You Explain It" | p. 85 |
Chapter 6 "Sam's My Man" | p. 105 |
Chapter 7 "As Different as Daylight and Dark" | p. 121 |
Chapter 8 "Lord, I Need Your Help Today" | p. 139 |
Part II If You're Gonna Play in Texas | |
Chapter 9 Big Dog | p. 161 |
Chapter 10 "Is There a Team in Dallas?" | p. 182 |
Chapter 11 A Virtue Out of Weakness | p. 205 |
Chapter 12 "It Wasn't Dallas. It was Dante's Inferno" | p. 226 |
Chapter 13 "We're Ready to Contend" | p. 247 |
Chapter 14 "The Baser Instincts of Men" | p. 268 |
Chapter 15 Less Than Zero | p. 288 |
Part III The Devil Lives in Dallas | |
Chapter 16 "We Need to Reverse This Trend" | p. 307 |
Chapter 17 The Lord Taketh ... | p. 331 |
Chapter 18 "A Vehicle for Corporate Ego" | p. 354 |
Chapter 19 ... And the Lord Finally Giveth | p. 376 |
Chapter 20 "A Big Transmitter to God" | p. 398 |
Chapter 21 The Last Happy Ending | p. 425 |
Chapter 22 Hollywood Babylon | p. 446 |
Chapter 23 America's Team-or the Antichrist? | p. 473 |
Chapter 24 Staring into the Dark | p. 499 |
Chapter 25 Living on a Prayer | p. 528 |
Chapter 26 "Assault on Mount Landry" | p. 559 |
Chapter 27 "You've Taken My Team Away From Me" | p. 588 |
Epilogue: The Apostle | p. 617 |
Acknowledgments | p. 633 |
Notes | p. 637 |
Index | p. 671 |