60-year anniversary: How the Cowboys’ star formed in the universe

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the stories. But the truth behind the birth of the Dallas Cowboys is plenty wild on its own.

Chapter 5: Building the beast

With his NFL entry a full go, Murchison partnered with Dallas socialite Bedford Wynne as a minority owner. The two then scrambled to build a front office of execs and coaches, field a squad of players, and sell a city on their team… all while Lamar Hunt and the AFL competition across town did the same.

Murchison hired Tex Schramm as their general manager. Schramm had handled publicity for the Los Angeles Rams, successfully pitching pro football to Hollywood before becoming that team’s GM. Schramm then segued to a stint at CBS Sports, where he spearheaded the then-unthinkable notion of turning the Olympic Games into a televised event. Schramm was an outside-the-box thinker with an undeniable eye for talent; when he left the Rams, he had hired an eager kid named Pete Rozelle to take his place. Schramm, whose birth name really was Texas (despite being born in California), would be the perfect visionary to magically whip up an NFL presence in Dallas.

More than a presence, though, Dallas needed players. Murchison, it turns out, had started amassing talent even before the team had been approved. The 1960 NFL Draft had taken place in November, months before the owners’ meeting that officially approved the franchise, and an expansion draft would only net the oldest and least desirable players scavenged from other rosters. Guessing a young hometown hero would help to draw fans at the outset, the businessman had inked SMU quarterback Don Meredith prior to even the league’s November draft. A “personal services contract” made Meredith an employee of one of Murchison’s companies and would bind him to the football club if and when they came into official existence.

Murchison believed several demographics within the Dallas fanbase would take to Meredith, a native Texan with rugged movie-star looks and an affable sense of humor. He once famously cracked that he chose his alma mater over coach Bear Bryant and Texas A&M because SMU was easier to spell. He was so popular on the Dallas college’s campus that his fellow students joked that the school’s acronym actually stood for “Southern Meredith University.”

But “Dandy Don” wasn’t just a local ringer meant to placate Dallasites and spur ticket sales. Meredith was the real deal at quarterback, too. The two-time All-American led the Southwest Conference in completion percentage in each of his three seasons as the Mustangs’ starter. He was subsequently selected by Hunt’s Texans in the inaugural AFL Draft, but also drafted by Halas and the Bears in the third round of the NFL Draft. Halas, the company man acting in the league’s best interest, had planned to send Meredith to Murchison’s team to ensure that the expansion club got off to a solid start. But Murchison’s backdoor contract negated those what-ifs and ensured that Meredith would be a field general for Dallas.

Murchison also quietly secured New Mexico running back Don Perkins ahead of the draft, a favor to a personal friend who also happened to be a senator from that state… and a member of the board of directors for the new Dallas franchise. Perkins had amassed over 2,000 rushing yards with the Lobos and was the first player in school history to have his number retired.

For his part, Schramm began assembling a front office. One of his first phone calls was to his old team, the Rams. That led to the hiring of Gil Brandt, the owner of a baby photography business and a self-taught football scout who had been gathering intel on college players as a hobby.

Much of 1960’s roster was indeed filled out through a late expansion draft. Each of the other 12 clubs was allowed to protect 25 players. (Active NFL rosters in the day were capped at 36.) Dallas was given 24 hours- too little time for even basic medical evaluations- to select up to three unprotected names from any given team to comprise their roster.

Chapter 6: The man in the hat

The most important asset was still to be obtained. Schramm and Murchison partnered to bring Tom Landry to Dallas. They signed the New York Giants’ defensive assistant coach to a personal services contract similar to Meredith’s before there was even a team to join. Considered one of the league’s top defensive backs in his playing days, Landry also returned kicks and punts, punted, and played quarterback. He was even better on the sideline, taking on a dual role as a player/coach for his final two seasons with the Giants. In 1954, Landry was not only a first-team All-Pro as a player, he was the team’s defensive coordinator (opposite Vince Lombardi on the offensive side).

Landry nearly took a job coaching the Houston Oilers of the AFL, but was instead lured to Dallas because he and his wife had purchased an offseason home there. In the era when a pro football salary wasn’t exactly a path to financial riches, Tom had planned to start his own insurance business in Dallas. He had little faith that the new NFL franchise being birthed there would work at all.

“This won’t last two years,” he told his wife. “You can’t build from the ground up.”

But Murchison, Wynne, and Schramm were indeed building from the ground up, and their new enterprise needed a name. First established as the Rangers, the club found themselves being confused with an on-again-off-again minor-league baseball team that also played in Dallas. The club even went through its expansion draft as the Rangers, until they finally decided a change was necessary.

The franchise briefly considered playing as the Steers- apparently a nod to the nearby Texas Longhorns, Wynne’s favorite college team- but Schramm reportedly nixed the idea of naming his squad after castrated bovines. “Cowboys” had a nice ring to it, Murchison thought, despite objections from Wynne and others that the moniker didn’t reflect the high-society swagger that was starting to envelop the city at the time. But Murchison settled on it, christening his new team the Dallas Cowboys. They would take the field in just three months’ time.

Continue…

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4