‘Bounty Bowl’ 30th anniversary and Cowboys-Eagles still at it

There’s no love lost between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles. 1989’s Bounty Bowl didn’t start the feud, but it sure deepened it.

November 23, 1989. “Blame It on the Rain” by Milli Vanilli was the No. 1 song in the country. Harlem Nights starring Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor had just unseated Look Who’s Talking from a month-long run atop the box office. The Berlin Wall had come tumbling down two weeks prior. A gallon of milk cost $2.34. A gallon of gas was just over a buck. And, at least on the visitors’ sideline of Texas Stadium that Thanksgiving Day, the price for laying out Cowboys kicker Luis Zendejas was $200.

Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the “Bounty Bowl,” one of the ugliest incidents in team history, an unfortunate stain on the league’s rich Thanksgiving Day tradition, and one of the most notorious chapters in one of the nastiest rivalries in the National Football League.

“Why would I place a bounty on a kicker who can’t kick worth a damn?”

The Cowboys were a dismal 1-10 entering the Week 12 game of the 1989 season; Jerry Jones had just purchased the team in February. Jimmy Johnson had replaced the legendary Tom Landry as coach. The team’s best player, Herschel Walker, had been traded away a few weeks earlier, and Troy Aikman was nearing the three-quarter mark of his rookie campaign as starting quarterback of the league’s worst squad. Hosting its annual Thanksgiving Day contest was one of the lone chances that season for the struggling Cowboys to shine before a nationwide audience. The opponent that day? The 7-4 Philadelphia Eagles, helmed by coach Buddy Ryan.

Down by a 10-0 score coming out of halftime, Dallas kicked off to open the third quarter. Moments after sending the ball deep on his first kick of the game, Zendejas was leveled by Eagles linebacker and special teams player Jessie Small. Replays seem to show that Small bypassed several members of the Cowboys coverage team to get to Zendejas. Once there, he delivered a massive blow that sent the 175-pound kicker flying and left him wobbling as he tried to stand.

In today’s game, the hit would have drawn an immediate flag, resulting in not only a penalty for the Eagles, but a stiff fine for Small from the league. But on that day in Irving in 1989, it was- incredibly enough- Zendejas who was flagged, for a low block. (In retrospect, Zendejas was clearly crouching in anticipation because he knew a big hit was coming; more on that later.) And for his bone-crunching blow, Small actually made money- directly from Coach Ryan, no less- according to blockbuster accusations leveled after the 27-0 loss by Johnson and the Cowboys.

The first-year coach claimed that Ryan had placed a bounty on Zendejas, promising a $200 cash payment to the Eagles player who flattened the kicker. Zendejas, coincidentally (or not, depending on your interpretation), had been cut by the Eagles less than a month earlier and then signed by Dallas.

Ryan laughed off the accusation as absurd.

“Why would I place a bounty on a kicker who can’t kick worth a damn?” he asked, according to Mark Eckel of NJ.com. “The guy was in a six-week slump. I wanted him in the game.”

Zendejas had, in fact, missed two field goals in Dallas’s previous game versus Miami. He did not seem to be, at least on the surface, a dangerous playmaking threat truly worthy of the personal ire of the Eagles coach.

The Dallas kicker, though, felt he had proof of the bounty. Eagles punter John Teltschik had warned him before the game that he was a target for a big hit. But there was more.

“Watch out for yourself…”

“In the days leading up to the game,” wrote Ray Didinger in a 2014 piece on the Eagles team website, “a story circulated in Dallas that Zendejas had received an ominous phone call from Eagles special teams coach Al Roberts. According to Zendejas, Roberts told him that Ryan had instructed his players to go after their former teammate.”

Zendejas claimed that upon his release in Philadelphia, he had been notified by Roberts, not Ryan directly. At the time, the kicker took to the media to voice his disappointment, calling his coach’s move “classless.”

”Buddy didn’t have the decency to tell me to my face; he had an assistant coach do it,” Zendejas said of his termination. ”When I phoned to ask him about it, he hung up on me.”

Roberts’s warning for Zendejas to “watch out for yourself” on Thanksgiving 1989 in the game that was quickly dubbed the “Bounty Bowl” was just the latest evidence of bad blood between Ryan and the Cowboys. Ryan, in fact, harbored a hatred for the rivals from Dallas ever since taking over in Philadelphia in 1986. That hatred that grew exponentially the following season.

During the 1987 NFL players’ strike, Dallas saw several high-profile members of their roster cross the picket line to continue playing. Ryan accused then-coach Landry of running up the score on his replacement players in a 41-22 win. After the strike had ended and full-time players returned, Ryan got his revenge on Dallas. He instructed his starting offense to run a fake kneeldown play – after two actual kneel-downs – in the final seconds of a game the Eagles were already leading 30-20. The ensuing rub-it-in touchdown beat the Cowboys by 17 points. In 1989, Ryan saw a chance to kick the rebuilding team when they were down, in their own stadium and on national television.

But the notion of Ryan placing a price tag on the heads of opposing players wasn’t even a new one.

“Ron Wolfley, a Pro Bowl special teams tackler for the [then-]Phoenix Cardinals, disclosed [in 1988] that he had heard that the Eagles had a bounty on him during the 1987 season,” as per a 1989 New York Times piece by Dave Anderson.  He goes on to write that, in an Eagles-Bears game that same 1989 season, “similar bounties were whispered to be on Mike Tomczak, the quarterback, and Dennis McKinnon, a wide receiver,” and adding, “Ryan, who has feuded openly with Mike Ditka, also supposedly had offered a bounty if any of the Eagle players flattened the Bears’ coach on the sideline.”

To be sure, the Cowboys were well aware of the bounty rumors when they took the field that Thanksgiving Day. And Zendejas wasn’t the only Dallas player with a supposed price on his head.

“He never used the word ‘bounty.'”

In the first half of the game, Aikman was slammed to the ground by Eagles linebacker Britt Hager well after an aborted-play whistle. The hit, despite broadcasters Pat Summerall and John Madden clearly being entertained by the “fracas” that followed, necessitated X-rays for Aikman. Johnson claimed the Eagles had also put a $500 contract on his rookie quarterback.

Hager, a Texas alum, was quoted in a 2016 Dallas Morning News article by Rainer Sabin when asked about the oft-repeated whispers of Ryan’s bounties.

“As far as I know, he never pointed out a guy,” Hager answered. “I never heard, ‘Go take the kicker out.’ Who would say, ‘Go take the kicker out?’ That’s why we all kind of laughed about it.”

He admitted, though, that Ryan wasn’t above at least insinuating that opposing quarterbacks were fair game for his players.

Eckel explains, “Ryan would say to me after the fact that he would tell his players at times before games, ‘I want to find out who their backup quarterback is today.” But he never used the word ‘bounty’.”

Anderson adds that Zendejas himself “spoke of having seen ”Buddy call guys out and give them $100” for what the kicker called a weekly Big Hit award but what Ryan called a Big Play award.

“Ryan acknowledged those $100 bonuses to his Eagle players, but insisted they were for an interception or a jarring tackle that caused a fumble in the context of the game, not for leveling a certain opponent.”

But, Sabin writes: “At the time, Hager and the Eagles special teams and defensive players would collect a pool of money and redistribute it for big hits, ‘decleaters,’ sacks, and turnovers. It wasn’t an uncommon practice in the NFL during a bygone era when the league’s image was less sanitized and the game wasn’t as scrutinized. In fact, the Cowboys had a similar system, according to [Dallas fullback Daryl] Johnston.

“‘There was no intent of malice,’ Johnston explained.”

But to anyone watching the 1989 Thanksgiving Day contest, there was clearly intent of malice in the Eagles hit that left a diminutive kicker staggering off the field.

Didinger, the famed Philadelphia sportswriter, had a private film session with Jimmy Johnson at Valley Ranch several days after the Bounty Bowl.

“On the film, you could see Small take a straight-line course to Zendejas. He actually ran right past Bill Bates, the Cowboys’ best special teams player, to get to the kicker who never made a tackle in his entire career.

“‘Why would he do that,’ Johnson said referring to Small, ‘unless somebody told him to do it?’

“I had to admit Johnson had a point.”

“You all know what you were doing!”

The New York Times quoted Zendejas as saying of Ryan after the Thanksgiving Day game, ”If I could’ve stood on my two legs, I would’ve gone over and decked him… We’ll play again in two weeks. If I see him then, I’ll deck him then. Honestly, I will.”

Zendejas did share words with several of his ex-Eagles teammates when the Thanksgiving game ended. Small, in fact, was overheard by Didinger telling Zendejas, ”I was just doing my job.” The Cowboys’ kicker reportedly replied, ”You know what you were doing! You all know what you were doing!” An Eagles’ trainer offered his hand; Zendejas slapped it away.

Johnson himself intended to confront Ryan right there on the field after the final gun. But the Eagles coach hurried off the Texas Stadium field, skipping the traditional coaches’ face-to-face meeting.

According to Didinger: “It was true Ryan left the field as soon as the game ended, but he did that every week. He didn’t believe in postgame handshakes. Professional courtesy wasn’t his thing.”

Johnson famously said of the moment, “Oh, I would have said something to Buddy, but he wouldn’t stand on the field long enough. He put his big fat rear end into the dressing room.”

In his response, Ryan, as he did with most things, deflected the criticism with a joke.

“I resent that,” Ryan said. “I’ve been on a diet, I lost a couple of pounds. I thought I was looking good, and he goes and calls me fat. I kind of resent that.”

The teams played again two weeks later. It was not nearly enough time, though, for tempers to have cooled. “Bounty Bowl II” had become a promoted event, and it carried the animosity into the Veterans Stadium stands, with Philadelphia fans pelting Cowboys players, NFL officials, CBS broadcasters, and even their own players with ice-packed snowballs in one of the most chaotic game environments ever seen at an NFL venue.

On the field, Zendejas was left alone, and he never went after Ryan. But Aikman took several hits during the game along with Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham; nine total sacks were recorded in a notably physical 20-10 Eagles win. Cowboys punter Mike Saxon was also roughed up during play, drawing an unnecessary roughness flag.

“He never truly admitted it.”

As for the initial Bounty Bowl accusations, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue- on the job just one month when it happened- followed up by interviewing a handful of players. There was even talk of a recording Zendejas had supposedly made of the phone conversation where the Eagles assistant had warned him of the bounty, but the kicker never turned over any such tape.

In the end, according to the Dallas Morning News, “the league dropped the inquiry, saying it found no ‘convincing evidence of an intent to injure any Cowboys player or to make contact with any player outside the rules of the game.'”

The 1989 season ended with the Cowboys finishing 1-15, the second NFL team to ever do so. Their league-worst record would have given them the top pick in the 1990 draft, but the team had given up that pick by taking quarterback Steve Walsh in the first round of the previous year’s supplemental draft. The Cowboys eventually traded picks with the Steelers to re-enter the first round; they selected running back Emmitt Smith 17th overall.

The Eagles came in second in the NFC East in 1989 and lost to the Rams in the wild card round of the playoffs.

Ryan never admitted to a bounty system in the years that followed, maintaining that position until his passing in 2016.

Johnson, now a FOX studio analyst, recalled Ryan’s denials in a 2014 interview.

“He sloughed it off. He never truly admitted it,” Johnson said. “I think Buddy was trying to play games. I kid him, ‘You had one of the great all-time defenses, but you never won a playoff game.’ I had the last laugh.”

Johnson’s championships may have afforded him the luxury to find humor in it long after the fact, but the Bounty Bowl saga remains a seminal part of the lore of the Cowboys-Eagles rivalry any time the franchises meet. Thirty years of hindsight has perhaps turned the original controversy into just a colorful chapter from a distant era; nothing, though, has diminished the intense dislike the two teams have for one another to this day.

And to think, it all started with a kicker.

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