Boys Will Be Boys Read Online Free PDF

well,” said Jones with a chuckle. “You just made three hundred thousand dollars.” (Bright later presented Jones with a quarter glued to a block, along with a note reading, “You’ll never know if it was a two-headed coin.”)
    Midway through the meeting Tex Schramm arrived, looked at Johnson (who had attended at Jones’s insistence), and roared, “You need to get your ass out of town! Your people have embarrassed Tom Landry enough already.” Though Schramm himself had been trying to deftly, sensitively nudge Landry aside for the past few years, there were proper ways to go about it. Dinner at Mia’s was not one of them.
    Johnson heeded the advice and caught the next flight to Miami. Jones and Schramm, meanwhile, had their own flying to do. Bright assured Jones that he would have no problem firing Landry as his final act of ownership, but Jones refused. He believed that, as the new boss, it was his duty to confront Landry face-to-face. Bright wasn’t one to argue the point—as long as Landry was a goner, he was content. “Bum Bright owed it to Tom to pick up the phone and give him a heads-up that the sale was going through,” says Bob Ackles, the team’s director of player personnel. “But Bum didn’t like Landry and felt he owed him nothing.”
    With his time dwindling, Landry followed the course of action of many imperiled men before him…and fled. Schramm had asked the coach to remain in Dallas so that Jones might speak with him, but Landry had little interest in making his ousting an easy process. As most Dallas residents were learning of his imminent demise from the Morning News, Landry was piloting his Cessna 210 to Lakeway, Texas, where his family owned a weekend getaway house. As if the big newsof the day were a 4-H bake sale (and not his dismissal), Landry headed out to the Hidden Hills golf course, where he played eighteen holes with his son, Tom Landry, Jr.
    By the time Jones and Schramm reached Hidden Hills on the evening of February 25, the sky was darkening. Only two golfers—Landry and his son—remained at the facility; they were practicing their putting. With Schramm at his side, Jones approached the men and introduced himself. The four retreated to a sales office, where Jones and Landry sat face-to-face. “This is with absolutely no disrespect to you,” Jones said. “But I’m here and so is Jimmy.”
    Having seen Landry on TV, oh, ten thousand times, Jones expected his reaction to be subdued and polite. “I’ll always regret going there,” says Jones. “I misread the situation. I wanted to do the right thing and tell him in person. I thought it would be honorable. But it didn’t come off that way. I’ll always be haunted by that.”
    “You could have saved your plane trip down here,” Landry snapped. “As a matter of fact, you could have handled this whole thing a lot better. This whole thing is just a bunch of grandstand tactics. You had no obligation to do this. You could have saved your gas.”
    With that, the third-winningest coach in NFL history began to cry.
     
    Later that evening, Jones and Schramm returned to Valley Ranch to announce the takeover of America’s Team. With approximately twenty-five reporters waiting in an auditorium, Jones stepped into Schramm’s private bathroom and shaved. Normally cool under pressure, Jones found himself sweating profusely.
    Upon leaving the bathroom, Jones was approached by Doug Todd, the team’s veteran media relations director. Todd had handled Super Bowls and drug scandals, surprising trades and shocking deaths. “You’ll enter the room and there will be a dais on the right,” Todd told Jones as he tightened the knot atop his tie. “And over here will be a row of chairs—”
    “Hold on,” snapped the new owner. “I can handle it. I can handle it.”
    But he couldn’t. Jones was not merely an outsider purchasing a football team—he was an outsider purchasing the soul of Dallas in the midst of a citywide slump. The