Boys Will Be Boys Read Online Free PDF Page B

same financial crisis that had done in Bright was impacting hundreds of thousands of denizens. Within the past seven years not a single new business had relocated to downtown Dallas. The murder, rape, and aggravated assault rates were the highest in the city’s history, and the public schools were being compared with those in Detroit and Houston. “Dallas was suffering from a self-confidence crisis,” says Steve Bartlett, who served as mayor from 1991 to 1995. “If the sports team did well the people would start feeling better about themselves too. But at the time the Cowboys were terrible and people were angry. That’s what Jerry was walking into.”
    The press conference was a disaster. In what would come to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Jones took the podium (Johnson remained in Miami) and presented himself as a backwoods Arkansan bumpkin powered by a heart of coal. With dozens of team employees apprehensively looking on, Jones kicked things off by exclaiming, “This is like Christmas for me!” and followed with a meandering seven-minute, twenty-four-second monologue that detailed his euphoria and excitement.
    “I had a little media experience when I played at Arkansas,” says Jones. “But I had no idea what I was doing. Admittedly, it was terrible.”
    When he finally got around to the beloved Landry, Jones’s words lacked depth and empathy. “This man is like Bear Bryant to me, like Vince Lombardi to me,” he said, suppressing a giddy smirk. “If you love competitors, Tom Landry’s an angel.” Collectively, the assembled media groaned. Landry may well have deserved to be fired— but by this yokel? Jones would promptly be nicknamed “Jethro” after the doltish Jethro Bodine character from TV’s The Beverly Hillbillies.
    “Jerry was so obviously in over his head,” says Jim Dent, the veteran Dallas writer. “In the media, we felt stabbed in the heart by the way he fired Landry. Jerry just dropped out of nowhere, and the opinionwas, What the hell does this guy know? That press conference cemented the belief.”
    At his best, Jones came off as dumb. He called Johnson “the best coach in America” and said that, as the new owner, he would be involved with everything from “jocks to socks.”
    Standing beside his new boss, Schramm shrunk by the second. Though his relationship with Landry ran hot and cold, there was always respect. At one point a reporter asked of Schramm’s status. “He’s standing right next to me, isn’t he?” Jones said. Told that Schramm was actually standing behind him, Jones said, “He’s a little behind tonight. We’ve got an evolving thing. Tex and I just initially talked this morning at nine o’clock. We’ve got a lot of settling to do.”
    Like Landry, Schramm was a goner. The man who had constructed the Cowboys would soon take a job as president of the new World League of American Football. Gil Brandt, the personnel wizard, was eventually jettisoned too.
    With a tilted grin, Jones assured the masses that he “needed” the holdover employees to show him the way. Then he went on a firing spree, unloading dozens upon dozens of longtime Cowboy workers. “On his first full day he had a bunch of us come into his office,” says Carlton Stowers, the outgoing editor of Cowboy Weekly, the team’s self-published tabloid. “He gave us the ol’ I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing speech. The next day the ticket manager got a note saying she had to be out of the building by five o’clock. She’d been with the team for twenty years.”
     
    On Monday, February 27, Tom Landry—his boxes packed, his office empty—addressed his players one final time. The former head coach entered a room at Valley Ranch and, as always, removed his hat. Following a lengthy pause, he began to speak softly. “This will be our last…meeting together,” he said, taking deep breaths. “We will…all go on. You’ll…all find that in…adverse situations, strength…comes