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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780871403339 |
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Publisher: | Liveright Publishing Corporation |
Publication date: | 11/04/2013 |
Pages: | 720 |
Sales rank: | 694,255 |
Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction xi
Part I You Can't Get the Hell Out of Texas
Prologue: "It's a Texas Thing" 3
Chapter 1 Missionary Man 11
Chapter 2 A Grim Reaper 30
Chapter 3 Big Man on Campus 49
Chapter 4 A Texas Yankee 68
Chapter 5 "Okay, Tom, You Explain It" 85
Chapter 6 "Sam's My Man" 105
Chapter 7 "As Different as Daylight and Dark" 121
Chapter 8 "Lord, I Need Your Help Today" 139
Part II If You're Gonna Play in Texas
Chapter 9 Big Dog 161
Chapter 10 "Is There a Team in Dallas?" 182
Chapter 11 A Virtue Out of Weakness 205
Chapter 12 "It Wasn't Dallas. It was Dante's Inferno" 226
Chapter 13 "We're Ready to Contend" 247
Chapter 14 "The Baser Instincts of Men" 268
Chapter 15 Less Than Zero 288
Part III The Devil Lives in Dallas
Chapter 16 "We Need to Reverse This Trend" 307
Chapter 17 The Lord Taketh … 331
Chapter 18 "A Vehicle for Corporate Ego" 354
Chapter 19 … And the Lord Finally Giveth 376
Chapter 20 "A Big Transmitter to God" 398
Chapter 21 The Last Happy Ending 425
Chapter 22 Hollywood Babylon 446
Chapter 23 America's Team-or the Antichrist? 473
Chapter 24 Staring into the Dark 499
Chapter 25 Living on a Prayer 528
Chapter 26 "Assault on Mount Landry" 559
Chapter 27 "You've Taken My Team Away From Me" 588
Epilogue: The Apostle 617
Acknowledgments 633
Notes 637
Index 671