When the Tuna Went Down to Texas: How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land

by Mike Shropshire

Overview

Bill Parcells was living in self-imposed exile from the National Football League sidelines. The Tuna had earned living-legend status after coaching the Giants, Patriots, and Jets from the skid-row district of the NFL and transforming those teams into champions. The final weeks of the 2002 season found Parcells working as an analyst at the ESPN studios. His heart aching, Parcells was like a televangelist with no cripples to heal. The Tuna urgently yearned for another lost cause.

In Dallas, Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones—described by author Mike Shropshire as "a man involved in a heroic struggle to overcome what had been diagnosed as a terminal face-lift"—was suffering through sleepless nights. Although his once-proud pro football powerhouse traveled beneath a banner that read "America's Team," it had suffered three straight 5-11 seasons. This team was so sick, it had bedsores.

After a clandestine meeting aboard Jones's private jet, parked at a New Jersey airport, Parcells agreed to abandon his East Coast roots and travel south to restore life to the Cowboys. The Tuna and Jones needed each other in the worst kind of way, so a shotgun wedding was performed. The pundits of the national media joined hands and shouted, "Parcells and Jones can't stand each other! They're too set in their ways! It'll never work!"

As usual, the pundits were wrong. With Parcells the ultimate motivator and so-called Jock Whisperer applying his craft, Dallas rolled to a 10-6 regular-season record and shocked the NFL by making the playoffs. When the Tuna Went Down to Texas details the saga of how this unlikely partnership of men "too brittle for tango lessons, but not yet blind enough for assisted living" amazed the sports world and serves as absolute proof that while the truth is not always stranger than fiction, it's usually a lot funnier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061756009
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Mike Shropshire is the author of The Pro, Seasons in Hell, and When the Tuna Went Down to Texas. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

When the Tuna Went Down to Texas
How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land

Chapter One

The Jock Whisperer

Amid the vast and endless sociological sprawl that erupts from the flat and brownish plains of modern North Texas, where the human species exists as a colony of ants -- they may be ants that drive colossal SUVs, but ants nevertheless -- there's a peculiar sanctuary that lies in sublime isolation from the twenty-first-century suburban madhouse that surrounds it. The homes that line the thoroughfares of this odd place, with their gray rooftops and stucco walls of cream and reddish orange, fronted by tiny yards that contain an allotment of two live oak trees that are really more like big weeds than trees, conform to the universally enforced code of impersonality that is the signature of the Sunbelt residential compound. Here is what separates this place from the numbing norm.

Look at these residential street signs: Cowboys Parkway, Avenue of Champions, Dorsett Drive, Meredith Drive, Staubach Drive, Morton Court. There's a thoroughfare named after almost every Dallas Cowboys icon, living or otherwise. Truax Drive. Billy Truax, for God's sake! They've memorialized a tight end who played maybe two seasons for the Cowboys, and there are more houses on his street than on Landry Lane. George Andrie, one of two Cowboys to score a touchdown in that Ice Bowl game at Green Bay that -- even with the cleansing power of the passage of time -- won't ever seem to go away, George has got his street. The other player to score that day, Lance Rentzel, has been excluded, but only because residential developers apparently maintain some silly prejudice against convicted flashers.

Pete Gent experienced a mediocrity-shrouded playing career. He is famous for his novel North Dallas Forty, in which the hero is a shoe box full of barbiturates, and the Tom Landry character is depicted as the second coming of John Wilkes Booth. God awmighty, even Pete Gent has a street named after him. This is football's version of Neverland, and Texas happens to be one of the very few venues on this planet where such a domain could happen.

Welcome to Valley Ranch, and please do not be deceived by the word "ranch." You won't find any horses or heifers or Gene Autrys or peckerwood rustlers or any of the other stereotypical features that one associates with the concept of a ranch. Situated a few blocks away from the seesaws and slides at Champions Park, not far from the intersection of Winners Avenue and Touchdown Drive, is where you will locate the corporate headquarters of a notorious enterprise. You'll drive past the topiaryhedged star surrounded by the Austin stone facade, and suddenly you're in there, the realm of what the blue-and-white sign identifies as world champions -- 1971, 1977, 1992, 1993, 1995. The compound is crisp, immaculately combed, tweezed, and manicured, yet characterized by all of the warmth and hospitality of a munitions factory.

This is the home office of the most publicized, most cherished, most feared, and most despised organization in all of sports -- the Dallas Cowboys.

And yet, even with all of the palpable otherworldly effects that shroud the complex, it is not a place where one might expect to encounter a zombie, a card-carrying member of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of the Undead, prowling the hallways. I thought that the one outstandingly inexplicable event of my life, my only brush with the supernatural, happened when I saw what was surely the specter of Andrew Jackson. For the merest trace of an instant, accompanied by a loud clap of thunder, Old Hickory appeared beside me on the front veranda of the Hermitage.

The Ghost of Valley Ranch is even more compellingly eerie. Death, I have seen thy face, and thy name is Tuna.

Throughout Western civilization, the one true and enduring cultural reality is that Monday is God's joke on the workingman. Shake off the hangover and commence yet another five to six days' worth of failed dreams and lost ambitions. That's for the lucky ones.

Bill Parcells's Mondays, it is unsettlingly evident, summon a dimension of torment that no reasonable man could fathom -- no sweat-soaked peon swinging a machete in the snake-infested sugarcane plantations in Castro's Cuba, no pin-striped Philadelphia barrister with an ulcerated gut from attempting to achieve a junior partnership -- nothing that any of these doomed souls could even begin to comprehend. When Parcells decided to reenter the coaching rackets and come to Dallas, his former secretary with the New York Jets placed a call to the woman in the Cowboys office who would be her latest counterpart. She offered some advice. On Mondays, Bill Parcells should be avoided like cholera.

Parcells, the football coach, had spoken of a hidden force that seizes his brain and his body. When the final gun sounds on Bill Parcells's NFL Sunday, the curse begins, and it won't release its gnarled and twisted fingers from the Tuna's throat for thirty-six diabolic hours, at least. He must gather the game tapes, poring over them, reviewing the activities of every player on every play, evaluating, second-guessing, anguishing over this football game so inconsequential to the world as a whole. Eleven players, each seemingly vulnerable to about eleven things he might do wrong. The potential for imperfection then becomes eleven multiplied by eleven. Given football's laws of chaos, a usually trustworthy tight end, with his team facing second and goal, will inexplicably move a half-count early, and the five-yard penalty turns 7 potential points into 3. Those are the kinds of things that the Tuna finds on these tapes, the microscopic subplots that make his cardiovascular arteries constrict and impel him ever closer to the hereafter.

He sits alone in his office. In another part of the building is the locker room that is decorated by Tuna billboards offering such reminders as blame nobody -- expect nothing -- do something, losers sit around in small groups, bitching about the coach, the system, and other players, and winners come together as a team. It is dark, vacant, and quietly eerie ...

When the Tuna Went Down to Texas
How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land. Copyright © by Mike Shropshire. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

… Dallas sportswriter Mike Shropshire's When the Tuna Went Down to Texas: How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land is a lively, irreverent, entertaining account of Parcells's first year coaching the Dallas Cowboys. Shropshire's prose snaps, crackles and pops, as in his description of a game between Parcells's Giants and the San Francisco 49ers: ''The 49ers recovered, but Montana did not. The CBS cameras provided a brief close-up of Montana, dazed and on his knees, with a big chunk of that Candlestick Park sod jammed into his helmet's face guard. After countless game-winning collaborations with Jerry Rice and friends, Montana was a beaten man. Football's unbeatable man, on that one key blast by Leonard Marshall, had been transformed into Roberto Duran looking at Sugar Ray Leonard and pleading, 'No mas.' '
— The New York Times

Charles Salzberg

"Are you kidding me?" asked a Sports Illustrated story in early 2003, shortly after autocratic Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hired equally autocratic Bill Parcells ("The Big Tuna") as head coach of his NFL franchise. It was a sentiment repeated throughout the world of professional football, a world in which the fortunes of the Cowboys had declined after three consecutive 5-11 seasons, and a world Shropshire seeks to expose in this uneven examination of the Cowboys' 2003 season. Shropshire (Seasons in Hell; etc.), a writer for Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Slate.com, takes a magnifying glass to the Cowboys' amazingly improbable 10-6 record in Parcells's first season. He plumbs coaching philosophies, quarterback controversies and locker-room gossip, seeking to understand the reason for the team's first trip to the playoffs since 1999. Shropshire pores over each game, and even transcribes the coach's public utterances. Inexplicably, though, he devotes little space to the relationship between owner and coach. Maddeningly digressive (containing meditations, at times lengthy, on subjects such as zombies, the 2012 Olympics, motivational speaking and hurricanes) and listlessly written ("[Flozell] Adams is a player of gigantic physical size"), the book will appeal to only the most devoted fans. Agent, Jim Donovan Literary. (On sale Aug. 31) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly