Tom Landry's Cowboys and America's Team

Tom Landry coached the Dallas Cowboys from the franchise's founding in nineteen sixty through the nineteen eighty-eight season: twenty-nine years, thirteen division titles, five appearances in the Super Bowl, two championship rings. He was sixty-four years old when Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys, fired him by phone, and hired Jimmy Johnson. Landry was at a golf course in Lakeway, Texas, when the call came.

The Dallas Cowboys were labeled "America's Team" by an NFL Films narrator in a nineteen seventy-eight highlight reel, a designation the franchise accepted immediately and has never relinquished. The label was a marketing achievement as much as a sporting one. The Cowboys in those years were followed by fans in markets that had no NFL team, by people who saw in the Cowboys' crisp organization, their helmet star, and their cheerleaders a specific vision of American ambition. They were also, simultaneously, the franchise that casual observers loved most to hate: the combination of success and self-promotion that invites resentment as reliably as admiration.

Landry's Cowboys were the product of his particular personality: methodical, deeply religious, analytically rigorous about football, famously stone-faced on the sideline in the felt fedora he wore regardless of the weather. The fedora became its own legend. There is a Tom Landry statue outside the stadium in Frisco wearing one. There is a street in Dallas named for him.

He died in February of two thousand in Austin, at age seventy-five. The Cowboys' identity, built over twenty-nine years of his coaching, has outlasted every subsequent attempt to define it differently.