Tom Landry

American football coach (1924-2000). He was born in Mission, Texas, and his high school career included successful seasons on the football team as a quarterback and punter, including leading his team to an undefeated 12-0 record as a senior. 

Upon graduating from high school, he attended the University of Texas in Austin, but enlisted in the Army Air Corps after his first semester. His older brother, Robert, had enlisted after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but his plane had gone down over the North Atlantic. Landry flew 30 missions in England as the copilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber and survived a crash landing in Belgium when the plane ran out of fuel. 

After World War II, Landry returned to UT, where he majored in industrial engineering. He played fullback and defensive back on the football team. After earning his bachelor's degree, he picked up a master's in industrial engineering from the University of Houston. 

Landry played one season for the New York Yankees -- no, not the universally despised baseball team -- this was a football team in the All-America Football Conference. The AAFC folded in 1949, and Landry was selected by the New York Giants in a dispersal draft. While with the Giants, he helped explain defensive plays to other players, giving him his first experience with coaching. 

Landry ended his 80-game playing career in 1955 with 32 interceptions returned for 404 yards and three touchdowns. He recovered ten fumbles, returning them for 67 yards and two touchdowns. He was also seclected as an All-Pro in 1954. 

Landry took over as the defensive coordinator for the Giants (opposite offensive coordinator Vince Lombardi) until 1960, when he was named the first head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. He stayed at Dallas for 29 seasons, from 1960 to 1988. The first several years were rough, with no wins at all in the first season and five or fewer in the next four. He got a ten-year extension the next year, went 7-7, and then in 1966, had a ten-win season and made it to the NFL championship game, losing to the Green Bay Packers. 

And after that, the Cowboys had 20 straight winning seasons, won Super Bowl VI and Super Bowl XII|XII], five NFC titles, and 13 divisional titles. He ended up with a 270-178-6 record. 

Besides winning lots of games, Landry became well-known for his exceptionally calm and stoic demeanor during games and for his trademark fedora. 

Landry developed the 4-3 defense while he was coaching for the Giants and refined it while at Dallas. It's now one of the most popular defense formations because it's very flexible and gives defenders the opportunity to respond quickly to offensive plays. Landry also showed innovative strategies in how he selected players -- he recruited soccer players from Latin America as placekickers and chose some track-and-field athletes as wide receivers. 

Landry also had a good record for turning assistants into coaches -- head coaches Mike Ditka, Dan Reeves, John Mackovic, Gene Stallings, and Raymond Berry all got their starts as assistants under Landry.

The Cowboys slumped badly in the 1980s, with three losing seasons in a row, including a 3-13 record in 1988, the worst in the NFL. This lead to harsh criticism from fans and from team owner Bum Bright and general manager Tex Schramm -- but Schramm said he was still confident in Landry, and Bright's expertise was in business, not coaching, so he preferred not to involve himself in team management. 

After severe financial losses in his banking, real estate, and oil concerns, Bright sold the team in 1988 to a low-life scumbag named Jerry Jones, who immediately fired Landry and forced Schramm out soon afterwards -- Landry was the only coach the Cowboys had ever had, and Schramm the only general manager, thus cementing Jones' eternal status as an absolute piece of shit. (You won't get this native Texan rooting for the Cowboys again 'til Jones sells the team. Or gets a pickaxe buried in his brainpan.)

Landry wept when he met with his players two days later, and the team gave him a standing ovation. Fans were unhappy, too -- they'd been upset with the team's recent poor seasons, but the idea of firing Landry with so little respect wasn't a decision the public was keen on. 

Landry died of leukemia on February 12, 2000. The Cowboys wore a patch on their uniforms that season depicting the coach's fedora. 

Favorite trivia: In 1959, which working as the defense coordinator for the Giants, Landry appeared on an episode of the panel game "To Tell the Truth," where he pretended to be a Catholic missionary named Father William A. Lightning.

He became "God's Coach", for "God's Team". Never mind that players like Lance Alworth and Lance Rentzel were quite unsaintly, and that the antics of many other such players made their way into slightly-fictionalized, best-selling accounts over the years. Even management people, such as Tex Schramm, were the Anti-Landry, a bunch of high-living Good Old Playboys; those were the people, after all, who gave us the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and had they had their way, those women would have been something raunchier than what was actually presented - the slight sanitizing was done, perhaps, out of respect for Coach Landry.

As a kid, he annoyed me, seeming like your typical smug FCA icon, but consider that his influence basically saved the lives of cocaine-addicted players like Hollywood Henderson and Mercury Morris (though Duane Thomas was a lost cause), and players like Bob Lilly and Roger Staubach have become, while annoying, solid Landry-like role models for the next generation. Which is good, since we don't have Coach Landry any more.

He was the last coach to wear a suit and fedora on the sidelines, an anachronism at the time, but, in retrospect, in this age of massive corporate-sponsored clothing deals, in which all coaches dress alike in their team-colors endorsement-deal sweat suits, Landry's conservative throwback garb exuded class.