Cowboys Icon Loses Battle With Leukemia

Sunday, February 13th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Tom Landry, whose brilliant football mind calculated behind a stone face and beneath a fedora throughout his 29 seasons as Dallas Cowboys coach, died Saturday. Landry suffered from leukemia, a cancer that impairs the production of blood cells.

If Landry's Cowboys were the self-proclaimed "America's Team," Landry himself grew into America's football coach by national acclamation in the 1970s, when his Cowboys played in five Super Bowls, winning two.

And as professional football gained in popularity throughout the decade, capturing America's sports heart and its television sets in record numbers, unflappable Landry became the new, fresh face of a city that had been stigmatized in 1963 by the assassination of a U.S. president.

Landry's tenure began with a winless 1960 season and ended with a 3-13 season in 1988. They were his two worst seasons in terms of wins and losses. In between, Landry led the team to an unprecedented 20 consecutive winning seasons from 1966 to 1985.

Landry's Cowboys won 13 division titles.

Known for years as "the only coach the Cowboys have ever known," Landry actually signed on to work for Dallas' expansion team in the National Football League before the franchise existed. Potential owners Clint Murchison Jr. and Bedford Wynne signed Landry, who had been a defensive assistant coach with the New York Giants, to a personal-services contract two days after Christmas in 1959. It wasn't until Jan. 28, 1960 that the NFL deigned to welcome Dallas into its ranks.

Landry was fired on Feb. 25, 1989, the day Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys from Bum Bright and anointed Jimmy Johnson the second head coach in franchise history.

"I don't recall his [Jones'] exact words, but he went on to say he'd bought the Cowboys and he was bringing in Jimmy Johnson to be his head coach," Landry said at the time. "I don't remember anything he said after that. A jumble of feelings crowded my mind. Anger. Sadness. Frustration. Disappointment. Resignation."

Landry's legendary coaching career ended with 270 victories, which placed him third on the NFL's all-time list behind only George Halas and Don Shula. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, 11 months after the firing. He was inducted by Jones into the Cowboys' Ring of Honor at Texas Stadium in 1993.

A deeply religious man who worked tirelessly for Christian causes when his Cowboys days were over, Landry told interviewers after his fifth and final Super Bowl appearance in 1979 that he believed his destiny always had been controlled by a power greater than the Cowboys' ability to win football games.

"As a Christian, I know my life is in God's hands," Landry said in 1979 after his fifth and final Super Bowl. "He has a plan for me. Therefore, I never worry about tomorrow or never worry about winning or losing football games. That knowledge gives me a lot of composure in tough situations."

Since 1989, Landry devoted his time to speaking engagements, appearances on behalf of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, evangelist Billy Graham and the Lisa Landry Childress Foundation, as well as business interests with his son, Tom Jr.

Lisa Landry Childress, the youngest daughter of Tom and Alicia Landry, died in May 1995 after a four-year battle with liver cancer. She was 37.

Thomas Wade Landry was born in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley, not far from the Mexican border, in the town of Mission, on Sept. 11, 1924. His father, Ray Landry, was an auto mechanic, chief of the local volunteer fire department and superintendent of the Sunday school at the Methodist Church down the street from the Landry home. His mother, Ruth Coffman Landry, was a homemaker who raised three children, including her youngest, Tom.

In his autobiography, published in 1990 and written with author Gregg Lewis, Landry described Mission as a typical Texas small town. "Anyone you'd meet on the street knew who you were, where you lived, and often where you were headingd while that meant privacy was at a premium and kids had a hard time getting into mischief, it proved to be a good preparation for the kind of public life I've lived for more than 40 years. I learned a sense of accountability early in life, accepting the fact that people were always watching - even when I wished they weren't."

As a child, Landry also worked hard to overcome a speech impediment.

"I never said much because I was too self-conscious to speak up," wrote the man that columnist Blackie Sherrod would dub Mount Landry.

"It seemed to fit the stolid, unflappable, and dependable, durable object he had become," Sherrod wrote in Landry's coaching obituary in 1989. "He was there, in his unflinching granite form, yesterday, today and tomorrow."

Once, at a Cowboys practice, defensive back Cornell Green intercepted a pass thrown by quarterback Don Meredith. In mock rage, Meredith chased Green down the field, beating him over the head with a helmet. Teammates exploded in laughter. Landry did not.

"Nothing funny ever happens on a football field," Landry said after the incident.

As for the public perception of him as a grim-faced Texan, Landry acknowledged that it was the way he learned to coach.

"People based their judgments just on what they saw on the sideline," he said. "The way I trained myself to concentrate, I blanked everything else out. You can't show emotion. I trained from watching Ben Hogan. He never let his concentration break. . . . The image never bothered me too much. My friends know me."

While playing football at Mission High, which boasted fewer than 200 students, Landry was a quarterback, all-regional fullback and defensive back. Mission's team in 1941 finished unbeaten, untied and almost unscored upon. The Eagles allowed only one touchdown that season. It came after defensive back Landry was penalized for pass interference against Donna High School.

Landry entered the University of Texas the next year. He was in Austin in the fall of 1942 when he got a call from his family notifying him that his only brother, Robert, who at 22 was almost four years older, had been killed.

Soon after, Tom Landry enlisted in the army reserve and applied for pilots' training in the Army Air Corps. In February 1943, he was summoned from campus to basic training.

Tom Landry would fly 30 missions over Europe in a B-17. On one mission, his plane ran out of gas over France, forcing a crash landing. Landry and the rest of the crew walked away uninjured.

After the war, Landry returned to Austin to further his studies and play football for the Longhorns. But he was a far more serious Tom Landry than the boy who had gone off to war.

"During the course of three short years, I went from a scared college freshman lost on his university campus to a grizzled war veteran of 21," he wrote in his autobiography. " . . . War had tested me, but I had survived. And that experience had given me not only a broader perspective on life, but a confidence in myself I had never known before."

But not enough confidence to ask a girl out on a date. For that, he enlisted the aid of Longhorns teammate Lew Holder's girlfriend. He asked that she introduce him to one of her sorority sisters.

In the fall of 1947, Gloria Neuhaus introduced Tom Landry to freshman Alicia Wiggs. Miss Wiggs was a graduate of Highland Park High School, where she had been a model whose picture had appeared in Seventeen magazine.

Tom Landry and Alicia Wiggs were married in January 1949 - a few days after Landry, the team captain, had led the Longhorns to a 41-28 Orange Bowl victory over the University of Georgia.

"I wasn't that interested in football," Mrs. Landry would say almost 35 years later. "I was really a Tommy fan."

Later in 1949, Landry graduated from Texas with a bachelor's degree in business to professional football. He signed with the New York Yankees of the soon-to-be-defunct All-America Conference. His contract called for $6,000 and a $500 signing bonus. He remained a Yankee for only one season before the league folded.

The next season, Landry joined the NFL's New York Giants, for whom he would star at defensive back. But it wasn't his speed that allowed Landry to thrive. He ran the 100-yard dash in a relatively snail-like 10.3 seconds. It was his smarts.

His game was based on out-thinking the opposition, in studying opponents and anticipating their every move. He loved the challenge.

"Even when I was still playing offense, I felt defense was the most challenging part of the game," he said. "The offense has its plays diagramed for it and knows ahead of time exactly what it has to do. On the other hand, the defense must constantly anticipate and react. On defense you have to accept the fact that you're going to give the other guy the first shot. Trying to figure out a way to take some of that advantage away from him was always the most intriguing part of the game for me."

In 1954, the Giants asked Landry, who was playing left cornerback, to become an assistant coach.

"When New York made me a player-coach, they raised me up to $12,000," he said. "I coached the whole defense by myself and made All-Pro. When I went into [Giants owner Wellington Mara's] office to ask for a raise, he said, 'I don't know if you had a good enough year.' "

Landry spent one more season playing and coaching. He retired as a player after the 1955 season to devote himself to plotting defensive schemes for the Giants.

The most he would ever make as a player was $15,000.

Coaching would prove more lucrative. His final Cowboys contract paid him $1 million a season.

Between NFL seasons, and Mrs. Landry lived in Dallas. Always he tried to return to Dallas in time for Christmas. When his coaching career was finished, he planned on settling in Dallas year-round and selling insurance.

It was as a Giants assistant coach that Landry began wearing his trademark fedoras. One reason was obvious. New York got cold during the football season, and he needed something to cover his bald head. The other shows how Landry's mind worked. Thinking ahead to a post-football life in the insurance business, he decided it would be best to look as businesslike as possible on the sideline. The idea was to impress possible future employers and people who might like to buy policies from him.

"A nice fedora seemed like the finishing touch in my working wardrobe," he once said.

When hats went out of style in the 1960s, Landry stuck with his fedora. When he became a head coach, there were those who thought he should switch to a cowboy hat. But Landry wouldn't hear of such a fashion statement.

It was also as a Giants assistant coach that Landry car pooled from his Connecticut home to games at Yankee Stadium with, among others, a young, up-and-coming broadcaster named Howard Cosell.

It doesn't take much imagination to know who did all of the talking and who did all of the listening.

It was while he was back in Dallas after the 1958 season, Landry wrote, that he had a religious awakening and was "born again." He began attending Wednesday morning men's prayer breakfasts at the Melrose Hotel before setting out to sell insurance. "Using the same sort of scientific, analytical approach that enabled me to break down and understand an opponent's offenses," he wrote, "I read and studied and discovered the basic keys of the Christian gospel."

When the fledgling American Football League announced it would have a team in Dallas in 1960, the NFL decided it, too, had to have a team there.

Landry was 35 years old when the Cowboys lured him home to Texas, making him the youngest coach in the NFL at the time. Landry signed a five-year contract that averaged out to $34,500 a season. It was a bargain when you consider that the Cowboys had hired "the greatest coach in football."

That's what his old boss, Giants head coach Jim Lee Howell, proclaimed after Landry's defense had held the Cleveland Browns and their great running back, Jim Brown, scoreless in a 1958 playoff game.

It was with the Giants, as well, that Landry redesigned NFL defenses. Most teams played with five defensive linemen and three defensive backs until Landry realized it could not be as effective against offenses that were beginning to rely more and more on passing. He designed a new defensive alignment that relied on only four linemen complemented by three linebackers. And so for years, the 4-3 defense became the only defense to play in the NFL.

Landry actually had his choice of jobs in 1960. The new AFL franchise in Houston, the Oilers, approached Landry about its coaching position. But he already had experienced life in a league that had competed with the NFL and lost. What if the Houston Oilers suffered the same fate as the defunct New York Yankees?

Besides, Tex Schramm, brought in by Murchison and Wynne from CBS Sports in New York to run their team, offered Landry something the Oilers did not.

"Tex gave me what I wanted from the beginning, complete control of the football end - anything that had to do with the players other than signing them," Landry once told reporters in explaining why he chose Dallas over Houston. "This was good, and ultimately this system helped us to succeed."

The key word was "ultimately."

In his first four seasons on the job in Dallas, the Cowboys were 13-38-3. There were rumblings that a coaching change might be in order.

Instead of a verbal vote of confidence for a coach with a year remaining on his contract, Murchison, who may have been Landry's greatest admirer, offered him a 10-year contract extension and an option to buy 5 percent of the Cowboys.

It cemented Landry's place in NFL history.

In 1965, the Cowboys finally won as many games as they lost, finishing 7-7. The next season, they went 10-3-1 before losing to the Green Bay Packers in the 1966 NFL Championship Game.

In 1967, the Cowboys lost to the Packers again in the NFL Championship Game - the game now known as the Ice Bowl for the sub-zero temperatures at Green Bay's Lambeau Field. The next two seasons, the Cowboys lost playoff games to the Cleveland Browns. The 1970 season ended with a trip to Super Bowl V and a loss to the Baltimore Colts.

Landry's Cowboys were being ridiculed nationally and referred to as "next year's champions." They had established a reputation as a team unable to win the "big" games.

And then in the middle of the muddle that was the 1971 season, Landry anointed Roger Staubach the Cowboys' No. 1 quarterback. The Cowboys finished with 10 consecutive victories. They beat the Minnesota Vikings in a playoff game, the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game and the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl.

Next year's champions had arrived.

Asked soon after he was fired by Jones if his first NFL championship team had been his favorite to coach, Landry did not hesitate to say, "no."

The team he most enjoyed coaching, Landry said, didn't win a Super Bowl. In fact it didn't even get there. It didn't make it past the first round of the playoffs, losing to the Los Angeles Rams, 20-0, to end the 10-6 season in 1985. The team's greatest accomplishment was winning the NFC East.

"It was so outmanned," Landry said. "There's no reason why New York or Washington shouldn't have won the division that year. We won it because of guys like Mike Renfro . . . and Steve Pelluer . . . and throwing the ball to guys like Karl Powe."

But for Landry, and for so many Cowboys fans, the play that stood out most had occurred a decade earlier. It was a 50-yard touchdown pass from Roger Staubach to Drew Pearson with 24 seconds remaining that allowed the Cowboys to beat the Minnesota Vikings, 17-14, in a 1975 playoff game. Before Pearson caught the ball, he collided with Nate Wright at the five-yard line. Wright fell down. It was labeled "The Hail Mary" by Staubach. The play was one final, desperate attempt to win rather than the result of any coaching genius. There are those who believe they saw Pearson push the Vikings defender away so he could catch the ball.

"It was the single most exciting play I ever saw," Landry said. "Interference? No, I never saw Drew push off. . . . I even lost faith that we could pull that game out. Roger Staubach was not at his best in that game. But he just believed so hard that it was contagious."

Landry did not find it hard to stay away from the Cowboys and the NFL in the decade since he was fired. He attended only two Cowboys games at Texas Stadium, both for ceremonies - his own and, a year later in 1994, for Tony Dorsett and Randy White.

Nor did he spend much time on Sundays watching football on television.

"If I start watching, I find myself fading away from it," he said. "My interest isn't as great as it once was."

Landry is survived by his wife, Alicia; son, Tom Jr., 49; daughter, Kitty Phillips, 46; and grandchildren.