John Eisenberg - Ten-Gallon War: The NFLs Cowboys, the AFLs Texans, and the Feud for Dallass Pro Football Future

Copyright 2012 by John Eisenberg

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Eisenberg, John, date.
Ten-gallon war : the NFLs Cowboys, the AFLs Texans, and the feud for Dallass pro football future / John Eisenberg.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-43550-3
1. Dallas Cowboys (Football team)History. 2. Houston Texans (Football team)History. I. Title.
GV 956. D 3 E 58 2012
796.332'6409764dc23
2012016241

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photographs Getty Images (Don Meredith); Corbis (Abner Haynes)

e ISBN 978-0-547-60781-8
v3.0517

For Mary Wynne, with love

T HE SELLOUT CROWD crammed into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 11, 2009, was taken aback when the Dallas Cowboys and Kansas City Chiefs took the field wearing throwback uniforms from a half-century earlier, when they represented the same city, played in rival leagues, and fought bitterly for the hearts and minds of the same fans.

What was this? Putting aside their famous metallic-blue colors for a day, the Cowboys wore dark blue jerseys with white numerals, white pants, and white helmets with dark blue stars on the sidestheir uniform from the early sixties, when they were a pitiful expansion team rather than one of the most popular sports franchises on the planet. The Chiefs wore white pants, bright red jerseys, and bright red helmets with the state of Texas outlined on either sidetheir attire from when they were known as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League.

Their surprising apparel was part of the National Football Leagues yearlong celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the AFLs birthan ironic commemoration in a way, considering the AFL had been the NFLs fierce adversary at first, an upstart seeking to muscle in on the established leagues turf. The two had stabbed each other in the back, told lies, fought over players, gone to court, and practically pushed each other to bankruptcy before agreeing to merge. But all that was ancient history now. They had long ago joined hands to become Americas preeminent sports league.

A half-century later, the NFL readily admitted that the AFL had contributed enthusiasm, bright ideas, and some damn good football teams to the merger and willingly commemorated its birth. During the 2009 season, former AFL teams such as the Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, and Buffalo Bills were donning replicas of their old uniforms to play each other in what were being called AFL Legacy Games. The Cowboys, now an iconic franchise known as Americas Team, were the only pre-merger NFL team playing in such a game, the league having decided it simply couldnt pass up an opportunity to pit the franchises that had once fought over Dallas.

The Cowboys and Texans had shared a home stadium for three years in the early sixties, playing on alternate Sundays at the Cotton Bowl, the concrete colossus then known as one of college footballs grandest stages. Both teams drew meager crowds, sometimes giving away as many tickets as they sold. They never faced each other on the field, but they battled in every other way, resorting to trickery and lawsuits to try to gain an edge, fighting over players, and stealing each others ideas as they sought to elbow the other out of town. Both franchises were owned by young men from oil-rich families unaccustomed to failure.

Spotting the AFL Legacy Game on their 2009 schedule, the Chiefs had run with the idea, selling it as The Game That Never Was, a reprise of the Cowboys-Texans battle. Sadly, most of the frontline warriors from those rollicking days were gone. Lamar Hunt, the sports pioneer who founded the AFL and owned the Texans, had died, as had Clint Murchison Jr., the Cowboys original owner. Both coaches, the Cowboys Tom Landry and the Texans Hank Stram, were gone. So was Tex Schramm, the Cowboys general manager, who had battled as fiercely as anyone.

Much of the bitterness from those days was gone too. The franchises had operated in different cities for more than four decades, dulling the distrust and dislike that boiled over back in the day. When Lamar Hunt was alive, he lived near Cowboys owner Jerry Jones on Preston Road in Dallas, and when their teams played, they lightheartedly competed for the Preston Road Trophy. Their teams had played a handful of regular-season games against each other over the years as part of the NFLs regular schedule rotation.

But while games between the Cowboys and Chiefs had become routine to most people, there were exceptionsold lions from the early sixties who, like southerners who still pledged allegiance to Dixie, swore they would never forget.

Sitting in his den in Dallas on that October afternoon in 2009, a seventy-two-year-old car salesman named Jack Spikes watched on television as his former team took on the Cowboys in the uniform he had worn when he was a hard-hitting fullback for the Texans in the early sixties. He worked at a BMW dealership now, occasionally selling expensive cars to Cowboy players, some of whom he liked. But his dislike for their high-and-mighty franchise, which dated to when he played for the other team in town, had never abated. He didnt like the Cowboys one bit.

I hope to hell the Chiefs beat the crap out of them, Spikes thought, just like we would have back then.

The sight of the teams in their old uniforms startled Mike Rhyner, a well-known sports radio talk-show host in Dallas, who was ten years old when the Cowboys and Texans started up a half-century earlier. Rhyner had sided with the Texans at first, mostly because his father demanded it, but later switched to the Cowboys. Having lived through those days, he knew this wasnt just any game from a historical standpoint.

Wow. Too bad they never played like this, in those uniforms, all those years ago, he thought. That would have been some war.

Watching the game in person, from a private box at Arrowhead, Chris Burford had the same thought. Like Spikes, he had played for the Texans and continued with the franchise when it moved to Kansas City. He had been a pass-catching fiend in those days, a wily receiver whose meticulous routes and sure hands befuddled opponents. Now seventy-one, a spry and sharp Bay Area lawyer, he had put football behind him, but he enjoyed coming back and mingling with other former Chiefs at the franchises annual alumni weekend. That occasion had brought him to Arrowhead on this Sunday.

To most of the other former Kansas City players in the box, a game against the Cowboys carried no extra significance. But Burford felt a tingling in his stomach. The smug preeminence of the Cowboys and their fans irritated him, as it did Spikes and the other former Texans who had fought the Cowboys long ago.

The game that never was? Sheee-it.

This one, in 2009, wasnt a fair fight, Burford thought. The struggling Chiefs were 0-4. The Cowboys were perennial playoff contenders.

But that wasnt the case when they shared Dallas in the early sixties and everyone had wanted them to settle their differences on the field.

The game that never was... what a bunch of horse crap, Burford snorted later when asked about sitting at Arrowhead that day. We would have kicked the shit out of the Cowboys back then. I would have loved to have played them every week. We were the better team. No one thought so, but we would have whipped them.

Hell, yeah, he remembered those days.