Rivals: Legendary Matchups That Made Sports History

12. Corporate Cowboys and Blue-Collar Bureaucrats: The Dallas-Washington Football Rivalry

twelve Corporate Cowboys and Blue-Collar Bureaucrats The Dallas-Washington Football Rivalry S T E P H E N H . N O R W O O D The longest sustained rivalry in U.S. professional sports, between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins, evoking the violent conflict associated with westward expansion, a central theme in American history, is unusual in that it involves cities that are neither regional nor economic competitors. No other professional sports rivalry of this duration , lasting from 1960 until the present, has been sustained between teams so geographically distant. The few involving widely separated cities, notably, between baseball’s New York Giants and Chicago Cubs in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals during the 1940s, lasted only a few years. In professional sports, fans take rivalries much more seriously than players. Practitioners of an elite craft, the players associate rivalries with the immaturity of collegiate “rah rah” culture. Professional football players ’ views of opponents are shaped by a strong respect for their abilities, which can offset the bitterest competition between teams.1 The power of such mutual respect is reflected in a letter written to WashingtonRedskinsquarterbackSonnyJurgensenafterhisteam suffered a stinging 42–37 defeat against the Cleveland Browns in November 1967. The Redskins were trailing badly for much of the game, by margins of 28–10 and 42–24; Jurgensen had rallied the Redskins with a spectacular performance, completing thirty-two of fifty passes for 418 yards and three touchdowns, despite noticeably poor protection from a porous offensive line. The Washington Post commented that even the Browns’ five sacks of Jurgensen do “not tell the whole story of how roughly he was worked over.” Having led the Redskins to the Browns 26-yard line with only twenty-eight seconds remaining on the clock, Jurgensen’s valiant effort 1WIGGINS_pages:Layout 1 2/11/10 3:26 PM Page 265 came to naught when defensive end Bill Glass “hand-fought his way through blockers” and hurled the quarterback for a game-ending loss.2 Shortly afterward, Jurgensen received a letter from Cheryl Meredith, who had watched the Washington-Cleveland game on television with her husband, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. Cheryl Meredith explained that at the start she and Don had been rooting for the Browns, because a Redskins defeat would increase the Cowboys’ chances of winning the National Football League’s (NFL) Capitol Division against rival Washington. “However,” Cheryl Meredith continued, “you played such an outstanding game—always coming from behind and never losing your spirit—that by the end of the game we were jumping up and down, screamingand yelling, reallypullingfor you to make that last touchdown.” Then she described her husband’s reaction when Glass sacked Jurgensen toendtheRedskins’finaldrive:“Donturnedtome,lookingsickandhands perspiring. He said, ‘You don’t know how he feels . . . it’s something you’ll never understand . . . I feel sick!’ Sincerely, Cheryl Meredith (Mrs. Don Meredith).”3 Significantly, Dallas’s legendary head coach, Tom Landry, who directed the Cowboysfrom the time they entered the NFL as an expansion team in 1960 until 1989, did not mention the rivalry with the Redskins in hisautobiography, published in1990. Joe Gibbs, Redskins head coach from 1981 to 1992 and again from 2004 until 2007, gave it very little attention in his autobiography, published the same year as Landry’s. Noting that “self-proclaimed experts” reminded him when he became Redskins head coach that his job security depended on his beating the Dallas Cowboys, hesuggestedthattheWashington-Dallasrivalrywasprimarilythe concern of fans and sportswriters.4 Still, even fans’ emotional investment in the rivalries between franchises is relatively limited, in part because American professional sports teams include players from similar ethnic and religious backgrounds. Americans do not perceive games as symbolic ethnic or religious conflicts, unlike the case in European and South American soccer matches.5 In the United States, regional animosities in professional sports are mitigated by the mixing of players from different regions on each team’s roster, which is not the case in college athletics. Indeed, the two Washington Redskins players whom the press identified as most antagonistic to the Dallas Cowboys, defensive tackle Diron Talbert and linebacker Jack Pardee, were both Texans. 266 STEPHEN H. NORWOOD 1WIGGINS_pages:Layout 1 2/11/10 3:26 PM Page 266 During the 1960s, when the Cowboys-Redskins rivalry developed, Dallas and Washington were very different kinds of cities, located in regions that...