The Last Cowboy: A Life of Tom Landry Author: Mark Ribowsky | Language: English | ISBN:
B00COQ6X90 | Format: EPUB
The Last Cowboy: A Life of Tom Landry Description
A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2013
An action-packed biography of a man, his team, and the league he helped create—in the tradition of Maraniss’s When Pride Still Mattered.
Tom Landry, the coach during professional football's most fabled era, transformed the gridiron from a no-holds-barred battlefield to the technical chess match it is today. With his trademark fedora and stoic facade, "God’s Coach" was a man of faith and few words, for twenty-nine years guiding "America's Team" from laughingstock to well-oiled machine, with an unprecedented twenty consecutive winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles. Now, more than a decade after Landry's death, acclaimed sports biographer Mark Ribowsky finally takes a fresh look at this much-misunderstood legend, giving us a distinctly American biography that tells us as much about our country's fascination with football as it does about Landry himself.
While his coaching years are set against the backdrop of a nation roiling with racial and political turmoil—and the anything-goes partying constantly threatening the all-American mystique—The Last Cowboy begins amid the dusty roads of Mission, Texas, where Tom Landry’s childhood played out like a homespun American fable. It then takes us to the war-torn skies over western Europe, where the straight-A student and high school football star piloted a B-17 through thirty harrowing, at times near-fatal, missions. And finally back to a booming Texas, where he continued his faithful march toward gridiron immortality.
In between, however, we learn that Landry was an infinitely more complex figure than his legions of fans and critics could have ever imagined. Indeed, for all his restrained emotions and old-world courtliness, he was a man of great reach and curiosity: an art and wine connoisseur, a world traveler, a collector of first-edition old-West literature. Drawing from dozens of exclusive interviews, Ribowsky reveals that Landry was anything but "cold," and it was actually his depth as a human that positioned him to become an avatar of change, first as the civil rights movement spilled onto the field and, later, as the game of football transformed into something unrecognizable to those who had come before him.
But Landry's virtues notwithstanding, he was hardly perfect and nor were his players. From the unending quarterback controversies between Roger Staubach and Craig Morton to the locker room battles with Duane Thomas and Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson to the heartbreaking loses suffered at the hands of Landry’s only true rival, Vince Lombardi, The Last Cowboy becomes a fascinating portrait of a fiercely Christian man desperately trying to stay the course in a city whose flamboyance mirrored that of the team he built.
The result is a definitive biography that will frame its subject within a larger American panorama while also reintroducing us to a legend whose impact on the NFL, and the sport itself, is nothing short of immeasurable.
- File Size: 8092 KB
- Print Length: 720 pages
- Publisher: Liveright; 1 edition (October 29, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00COQ6X90
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #141,027 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Coaching > Football (American) - #46
in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Coaching > Football (American) - #67
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Miscellaneous > History of Sports
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Coaching > Football (American) - #46
in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Coaching > Football (American) - #67
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Miscellaneous > History of Sports
Everything in Texas is big, so readers should not be surprised that THE LAST COWBOY by Mark Ribowsky runs 632 pages, not including footnotes and index. Most presidential biographies do not approach that length, but for many readers, Tom Landry’s life was far more influential than that of a mere President. After all, for 29 seasons, Landry was the coach of “America’s Team,” the Dallas Cowboys.
A quality biography should accomplish two goals. Readers must learn about the life of the subject, and the book has to place that life in the context of the times. It is not enough to simply learn the details of Landry’s life; his accomplishments should be measured in the context of the civil rights era of the 1960s and ’70s. During his college career, African American players were not allowed at most schools in the south. During his coaching career, they became the dominant players. Landry also coached during the decades when the National Football League exploded in front of fans and became America’s sport. THE LAST COWBOY places his accomplishments in the context of those two important developments. It achieves those goals in a detailed and dispassionate manner, emulating in style and reporting the life of Landry, a man viewed by many as stoic and unemotional.
Landry was a true son of Texas. After high school, his football career at the University of Texas was interrupted by service in the Army Air Corps. He flew 30 missions over Europe as a bomber co-pilot. His brother Robert, also a bomber pilot, was killed in Europe when a plane he was flying crashed in the North Atlantic. Landry rarely mentioned the loss of his brother, and his wife Alicia only discovered that there was a brother when she observed a photograph of him when she first met Landry’s parents.
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