TOM LANDRY’S TOUCHDOWN
Do you remember how smartly the man dressed? That custom-tailored jacket, the perfectly knotted tie and, always, that trademark fedora perched at just the right angle? Do you remember Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry, watching from the sidelines on any given NFL Sunday from 1960 to 1988? If you do, then you might also remember the man’s classic demeanor: calm, stoic, concentrating. His players might be celebrating the go-ahead touchdown, but Landry was all business. Getting ready for the next series, focusing four plays ahead, the football grandmaster who led America’s Team to two Super Bowl championships in the 1970s. But you would have had no reason to suspect then that the veteran NFL player and coach was also a veteran of 30 combat bomber missions in World War II, or to have envisioned the unflappable, iron-jawed head coach as a stunned young pilot in the cockpit of a B-17 bomber.
“I think the thing that sticks out the most is that I was not prepared for all of it,” Landry told me in a 1981 interview I conducted with him for a documentary on the B-17. “I’d been one semester at the University of Texas. I was called up in February of ’44, when I was 19 years old. And, boy, to go from there—from Mission, Texas—to Europe to fly a bomber… I just really didn’t know what was going on. I just flew my missions, did my job,
