Dandy Don

I just learned a few moments ago that Dandy Don Meredith died earlier today. He was 72 years old, lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and had suffered from some debilitating health conditions over the last several years. A native of Mt. Vernon, Texas, Meredith still holds the single game passing yards record for the Dallas Cowboys, and infused the franchise with a spark and verve that it needed under the tutelage of Coach Landry. He was Joe Namath with a drawl, boots, a reasonable amount of self-restraint, and razor-sharp wit. In the broadcast booth in the early days of Monday Night Football, Meredith more than held his own with Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford.

It is spookily ironic that his name came up in a conversation with a friend only hours before when after a rare Dallas Cowboys victory we were discussing how peculiar it was that some still refer to the 'Boys as "America's Team," an appellation that used to be common among sports fans in the south. Meredith and his Dallas teammates from the mid-sixties - Bullet Bob Hayes, Bob Lilly, Jethro Pugh, Lee Roy Jordan, Chuck Howley, Walt Garrison, Dan Reeves, Larry Cole, Mel Renfro - were heroes to many of us. They were men's men, took and gave out helmet-to-helmet hits because they didn't know there was any other kind, and judiciously hid their tattoos from both their fans and their mothers. An on-field celebration would have brought a rare flash of temper from Tom Landry. They were iconic and legendary, but not wealthy - they drove Ford and Chevrolet pick up trucks without a sense of irony, and did not advertise their brand of blue jeans. They were years away from the Age of Endorsement among professional athletes, although Meredith did like his Lipton Tea. When he said he was through with football as a player, he was done - he walked away and never looked back.

Our knowledge of these men was no doubt cursory and superficial -in the late sixties and early seventies they were far removed from the vicious 24 hour-a-day sports sycophancy we have today and could enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy. We could watch Pugh and Lilly crush a quarterback without knowing how many DUIs had been issued to Dallas Cowboy team members that month. We could cheer a Hail Mary from Meredith without knowing about the incident that occurred earlier that week at a Fort Worth strip club involving several members of the Dallas secondary and a transgender entertainer named Fantasia. We could watch Meredith or Staubach march their offenses down the field toward opposing end zones without the landscape being littered with news morsels about domestic violence, marital infidelity and substance abuse. As far as we knew, Lance Rentzel was just a great receiver with an incredibly sexy wife. None of us outside the esoteric world of professional bodybuilding even knew what anabolic steroids were.

Adoration requires a certain amount of naivete.

In those pre-Watergate years, it felt good to have heroes. I guess what we didn't know didn't hurt us. Only recently have we dropped the once-necessary connection between being an amazing athlete and being a good guy. Certainly the popularity of pro football , if anything, has exploded. But perhaps it's not because we want to be those guys like we once did. Now it's more cathartic and visceral, and far less sentimental, in that they get to exhibit both skills and acts of violence we can only dream of. We don't want them to be our buddies - they are our gladiators.

But I would have liked for Don Meredith to be my buddy. Thanks much, Dandy Don.