Editor’s note: The following column from the Best of West collection was originally published in the Port Arthur News on Dec. 11, 1992.
Even now, 18 years after he peeled off jersey No. 74 for the final time, Bob Lilly gets an adrenaline rush when the Dallas Cowboys are about to face the Washington Redskins. When you’ve played at RFK Stadium as many times as Lilly did, when you’ve been an integral part of such a heated rivalry, the memories won’t let you treat it like just another game.
“I don’t think there’s another rivalry in the NFL to match it,” said Lilly, who will be signing autographs from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Port Arthur Civic Center Saturday. “We genuinely disliked them and they genuinely disliked us. And those fans at RFK are brutal.”
Lilly, of course, played when animosity between the two teams was scalding. What will transpire between the Cowboys and Redskins Sunday will be a relative love-in, compared to the pre-game psychological warfare and take-no-prisoners brawls of another era.
It was that way by the design of the late George Allen, who was a genius at incendiary tactics.
“I look back at the things he’d do, and it’s all kind of funny,” says Lilly. “I can see where we took that stuff way too serious. Allen was a master at upsetting Coach Landry. The week we’d be preparing to play them there would always be helicopters flying over our practices, or someone with binoculars in the hotel overlooking our practice field.
“Coach Landry was always trying to find a secret practice field so they couldn’t spy on us. In reality, I don’t think they ever found out one thing to help them. I finally figured that out when I asked some of their guys at the Pro Bowl one year how much their spies learned about us. They just laughed and said the spies were probably drinking beer instead of spying.”
Lilly got a chance to stick the needle in Allen one year when the Redskin mentor was coaching the NFC team in the Pro Bowl. “I asked him if we were going to spy on the AFC,” Lilly chuckled. “He said no, but we’re going to blitz them. Blitzing was against the rules in the Pro Bowl. Sure enough, we blitzed just enough to make them mad.”
Two other things stick out in Lilly’s mind about the annual meetings with the Redskins. First and foremost, once the games started it was basically good, hard nosed football. Nothing dirty, nothing cheap. Just blood and guts football. And neither team was ever able to really dominate the other.
“From the very beginning, it seemed like we always split,” Lilly said. “And it’s stayed that way. Even in the years when we weren’t very good or they weren’t very good, we’d split with them. Regardless of the coach, who had the best players or anything else, we were going to win one and they were going to win one.”
Lilly is right on target. From ‘61 to ‘74, when he was building a Hall of Fame resume, there were only three sweeps in the 14 years. All of them occurred before Allen arrived. Thanks to six consecutive Cowboy wins from ‘68 to ‘70, Lilly retired with a 16-11-2 record against Dallas’ chief tormentors.
He also retired with a list of accomplishments that likely will never be matched. The Dallas franchise’s first draft choice, he was also the first name in the club’s Ring of Honor and the first Cowboy in the NFL Hall of Fame. He was a seven-time All-Pro and an 11-time Pro Bowler. Recently he was named to Sports Illustrated’s all-time “Dream Team.”
Though this is Lilly’s 18th season away from the game, he remains very much a Cowboy fan. While he still speaks of Landry with great affection and respect, he’s solidly in the corner of Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones.
“What Jimmy Johnson has done is miraculous,” Lilly said. “He took a team that was obviously going downhill and has rebuilt it faster than anybody could have dreamed. I love his coaching style. He doesn’t put up with anybody who is not going to be a team player or a hard worker. I see the same kind of dedication that was so much a part of our great teams.”
As for Jones, he thinks the Cowboys owner got somewhat of a bum rap in the beginning, and feels it was probably the fault of former owner Bum Bright. He believes Jones had communicated to Bright that if he bought the team he was bringing in Johnson as head coach, and expected Bright to have Tex Schramm make Landry aware of that fact.
“I think Jerry handled things the way he did with the understanding Coach Landry had been told,” Lilly said. “Jerry was pretty green about publicity and wound up looking bad. But anybody with common sense would know he wouldn’t have wanted things to happen the way they did. He’s not a hard-hearted person.”
Lilly’s appearance at the card show in Port Arthur is significant because it is one of the few he does. The only other card show he’s done in Texas was in Dallas. He said at most he’ll do 3-to-4 a year. Ironically, one of his first such appearances was in Washington.
“They were really nice to me, but they made it clear they didn’t like the Cowboys.”
What Lilly finds interesting at the card shows is how much kids too young to have seen him in action know about his career. In the beginning, he’d anticipated most of his signings would be for fathers, not their sons.
“The kids know where I played in college, my size, how many Pro Bowls, things like that, because of information on the cards,” he said. “The parents have more questions because they remember specific things. They’ll ask me about throwing my helmet in Super Bowl VI, about the long trap on Bob Griese in Super Bowl VII, about Coach Landry.
“Sometimes they’ll ask about things I don’t want to remember.”
Saturday, Southeast Texas, is your chance to ask the questions. Just don’t walk up to him wearing a Redskins jersey.
Sports editor Bob West can be e-mailed at rdwest@usa.net.
