KEEPER OF HISTORY

Some of football’s most memorable moments have happened in North Texas — and Sam Blair has been there to document most of them

By Steve Pate

Sam Blair began covering pro football so long ago that the NFL’s newest franchise, the Cowboys, practiced at a baseball park called Burnett Field, just on the outskirts of downtown Dallas.

The year was 1960 and players kept noticing their shoes were being chewed up, not by the baked surface of the practice field but from inside the locker room. That’s right, folks, the rats back then weren’t in the pressbox. They were real rats.

Such was life in the pioneer days of the Cowboys and professional football in North Texas. Blair hammered out his stories on a Smith-Corona typewriter that was called a portable, despite weighing a good 30 pounds. On game days his newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, furnished him with his own Western Union man, who wired Blair’s prose back to the paper while tugging on a flask of, shall we say, southern comfort.

Blair these days is a member of the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee’s Century In the Making Action Team, a panel of media sorts strapped with identifying the top 250 greatest moments in North Texas football history. In early 2010, fans will peruse that list and begin to vote on the top 100 football memories of North Texas.

It would be fascinating if everyone had Blair’s sharp memory. He covered many of those great events and still rattles off dates like it’s game day.

Blair’s history at The News stretched from 1954 to 1995. He was the first sportswriter on a North Texas paper to cover pro football as a beat, beginning in the late 1950’s when Lamar Hunt started looking into bringing a franchise to Dallas.

Frank Luksa, also a member of the Action Team, became the Cowboys’ beat writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1961 and continued in that capacity for years at the Dallas Times-Herald. Blair and Luksa go so far back they are a piece of Cowboys history.

Blair did far more than write pro football. He was The News’ sports editor, under executive sports editor Walter Robertson, 1968-81. And, he was the paper’s lead sports columnist from 1964-1978.

He has written nine sports books. Doubleday published the first, Dallas Cowboys: Pro or Con?, in 1970. Blair collaborated with writer Bob St. John and Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach in 1974 on Staubach: First Down, Lifetime to Go.

Blair went on to write books with Baylor coach Grant Teaff, Texas legendary runner Earl Campbell, Cowboys Hall of Fame tackle Bob Lilly, two with golfer Lee Trevino, an Aggies anecdotal history, and a book of memories by the great broadcaster Merle Harmon.

Blair covered a dozen Super Bowls while keeping close watch over the Cowboys in the first quarter-century of the franchise’s existence. He says the team that most epitomized what the Cowboys would become, the America’s Team of teams, was the 1971 club that beat Miami 24-3 in Super Bowl VI.

That was the Cowboys’ first of five Super Bowl championships. It came the year coach Tom Landry made the mid-season decision to go with Staubach fulltime at quarterback. The Cowboys did not lose another game.

The roster was chockfull of seasoned veterans who had never won it all but were in their prime: Bob Lilly, Lee Roy Jordan, Chuck Howley, Bob Hayes, Walt Garrison, Ralph Neely, Dave Manders and more.

“They were at their physical and competitive peaks,” Blair recalled. “If that team would have pushed it a little bit, they could have won that game, 44-3. It was that one-sided. And the Dolphins evidently learned a good lesson; the next year, they didn’t lose a game.”

Blair was particularly fond of Lilly. Ten years ago on a radio show, Blair offered, “I believe even today, for one snap, Bob Lilly could line up and blow right past one of today’s linemen and get to the quarterback.”

Today, he modifies the observation only slightly, noting, “I made that comment when Bob was 60. Now he’s close to 70. I might have to temper that a little bit.”

His favorite Staubach memory was the famous “Hail Mary” pass in Minnesota during the 1975 playoffs. Seemingly beaten with seconds remaining, Staubach hurled a prayer from midfield that Drew Pearson pinned to his hip while eluding a defender and waltzing the final yards into the end zone. A humble Staubach in the locker room referred to it as a “Hail Mary;” and, Blair and other writers put it down in sports lore just that way.

Blair was always a pro but wasn’t afraid to praise the deserving. He respected Landry and Staubach, general manager Tex Schramm and Cowboys owner Clint Murchison. He also held Lamar Hunt in high esteem.

And he liked covering sports in those times, saying, “I don’t think you’ll find this anywhere in pro football today, but Tex and Lamar Hunt all those years had listed home telephone numbers in Dallas.”

Although removed from the pressbox, Blair also admired how the Cowboys rebuilt themselves into three-time Super Bowl champs in the 1990’s.

Now he gets to piece all those memories together for the big list of 250 North Texas football moments.

“I’m delighted to have this opportunity,” Blair said. “Somehow I always figured a Super Bowl would wind up here, but I had absolutely no idea when.

“Once it became clear the stadium in Arlington was going to be a reality, I still didn’t think the Super Bowl would show up here this soon. But that big ol’ Cowboys Stadium is sort of a babe magnet. It’s drawing all the big-league events: Super Bowl, Final Four, big-time international soccer matches, all the big music concerts.

“I think North Texas has been on a path for several years, although we never did know where the path was leading or who was going to be the tour guide. Turned out Jerry Jones was, getting that stadium in Arlington.”

It’s a long, long way from Burnett Field. Even if Blair’s memory brings it all back like yesterday.