Customer Reviews

God's Coach: The Hymns, Hype, and Hypocrisy of Tom Landry's Cowboys

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Bayless was run out of Dallas not because he wrote 3 negative books on the Cowboys. Out of season, and even during the glory years, most die hard Cowboy fans are intellectually honest enough to know that things have always been bumpy. But Bayless seeks to do a hatchet job on Tom Landry right from the start. Landry is portrayed by Bayless as a hypocrite because he professes to be a Christian but runs a coaches a professional football team by cutting players and motivating by fear of being cut. Huh? Basically a hypocrite for doing his job and doing it well.

Most of Bayless' key sources in this book are disgruntled Landry haters. Bayless became friends with Paul Hackett and didn't like the way Hackett was treated by the Cowboys. Never mind that Hackett couldn't adjust his offensive thinking for quarterbacks without strong intelligence (like Danny White) and who has proven that he is nothing but a run-of-the-mill college coach. Ironically, many of those so-called haters were present at Landry's funeral earlier this year and I began to wonder whether they really said what Bayless quoted them as saying.

Perhaps there are things in this book that are relevent to any Cowboys discussion, but the timing of the book was odd. It was written in 1989, the low point of the franchise. Had it been written in, say, 1980 (after many of the events portrayed here), Bayless might have some credibility. In fact, he has none.

A classic case of biting the hands - the Cowboy Organization and Coach Landry - that fed him.

While Landry's refusal to re-engineer Cowboy offense and defense may have contributed to their decline at the end of his career, it's much more likely that the "20 consecutive winning seasons" and the resultant 20 consecutive low-round drafts were the MAJOR cause.

Tom Landry became a captive of his own image. In this book veteran sports writer Skip Bayless pulls back the curtain and shows how a decent man, and Christian, had 20 straight winning seasons as a coach in the NFL, while remaining cold and emotionally distant from his players, and then watched his team decline as the NFL changed while he refused to.

A Dallas fan since 1981, this reviewer was there for the Dallas fall from grace. He saw the decline, and could not account for it. This book answered many of the questions he had as to why Landry was still trying to run an offense and defense perfected in the 1960's in the 1980's; why Landry was never seen scouting players in the off-season; why did so many players and even coaches under Landry seem to have so many issues with him once they left the team.

An eye-opening book that shows how a humble Christian man from Mission, Texas, became for 20 years the winningest coach in NFL history........and then fell into the trap of trying to live up to his own imagae and tried to hang on too long as the league changed around him.

Discover the truth about Tom Landry's firing by Jerry Jones. Did Jones fly personally to meet with Landry on a golf course to rub his face in the fact that he was being fired? Or was Landry improbably trying to hide from the Cowboy's front office, delaying the inevitable? Was Jones chortling at telling Landry he was being replaced by Jimmy Johnson? Or did he want to personally assure Landry that he was going to get the $1 million dollars the last year of his contract called for?

Read the book and find out.

Bayless doesn't pull any punches and looks like he has several axes to grind. A must read for any die-hard old school Cowboys fan.

I've read a few books on the 'Cowboys of Old' and I ahve noticed a trend. They all portray Tom Landry, as a man, in the brightest light possible--as he should be. But as a coach, it is revealed that he was "all business", which is probably true. I used to be a cowboys fan, and unfortunately the truth of those cowboys come to life, and the heroes of a 6-year old cowboy fan put a stain on what once was "America's Team". I'm not discrediting the author, I'm sure they're true, but if you were/are a cowboys fan, this book may be a little too truthful for you. I have since lost respect for some of those players, and I am glad I was ignorant as a 6-year old to the behind-the-scenes goings-on because if I had known then what I know now, I would have rooted differently.