When the Tuna Went Down to Texas: How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land [Hardcover]

Mike Shropshire (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2004

Bill Parcells was living in self-imposed exile from the National Football League sidelines. The Tuna had earned living-legend status after coaching the Giants, Patriots, and Jets from the skid-row district of the NFL and transforming those teams into champions. The final weeks of the 2002 season found Parcells working as an analyst at the ESPN studios. His heart aching, Parcells was like a televangelist with no cripples to heal. The Tuna urgently yearned for another lost cause.

In Dallas, Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones -- described by author Mike Shropshire as "a man involved in a heroic struggle to overcome what had been diagnosed as a terminal face-lift" -- was suffering through sleepless nights. Although his once-proud pro football powerhouse traveled beneath a banner that read "America's Team," it had suffered three straight 5#150;11 seasons. This team was so sick, it had bedsores.

After a clandestine meeting aboard Jones's private jet, parked at a New Jersey airport, Parcells agreed to abandon his East Coast roots and travel south to restore life to the Cowboys. The Tuna and Jones needed each other in the worst kind of way, so a shotgun wedding was performed. The pundits of the national media joined hands and shouted, "Parcells and Jones can't stand each other! They're too set in their ways! It'll never work!"

As usual, the pundits were wrong. With Parcells the ultimate motivator and so-called Jock Whisperer applying his craft, Dallas rolled to a 10#150;6 regular-season record and shocked the NFL by making the playoffs. When the Tuna Went Down to Texas details the saga of how this unlikely partnership of men "too brittle for tango lessons, but not yet blind enough for assisted living" amazed the sports world and serves as absolute proof that while the truth is not always stranger than fiction, it's usually a lot funnier.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Are you kidding me?" asked a Sports Illustrated story in early 2003, shortly after autocratic Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hired equally autocratic Bill Parcells ("The Big Tuna") as head coach of his NFL franchise. It was a sentiment repeated throughout the world of professional football, a world in which the fortunes of the Cowboys had declined after three consecutive 5–11 seasons, and a world Shropshire seeks to expose in this uneven examination of the Cowboys' 2003 season. Shropshire (Seasons in Hell; etc.), a writer for Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Slate.com, takes a magnifying glass to the Cowboys' amazingly improbable 10–6 record in Parcells's first season. He plumbs coaching philosophies, quarterback controversies and locker-room gossip, seeking to understand the reason for the team's first trip to the playoffs since 1999. Shropshire pores over each game, and even transcribes the coach's public utterances. Inexplicably, though, he devotes little space to the relationship between owner and coach. Maddeningly digressive (containing meditations, at times lengthy, on subjects such as zombies, the 2012 Olympics, motivational speaking and hurricanes) and listlessly written ("[Flozell] Adams is a player of gigantic physical size"), the book will appeal to only the most devoted fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Mike Shropshire is the author of five books, including Seasons in Hell, described by radio personality Don Imus as "the single funniest sports book I have ever read." Shropshire's work has also appeared in Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and MSN Slate. He lives in Dallas with his wife and teenage son.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (August 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060572116
• ISBN-13: 978-0060572112
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,804,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny and Revealing--"The Jock Whisperer" and the Cowboys, September 10, 2004

By 

Pathfinder (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When the Tuna Went Down to Texas: How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land (Hardcover)

I live in Dallas, and I've followed the Cowboys for many, many years. I'm a big fan--and I loved reading this book. Why? Because it tells the truth, and even though the truth sometimes hurts, in this book it only hurts when your sides are aching from laughing so much. Shropshire, who is just about the funniest sports writer around--Don Imus called his earlier book Seasons in Hell "the single funniest sports book I have ever read"--doesn't pull any punches here. He lives in Dallas too, and he knows these guys. He gives us juicy behind-the-scenes anecdotes (how he got these I'll never know--must have had a mole in the Cowboys' locker room) as well as all the standard stuff, and Shropshire's style makes it a great read. AND FUNNY--if you can read the last sentence in this book (it's X-rated) and not smile and want to read the rest, you're a stronger man than I.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Subject, Horrible Writing, November 18, 2004

By 

A. Keller - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When the Tuna Went Down to Texas: How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land (Hardcover)

Let me preface this review by stating that I'm as die-hard a Dallas Cowboys fan as you'll ever meet on this Earth. I have read just about everything ever written about the Cowboys and their various coaches over the years. So naturally, I was very excited when I saw this book in the bookstore and immediately bought it. By the time I finished reading it three days later, I was very disappointed.

The author seems to be trying way too hard to sound like a good writer. His sentences are way too flowery, and he always goes for the 38-word description rather than the 3-word description. For example, in the chapter discussing the Cowboys' exciting overtime win against the Giants on Monday Night Football, rather than giving us a one-paragraph introduction briefly describing the emergence of MNF and then immediately segueing into a description of this particular MNF game, the author rambles on for 8 pages giving us way more detail on the early days of MNF than we could ever want. I was reading the book because I wanted to read about the 2003 Dallas Cowboys and Bill Parcells, not because I wanted a history lesson regarding how MNF came to be.

The author also makes a great deal of factual mistakes in the book that any die-hard fan (or maybe just one as obsessive about the Cowboys as I am) would pick up. For example, the writer informs his readers that the Cowboys of the 1990s won Super Bowls 29, 30, and 32, when in fact they won Super Bowls 27, 28, and 30. Also, he describes how Terrell Owens danced on the star at Texas Stadium, then came back the very next year to torch Dwayne Goodrich for the game-winning touchdown, when in fact Dallas got revenge on Owens the year after he danced on the star, beating the 49ers handily and holding Owens scoreless. The now-infamous "Campo-Coslet decide to punt, Dwayne Goodrich and Tony Dixon get torched" game was TWO year after the star incident, NOT the very next year. The Dallas Cowboys and all their fans took great pride in getting their revenge on Terrell Owens the year after the star incident, and this author denies that it even happened.

In general, the book is a collection of some "behind-the-scenes" stories that anyone who closely follows the Cowboys would already know, excerpts lifted from a MUCH better Bill Parcells book ("The Final Season"), and some all-too-brief recaps of the games played last year buried amongst pages and pages of trivial crap that the author threw in to make his writing sound more flowery.

Overall, this book is about two things that interest me greatly (the Dallas Cowboys and Bill Parcells), but this author manages to sap all the life out of it and write a book that is tedious for even the most die-hard fan. Where is the insider information? The information in this book could be obtained simply by going to the Cowboys' website. Where are all the witty Parcells coach-speak quips? Parcells is FAMOUS for hilarious remarks. Where are they? The only thing saving this book from a one-star or ZERO-star rating is that it's about the Dallas Cowboys. A better author would have produced a MUCH better book. I got the feeling that this author wrote this book without ever having an actual conversation with Bill Parcells. If you're a Bill Parcells fan, you'll prefer to read "The Final Season." It is actually written BY Bill Parcells and contains more of his wit and his wealth of football knowledge than this book does.

This book deserved a better author.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Entertaining, January 14, 2005

By 

Spiny Norman - See all my reviews

This review is from: When the Tuna Went Down to Texas: How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land (Hardcover)

Being from New York and now living in Dallas I was glad when the Cowboys hired Bill Parcells. I knew he was a good coach and it made following the Cowboys, after three 5-11 seasons, a little bit more compelling. I had read and enjoyed Shropshire's Seasons in Hell (about the original Texas Rangers) and when this book came out I decided to give it a try. I hoped this book would be as good and I wasn't disappointed.

I think it is possibly the most entertaining sports book I have read. Parts of it are laugh out load hilarious. It is not "ground breaking" as Moneyball or Ball Four but it makes no pretensions to be. If you are a purist looking for an in depth scholarly study of the nuances of football coaching strategy, or a play by play recap of the 2003-2004 season there are probably better, more boring, books out there.

Read this book if you are a fan of football, Bill Parcells, the Cowboys or you want to have a good laugh. There are a lot of good behind the scenes stories about players, coaches, and owners here that you didn't read in the newspaper. The writing style is unique and if you read Seasons in Hell you know what I mean. I think it's a better read than Seasons because the subject matter is more topical.