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Craig Morton, reborn quarterback and newlywed, arose at 6 a.m. on the morning of his first Super Bowl practice since 1971 (when he was a Dallas Cowboy). "I just sat alone for two hours thinking about it. When my wife, Susie, and I were having breakfast, I said to her, 'Hey, you know, we're going to the Super Bowl.' I'm just beginning to realize it, and I'm excited." Looking to a bright future at age 34, Morton plans to buy a house in Den ver and settle down for the first time since he left Dallas. "I hope they keep me here for a while."
A large measure of credit for Morton's success in Denver can be traced to his days as a Dallas Cowboy, which ended only after Lieut, (j.g.) Roger Staubach, U.S.N. (ret.) took away his command in the huddle. It was in Dallas under Coach Tom Landry that Morton polished his skills in running a complex offense. Much of the sophisticated strategy that marks modern football was devised in Landry's fertile mind. For beneath the ubiquitous hat a size too small, behind the stony visage, resides a genius of the game. As a player-coach in the 1950s, Landry refined the 4-3 defense, using a slide rule to work out the odds on given plays in given situations. His Cowboys play the most intricately calibrated football—on both offense and defense—ever concocted.
Landry once sold insurance, so he is quite at home in Dallas, one of the country's major insurance centers. As any good actuary should, he relentlessly computes the possibilities and probabilities that govern the chaotic life span of a football game. His much-remarked-upon stoic sideline demeanor (Don Rickles: "There's 70,000 people going bananas and there's Tom Landry trying to keep his hat on straight") is a reflection of his calculating soul. Explains Wide Receiver Golden Richards: "He is not aware of the moment because he is thinking two plays ahead of the rest of us."
The legend in Dallas is that Cowboy Owner Clint Murchison bought a computer company solely to complement and exploit his coach's style. Whatever the case, one of the electronic brains was soon harnessed to answer a difficult question: Which young men could play successfully under Landry's byzantine flex defense and multiple offense? At Cowboy headquarters, part of the basement and a full wall upstairs are lined with 1,500 big black ledgers that detail the size, speed, strength and character of every professional football prospect known to man, God and the truly all-seeing and all-knowing: the Cowboys' scouts. Players from the franchise's early days recall a computer expert hired in 1962 to begin research on a programming system sophisticated enough to factor in all of the countless variables. On team flights after games, the weary players tried to sleep while the frustrated computer whiz pored over his charts, periodically jolting his fellow passengers to wakefulness. "Desire!" he would scream. "Desire!" He never did figure out how to program that intangible.
Nonetheless, enough quantifiable information reached the computers to make Dallas the most consistently formidable club in football. Cowboy free-agent success stories are legendary. The current favorite: All-Pro Safety Cliff Harris from that renowned football hotbed Ouachita (Ark.) Baptist