Stars and Strife

Sporting News, The, Oct 4, 1993 by Steve Gietschier

Sport has a tough time dealing with nonconformists. Team sport especially is more prone to dismissing enigmatic athletes as flakes, prima donnas, head cases, egomaniacs or just plain nuts than trying to handle their idiosyncrasies decently. And yet if some individual athletes did not differ from the group, there would be no stars and our search for excellence would be in vain.

The questions this tension provokes include these two: How far from the norm can an individual stray before being declared an outlaw, and what possesses a gifted athlete to test an institution knowing that it cannot adjust to this kind of challenge?

It would be easy to debunk the late Joe Don Looney as a spoiled brat who simply refused to play by the rules or as just another 1960s wacko whose brain was fried by drugs, sex and Vietnam. But neither of these facile analyses, as Brent Clark demonstrates superbly, is even close to the truth. The fact is Looney was perceptive enough to recognize the hypocrisy of American society well before the counterculture exposed it, and his conversion to a lifestyle based on Eastern mysticism was probably the most rational decision he ever made.

An but forgotten now, Looney was an extraordinary athlete and handsome and charming besides. In the early 1960s, he revived the University of Oklahoma's sagging football program just when Coach Bud Wilkinson's commitment was being subverted by the demon god of politics. Looney's provocative behavior eventually got him tossed from the team - though Wilkinson forced a co-captain to deliver the news - and he went on to an erratic five-year, five-team odyssey in the NFL. Waived by the Redskins in 1967 and by the Saints in 1969 after a tour of duty in Vietnam, Looney drifted for five years until his spiritual rebirth. Still driven to unpredicatable behavior but very much at peace with himself, he survived until a solo motorcycle crash in 1988.

The irony of Looney's life is that he was raised in the American Southwest, a region that allegedly promotes the individual but stultified Looney with its rigid conventions. Only when he turned to the East, to a culture in which the individual is subsumed within the collective, did he experience the release of personal freedom.

Clark's research for this extremely thoughtful book is quite thorough. The interviews he conducted give him tremendous insight into his subject. There are times, though, when he appears to be a bit too free in describing what Looney was thinking. One could wish, too, that the book's epilogue had been written in Clark's voice and not as the funereal thoughts of one of Looney's surviving friends.

If somebody asks which of these two books is essential to understanding the regeneration of the Dallas Cowboys under Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson, the answer unfortunately must be neither of them. Maybe the untold story just isn't that interesting to those beyond the Metroplex.

Perhaps in Bayless' case we expect too much. His previous book, "God's Coach," was a tremendous piece of reporting, ripping the shrouds off the hypocrisy of the Tom Landry-Tex Schramm Cowboys. "The Boys" is tepid in comparison. About all we really learn is that Johnson blew his stack after a loss to the Redskins late in the 1992 season and that Jones made no effort to retain defensive coordinator Dave Wannstedt as he was being romanced by the Chicago Bears.

Fisher's "Stars & Strife" is even less satisfying. It covers much the same ground - that alone calls into question both books' claim to being revelatory - and is poorly organized besides. What Fisher has written is a series of essays that have been put together in rather a slapdash fashion.

Both books seem to anticipate some explosion destined to bring this nouveau regime crashing into ruination. But Emmitt Smith is back, and the 'Boys are out to prove that a team coming off a bad start can still make the playoffs.