The legendary Cowboys quarterback died last night of a brain hemorrhage at his Santa Fe home. Curt Sampson was able to visit Don there for a tribute to the “First Cowboy” in our October issue. Give it a read this morning.
2 comments
In my youth (before I was old enough to misspend it), Don lived across the alley. My sister babysat for he and his first wife, and when he’d come to the house, I’d meet him at the front door in my little Cowboy’s helmet. He was bigger than life. Two decades later, mom saw a man — incognito in sunglasses and baseball cap pulled low — striding across the terminal at the Albuquerque airport and announced matter-of-factly, “There’s Don Meredith.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell by his gait.” She was right.
The most famous athlete in all of Dallas history, the man who took the Cowboys from absolutely nothing to almost the top, as longtime DMN sportswriter Sam Blair once put it.
@ 12:43 pm on December 6, 2010
One more Meredith fun fact: We already knew Danderoo still holds two Cowboy passing records: longest pass play (95 yards) and most passing yards in a game (460 yards). But I wondered how that 460 in a game stacks up with his era.
The game was against San Francisco in ‘63, and it also happens to be — I looked it up — the fourth-biggest passing day by an NFL QB during the entire decade of the 1960s. And to emphasize the impressiveness of that day: there was no Bob Hayes. This was two years before Bullet joined the team and made it much easier for Don to pad his passing stats!
(scroll to “400 yards passing in a game” and see the 1960s):
FrontBurner® launched in March 2003, the first blog in Dallas run by a media organization. This is where the editors of D Magazine come to waste a tremendous amount of time.
2 comments
In my youth (before I was old enough to misspend it), Don lived across the alley. My sister babysat for he and his first wife, and when he’d come to the house, I’d meet him at the front door in my little Cowboy’s helmet. He was bigger than life. Two decades later, mom saw a man — incognito in sunglasses and baseball cap pulled low — striding across the terminal at the Albuquerque airport and announced matter-of-factly, “There’s Don Meredith.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell by his gait.” She was right.
The most famous athlete in all of Dallas history, the man who took the Cowboys from absolutely nothing to almost the top, as longtime DMN sportswriter Sam Blair once put it.
One more Meredith fun fact: We already knew Danderoo still holds two Cowboy passing records: longest pass play (95 yards) and most passing yards in a game (460 yards). But I wondered how that 460 in a game stacks up with his era.
The game was against San Francisco in ‘63, and it also happens to be — I looked it up — the fourth-biggest passing day by an NFL QB during the entire decade of the 1960s. And to emphasize the impressiveness of that day: there was no Bob Hayes. This was two years before Bullet joined the team and made it much easier for Don to pad his passing stats!
(scroll to “400 yards passing in a game” and see the 1960s):
http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/image/history/pdfs/Records/Outstanding_Performers.