An Act, Followed By An Act, Followed By An Act

There is this one slow, sad truth about pro quarterbacks: almost to a man they are deadly dull. It is as if the game they dominate, with its brute violence and constant pain, has leeched them of precisely those qualities—fury, rage, sharpness of tongue—that make other, lesser men appear more interesting. For every Joe Namath or Joe Kapp, caustic and cocky, there are five Bart Starrs, so clean and straight and self-effacing that they make one yearn, say, for the ribald companionship of Saint Francis of Assisi. Craig Morton (see cover), suffice it to say, is no Joe Namath. Nor is he a Saint Francis, or so claim the young ladies of Dallas.

Last week, as the Cowboys prepared for their first Super Bowl, Craig Morton's already legendary reputation for deathless dialogue took a new turn. He developed laryngitis. Forbidden by his doctor to speak for two days, and afterward in a whisper, Morton kept to his Playboy-modern apartment, attended only by a game plan, a girl named Patty and the sounds of silence. In a way. muteness suits Morton, a quarterback whose plays, for the past seven games, have been called from the bench. Talking with him—or at him, to be accurate—one almost expects the back door to fly open and a breathless Mike Ditka or Pettis Norman, the messenger tight ends, to rush in with the latest fresh quote from Coach Tom Landry.

Dig the scene: it is freezing cold in Dallas, so cold that the syrup in the ubiquitous Texan drawl has congealed into fudge. A cheery oak fire crackles in Morton's fireplace; the game balls dangling from the ceiling cast amorphous shadows. "Seven game balls," whispers Morton. "Three of them from the Cowboys." The firelight plays odd tricks with the decor: a gold-plated Model 94 Winchester .30-30; a gaudy, grinning statue of Cyrano de Bergerac; a bronze beetle on the cocktail table; a chinchilla rug fully six feet square; masses of gnarled wrought iron that resolve themselves into lamps and chandeliers. A photograph of John Wayne, wearing the black eye patch and wicked grin of Rooster Cogburn, pulsates on the far wall. "Good luck, Craig," says Wayne's gritty handwriting.

"Luck," whispers Morton. "I'll need it. I'm hurtin'." Yes, he is. Including the laryngitis, which will have passed by the time he begins hutting his audibles in Miami, he is currently sporting six separate injuries of greater or lesser magnitude. During the off season, the doctors who rebuild football players transplanted a tendon from Morton's foot into his right shoulder to repair a separation. His passing elbow is infected. "I rubbed it raw on AstroTurf and an infection set in, but it's pretty much cured by now," he says. Not so the three-inch gash in his passing hand, inflicted by a Cleveland cleat in the Cowboys' 6-2 "baseball" victory last Dec. 12. A small, suppurating hole remains in the palm, just north of the lifeline.

Bruised ribs, courtesy of the 49ers' Stan Hindman in the NFC title game, and a sore butt that has tailed him all season round out the injury picture. Painful as all these wounds are, nothing bothers Morton more than the wasting disease of the scalp that won him his nickname on the team. Morton, at 27 the Cowboys' wavy-haired bachelor plenipotentiary to the football groupies of this world, is starting to lose his hair. When that fact became evident, Don Meredith—always the one for a gentle witticism—began calling him Curly.

No man in football has a better understanding of what Craig Morton has been through this year than Meredith. As the prime target for those deafening Dallas boos when the Cowboys blew a big one, which was often, Meredith ultimately chose early retirement rather than face anymore Big D grossouts: "You dawg! You yaller houn'! Whyncha get a tail so you can tuck it between your laigs?" In July of 1969, Morton was driving to San Francisco from a weekend at Russian Lake when he heard the news of Meredith's retirement on the radio. "I almost wrecked the car," he recalls. "I had to pull over to the side of the road and yell." Aha! So he once was capable of yelling. Could that laryngitis be psychosomatic? As Meredith said last year when Morton was named captain: "Curly's going to find out there's a lot more to being a leader than just going out and calling a coin toss."

Morton can call much better than that, of course. In the risky business of checking off—changing the play at the line of scrimmage when a defensive set becomes obvious—Morton has long been an acknowledged master, and this skill helps explain why he regained his job from Roger Staubach, who started the first two Cowboy games this season. In the third game, the first of two losses to the Cardinals, Dallas was on its five and Staubach failed to see Larry Wilson—the man who virtually invented the safety blitz—lined up over tackle, ready to do his thing. Staubach sent Walt Garrison into the left side, and Wilson zapped him for a three-yard loss. In the next game, against Atlanta, Morton was the starter. Two games later, against Kansas City, he spotted Johnny Robinson pussyfooting up for a safety blitz. Craig went audible and hit Bobby Hayes behind everybody—right where Robinson normally would have been—for an 89-yard touchdown. "Against the 49ers," Morton says, "I called 10 or 12 audibles, most of them pitchouts to Duane Thomas." That in itself indicates Morton is capable of daring, since pro quarterbacks rarely check off to a running play. It won the championship for Dallas.

Still, Meredith is right about the need for learning leadership on a team as cerebral as the Cowboys. "Don conveyed more confidence," says Danny Reeves, the player-coach whose elevation to the hierarchy early this year vastly improved communication between Landry and his troops. "Craig has great self-confidence, but the problem is getting it across to the others."

In effect, the Cowboys have played two seasons: in the first, they went 5-4 and were drubbed by St. Louis and Minnesota; in the second, they went 24 quarters without giving up a touchdown and won seven straight games. During the second season, Landry called most of the plays, ostensibly to relieve Morton of the added pressure of calling the plays on top of reading defenses (something he is demonstrably good at) but perhaps also to show that Landry's own head—which might have rolled had the Cowboys collapsed—was still among the most astute in football. "No quarterback likes to have plays called from the sideline," says Reeves, "but Craig was man enough—mature enough—to accept the help. If we hadn't been successful, I'm sure he would have rebelled. But it worked."

More important was the emergence of Duane Thomas as a game-breaking runner, the superb stiffening of the Cowboy defense and the spirit of cohesion that infused the team. " Cleveland was the tester," Morton says. "We had a way of going under for those guys when something went against us. In the Browns' game, when Bobby Hayes dropped a punt for a safety, we began to get it together. Before, we might have caved in with the bad break. Well, there it comes again. Fate, you know. But everyone sort of said, 'That's O.K., Bobby. We'll get it back.' And we did and we won and we kept on winning."