By Mike Wise
Saturday, September 27, 2008
In late July, during his first training camp as an NFL head coach, Jim Zorn noticed Sam Huff walking onto the practice field in Ashburn. He turned to the Hall of Fame linebacker and said, "I really appreciate you coming out here today."
"The way he said it was just so genuine," Huff, now a radio analyst with the team, recalled recently. "Same way he treats his players. No gloss, just straight talk, like a great man who used to coach me with the New York Giants."
Which is why Huff that afternoon told Zorn, "You know, you remind me of Tom Landry."
"That's funny," Zorn began, "because I played for Tom Landry."
"Huh?" Huff said. "I don't remember that."
It's one of those six degrees of Washington facts almost as easy to forget as the name Leo Gasienieca, the player Zorn beat out to become the Cowboys' No. 3 quarterback behind Roger Staubach and Clint Longley in the summer of 1975.
Before Zorn found a pro football home in Seattle, rolled right and sent Steve Largent to the Hall of Fame, before he threw for 21,115 yards and made the Pacific Northwest ga-ga over the expansion Seahawks, he was a shaggy-haired, Southern California dreamer who showed up in Dallas with incredible lungs and a remarkably mature outlook for just 22.
"I was a rookie free agent undrafted from Cal Poly-Pomona -- I mean, who was I?" Zorn recalled this week, a few days before he would coach the final Dallas-Washington regular season game at expiring Texas Stadium.
"So I said I'm gonna do a couple things here: One, I'm not going to allow them to cut me because I'm not physically ready.
"And the second thing was I was only going to be concerned about what I could do. We had nine quarterbacks before the veterans got there. I wasn't going to look at what Roger Staubach was doing."
It had the potential of a Mark Wahlberg film pitch, including the young upstart embarrassing Staubach and other veterans during a two- to three-mile run up and over a small mountain in Thousand Oaks, Calif., during training camp, where an invincible-feeling Zorn finished about a minute and a half faster than any player.
"Let me toot my own horn because I'm 55 and I can do that," Zorn said, recalling the moment. "I remember Mike Ditka [then the Cowboys' tight end coach] was standing there and was just freaking out going crazy when I came in. He was really excited, because, you know, he likes warriors."
The kid showed he had gumption, too, during a seminal moment when Zorn approached the legendary Landry, eyeing him beneath the coach's fedora, laying his cards on the table. He had not played in the NFL preseason, which then consisted of six games.
"After the second preseason game I saw this thing spiraling out of control," he said. "I wasn't going to get a chance. I went to Tom and said, 'Coach, listen. If I'm going to make this team, in my mind I'm going to have to play to see what I can do, because I know I'm not going to play in the regular season. So if you give me a chance, I'll show you what I can do."
Landry replied by saying he was once on a football team for three years before he took a snap, and that he had gone to his coach at the time and asked him the same question. "I'm going to tell you the same thing he told me," Landry began, "when you get your chance, be ready. That's all I'm gonna tell you. When you get your chance, be ready."
Near the end of the 1975 preseason, in a lost game against the Raiders at the same Texas Stadium where Zorn will march out tomorrow, Landry summoned the rookie left-handed quarterback who begged for his chance.
Zorn was uncanny. He got out of the way of defensive linemen, almost like Roger the Dodger. As many butterflies as the kid had, he reared back and fired, unfazed by the moment, moving the Cowboys downfield.
"I scrambled for a bunch of yards," Zorn recalled. "I threw a touchdown pass. I was nervous as all get-out, but I hung in there. We had a complete drive for a touchdown. That was one of my goals."
After that night, Zorn said he knew. "I said: 'Well, there it is. Now if they cut me, at least inside of myself I had everything that I needed to satisfy myself with the effort I gave.' "
There was no happy ending in Dallas, of course, no script to sell for at least another year or so.
The long shot who survived a gantlet of other free agent quarterbacks who wanted his job, whose desire and fitness had Ditka frothing for joy, could not escape the fate of most undrafted rookies.
Zorn had actually made the 43-man roster the week before the Cowboys opened their season against the Rams, but a knee injury to Dallas fullback Scott Laidlaw that week forced Landry to make a tough decision: cut a wide receiver, defensive back or Zorn to make room for running back Preston Pearson, whom the Cowboys had just picked up. During the pre-Upshaw union days, there were 43-man rosters, no injured reserve or practice squads. Laidlaw was supposed to return in a matter of weeks, so someone had to go before Sunday.
"I came into my locker and Tom said, 'I need to talk to you,' " Zorn said.
Asked if he grew emotional when Landry asked him to turn in his playbook, Zorn said: "Actually, he was tearing up. He didn't want to cut me."
Landry asked him to stay in town in case another player was injured. Zorn said he briefly became a glorified errand boy for a wealthy Dallas executive and ardent Cowboys fan, L. Ron Fitts, before catching on as a backup that season with the Rams, under Coach Chuck Knox, his future coach in Seattle.
"I thought we were going to have a long-term relationship until Tom took me aside," Zorn said. "But, you know, I'm 22 years old at the time. Had I had some long vision, I might have stayed there regardless of who wants me."
Zorn said Landry, who died in 2000 at age 75, left an indelible impression on him during their one summer together.
"Awesome," he said. "He was really a guy who was thinking, who always had a plan. His whole staff had their jobs and their own authority and he trusted every one of them. I'm not trying to be Tom Landry, but when you can trust your staff it makes it so much better for you."
No regrets, Zorn said, as he prepared to return to where his NFL career began, in the same stadium with the hole in the roof where Landry let him take his first snap.
"I was so young, but Dallas is what made a difference for me," he said. "Going through a grueling training camp, beating out the quarterbacks I did to win the number three position, to be able to compete against Roger Staubach and Clint Longley. Gosh, we had all these really great football players. Before I was cut, I got to eat dinner with every one of the 43 players who made that team. To be on the team with those guys gave me so much confidence.
"Once I was done with the Cowboys, I knew I could play in the NFL."
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