It’s Denver and Dallas

It is Super Bowl time, and the tale of two cities, Denver and Dallas, is shouted antiphonally from towering stadium tiers: It is the best of times! It is the best of times! It is the season for bumper stickers and bunting and bragging in bars, for celebration and civic pride. Time for whimsy and WE’RE NO.l!, for good cheer and bad bets. It is a time warp, where the young dream of growing up and the old remember youth, and in the delirious identification with a winning football team, neither fantasy nor reminiscence seems foolish. The game becomes a bond strong enough to unite, however temporarily, the disparate elements of an urban society. In Dallas and in Denver, where football is a passion, not a fancy, the trip to the Super Bowl is a municipal journey.

The towns love their teams fiercely, each in its own style, and the teams, in turn, reflect in a measure the characters of their cities. Denver, wild and woolly jumping-off point for prospectors, outfitting depot for dreams. It mattered nothing that a man could scratch and sift his way through grubstake after grubstake without success. The lodes were somewhere out there in the Rockies for the patient and the tenacious. The fevered sport of searching for gold and silver is the original version of “Wait ’til next year!”

So it was for the Denver Broncos and their loyal, long-suffering fans. The Broncos had been the door mat of pro football —13 straight years before they fashioned a winning season. But with more true grit than could be found in the poorest prospector’s pan, Denver fans turned out to cheer their team. The Broncos have sold out every home game played in the ’70s, and every year the list of masochists ordering season tickets grew by the thousands. This year, the faithful finally struck the mother lode, division title, American Conference championship, a berth in the Super Bowl.

Dallas is a trader’s town, a place for shrewd operators from the time of its founding in 1840, on a likely river crossing, by a canny settler of the Texas Republic’s northern Indian frontier. Roads and rails soon branched away from the site, and Dallas began to do big business in buying, selling, managing and shipping the goods of the Southwest. In succession came buffalo hides, cotton, wheat and oil, banks to make loans for a percentage of the profits and insurance companies to underwrite them. It is a city of wealth wrought with sharp pencils and calculating minds.

The Dallas Cowboys were put together in the same manner, with a loan officer’s eye for the sure, steady return and an actuary’s fetish for minutiae. Formed the same year as the Broncos, the Cowboys have been, over the past 18 seasons, the most successful team in football. Dallas devised a computerized scouting system that catalogued the requirements of the sport in fractions of inches and split seconds. The Cowboys have turned up blue-chip players with clockwork regularity, including prospects found in fields foreign to the gridiron. Track stars, basketball players —not to mention the occasional Heisman Trophy winner—have contributed to the impressive return on Dallas’ investments: the play-offs eleven times in the past twelve years, five National Conference titles, one Super Bowl championship.

Denver and Dallas, Broncos and Cowboys, the upstarts v. the Establishment.

This Sunday’s meeting in the Superdome in New Orleans offers a symbolic asymmetry that the big bowl has not known since Joe Namath’s cocky New York Jets humbled the mighty Baltimore Colts in 1969. Denver Coach Red Miller, ebullient and emotional, is in his first year as a head coach after wandering in the desert of long-ignored assistant coaches. Tom Landry, stoic and singleminded, is the only head coach the Cowboys have ever known (his 18-year tenure surpasses his closest rival in job security, Bud Grant of the Vikings, by seven years). Bronco

Quarterback Craig Morton is a Cowboy reject, the Dallas starting quarterback until Semi-Peerless Roger Staubach unseated him. In their locker room after beating the defending Super Bowl Champion Oakland Raiders for the A.F.C. title, the Broncos were ecstatic, scarcely believing the dream had come true. Shouts, cheers and champagne washed their victory. When the Cowboys filed into their redoubt after their N.F.C. title win over Minnesota, there was no raucous celebration and no bubbly wasted by the cool young professionals from Dallas. And in their cities … well, Denver fans went berserk, while the Dallas fans, accustomed to such moments, took the win in quietly appreciative stride and started looking for hotel rooms in New Orleans.

The outburst in Denver’s Mile High Stadium after the Super Bowl slot had been assured was the peaking of a fever that has raged this fall in the Rockies, leaving all of its victims colored a resonant orange. The team color has banished every other hue from the spectrum in Denver. T shirts, scarves, pins, sweaters, radios, coats, can openers, beer mugs, the hair on otherwise-sane heads and Christmas trees have been dyed to match the Broncos’ Orange. Defensive End Lyle Alzado, star of the A.F.C.’s best defensive unit, an indefatigable worker in community projects and perhaps the team’s most popular player, mused: “Who the hell would want an orange Christmas tree? I sure wouldn’t.” Enough Denverites did, however, to strip the shelves of spray paint. And the distributor for the sweet soft drink that bears the fortunate—not to mention cleverly exploited—appellation, Orange Crush, has had to hire 20 additional employees to meet the demand.

Season Ticket Holder Charlie Goldberg is the man who started painting the town orange in 1971. Goldberg bought bolts of orange cloth, cut them into strips and distributed them to fans at the gate before a game against the San Diego Chargers. The gesture was made to express support for then-Head Coach Lou Saban, whose family was abused by disappointed fans. Says Goldberg: “By God, the Broncos went out and beat the hell out of them, then the next week, went and zipped Cleveland.” A monochrome mania was born. It found voice when Running Back John Keyworth warbled a ditty into a bullet on the Denver charts: Make Those Miracles Happen.

For the conference championship game, Goldberg had another morale booster up his sleeve. Since his company had a contract to demolish a twelve-story building in Denver’s downtown, Goldberg had the three-ton ball on his wrecking crane painted orange and hung a sign on the side of the building with OAKLAND painted in huge letters on it. A crowd of hundreds gathered to watch and cheer the destruction. The darker side: when a man walked into a bar and turned on the jukebox during a televised Bronco game, he got into a frenzied argument with irate fans, one of them followed him into a parking lot, shot and killed him, and wounded two companions.

Even the city’s traffic patterns have been disrupted. Aside from the fact that an eye-aching number of cars, trucks—even a city bus—have been repainted orange, the police must be called out to keep traffic moving on the roads surrounding the Broncos’ practice field. But nothing has been upset as much as the city’s image of itself and its team. Bronco Co-Owner Gerry Phipps attributes the mania to “a little inferiority complex that people in the city have. It’s their way of saying, ‘Hey, look at us!’ ”

The successful Bronco season has catapulted Denver onto the national sports map. Professional team sports are a recent graft on the Rocky Mountain iden tity. The National Basketball Association Denver Nuggets, while a solid team, are known as the place where former North Carolina State Superstar David Thompson disappeared. A hockey franchise new to the town is struggling with expansion team woes, and a planned sale of the Oakland A’s to Denver Oilman Marvin Davis awaits the outcome of Round 57 in the Charlie Finley-Bowie Kuhn brouhaha.

But the Broncos, ah, the Broncos are the Mets of the Mountains. Theirs is a Cinderella story to catch the fancy of underdog rooters everywhere and stamp a presence on the national mind as copper bright and shiny as a new penny from the Denver Mint. It is exquisite, this first flirtation with a world championship of sport. No matter how often it may recur, it will never again be so sweet. It excuses the excesses and lifts the hearts of all who look on and recall.

The long wait and the wonder of it all swelled for the team and its fans in the final moments of the Oakland game. The vanguard of 74,982 fans (they booed the 62 no-shows ex cathedra) swarmed onto the field, tore down supposedly indestructible steel goal posts and carted them away, but not before the long shank of one upright had been passed around by reverent hands, an instant relic of Denver’s new religion. Below, players dawdled on the field to wave their exultation to adoring fans in the stands. In the locker room later, Offensive Guards Tom Classic and Paul Howard sat stunned, reassuring one another that it was not some dizzying hallucination. ‘Tom. we are going to the Super Bowl,” Howard intoned. “We are not going to be watching it on TV this year.” Replied Classic:

“I’m too numb to understand that.”

Coach Red Miller understood. At 50, he had gypsied around the pros for 17 years as an offensive coordinator, the eternal bridesmaid who devised ways to put points on another man’s Scoreboard. Feisty and indisputably tough, he was a trench slugger, a coach who did his demonstrating amid the sweat and grunting on the field, as well as at the blackboard. During one such session this year, he split open his forehead knocking his unprotected head against the helmet of 280-lb. Offensive Tackle Claudie Minor. But he was also a jokester who regularly inserted a trick play, say a quadruple reverse, to confound the defensive starters during practice sessions, providing his players with a few moments of grass-rolling laughter at their teammates’ expense.

He was passed over as head coach for such antics and a tendency to hoist a beer and become close to his players. Says Miller: “I was a free spirit. I operated on a different wave length than most coaches. I was highly excitable, and I’d get down in the pits with the players. I think some owners thought I was too exuberant. Too many coaches believe you just play the game. I happen to feel the opposite. I believe you play the game with emotion. I enjoy life. They couldn’t identify with me.” When his chance came at Denver, he toned down the off-field activities in favor of ceaseless preparation: “I haven’t had a drink in about a year. I’m not saying I will never drink again, but I stopped as a matter of self-discipline.”

If Miller needed discipline, the Broncos needed it more. After last season, a dozen players sent a petition to Co-Owner Phipps expressing their lack of con fidence in then-Coach John Ralston. An already solid defensive unit carped at the woefully inadequate offense. The center did not hold. They had climbed to a 9-5 record, but believed they could have done better. Says Wide Receiver Haven Moses: “We knew we had the people to win, but we had no direction, no someone or something to pull it together. We had to have someone to crack the whip.” Lyle Alzado describes the initial, outwardly insignificant lash: “The first day of training camp, Miller pointed to the soda and candy machines and said he didn’t want us to bring any of that stuff into the meetings because it would disturb our concentration. He looked at us for a second and screamed, ‘I mean it!’ ” End of munchies in meetings.

The arrival of Quarterback Craig Morton in a trade with the New York Giants injected stability on-field to match Miller’s sideline command. Haven Moses on Morton: “Last year we had no one in the huddle who would take charge. Craig has given us that added dimension, offensive motivation. When we get behind, we know that he is still capable of pulling it out.” Morton was the 26th man to step into the Broncos’ revolving quarterback door in 18 years. A much-maligned performer during twelve frustrating seasons in Dallas and New York, he is now Denver’s once and future king.

The Broncos’ offense is still far from an inexorable machine, but Miller’s innovative strategy superbly complements Morton’s skills, and the team can now capitalize on the good field position that the Orange Crush defense constantly wrests in fumbles and interceptions.

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

College. Fully half of the Dallas first-round draft picks over the years have been All-Pros.

For years the Cowboys appeared to have as much personality as a flat Texas landscape. Too computerized, too efficient, too heartless. Their presence on the football field was as chilling as a ranch-house visit from a cold-eyed Dallas banker holding an overdue mortgage. But just as the years tamed the ostentation of Dallas wealth, so has success slowly transformed the Cowboy image. The coldness has become cool professionalism, with a soupgon of eccentricity. The Cowboys have become the glamour team of pro football, home to the dazzling rookie with the accent on the second syllable, Dorsett. In the old days, nicknaming a Dal las player consisted of calling Defensive Tackle Robert Lilly “Bob.” Now the Cowboys boast “Manster” Linebacker Randy White (for each of the things he is half of) and the bookend defensive ends, Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Harvey “Too Mean” Martin. Then there is Tom “Hollywood” Henderson, who, during the offseason, dated one of the Pointer Sisters.

Even Landry has loosened somewhat.

He has begun to pass an idle word or two with his players, and—to the wonderment of sportscasters sitting boggled before their monitors—was recently seen to smile. Two plays ahead in his head or not, he now walks over to pat a player on the back after a big play, occasionally. He is no Red Miller, to be sure. Once, when former Dallas Quarterback and Prankster Don Meredith had his teammates laughing during practice, Landry’s perspective on such doings was firmly spelled out: “Gentlemen, nothing funny ever happens on the football field.”

Landry’s wit, dry and ironic, is saved for sportswriters and for speaking engagements that help the Cowboys’ thoroughgoing public relations campaign. The same sense of detail that marks computerized scouting can be found in every phase of the Cowboy operation. The N.F.L.’s largest radio network, 133 stations, beams Cowboy games from Key West, Fla., to Thousand Oaks, Calif. A weekly newspaper published by the club has a lavish freebie list—including college trainers, so that prospects hanging around waiting for the whirlpool will have the Cowboys to read about.

Aiything the rest of the world can do, Dallas can do bigger and better is a local creed that pervades everything from the palatial mansions of Highland Park and the outrageously expensive bagatelles of Nei-man-Marcus to the ample, amply displayed busts of the famous Cowboy cheerleaders. Other teams have cheerleaders, but none has chosen them with so much care as Dallas—and then put them in uniforms with so little cloth. Nearly 700 women try out each fall for the 36 low-neckline, high-kicking jobs. While the Chosen Ones receive little pay ($15 per game), they get more air time than many a television star as cameramen focus in when anything short of a touchdown is happening onfield.

Since the Denver cheerleaders are drawn from lithe, ski-slope-burnished Rocky Mountain womanhood, a substantial showdown will occur this Sunday on the Superdome sidelines as well as between the goal lines. It could be more exciting than the game, which—if this year’s Super Bowl follows the soporific pattern of recent years—may be a dogged defensive struggle. Certainly Denver’s strategy will center on its magnificent 3-4 Orange Crush. When asked whom the Cowboys feared most among that band, Landry replied: “All eleven guys. They play as if they were backed into a corner and fighting to get out.” Dallas’ flex 4-3 defense, led by N.F.L. Defensive Player of the Year Harvey Martin, is hardly a pushover either. The fracas in the trenches could be the deciding factor.

Still, there could be pyrotechnics on offense as both coaches search for the quick-strike, unpredictable play. Red Miller has been known to gamble on fourth down; a faked field goal against Oakland during a regular-season matchup resulted in the touchdown. That fact is less amazing than the target of the completed pass from Holder-Backup Quarterback Norris Weese: venerable Kicker Jim Turner, 36, who is enough of a football fossil to wear high-top black shoes. It was the first pass reception of his 14-year pro career. Landry has inserted special big plays into his offense for three late-season games, and each one has produced a touchdown. Most experts rate both coaches as the best offensive planners in the game, and the match of wits between them could be explosive.

In a real sense, a team picture of the

Denver Broncos and the Dallas Cowboys is a family album in shoulder pads. They are the offspring of their cities and their coaches. Roistering Red Miller and Man-with-a-New-Grubstake Craig Morton are the kind of frontier dreamers old Denverites would have appreciated. Cerebral, straight-thinking Tom Landry and All-American Technician Roger Staubach are the steady, main-chance men that made Dallas Big D. These two very different teams from two very different Western cities will shoot it out in the most spectacular corral ever built. The teams and the setting are unique. Before Super Bowl XII is over, the showdown could turn into a show stirring the mountains, the prairies and all the watching football lands beyond.