Football 101: No. 45, Randy White
After a brief pause for the Pozeroski Baseball Preview, we continue with our roundups of the next players in the Football 101—my personal countdown of the greatest players in pro football history. Thanks for reading, and for those who aren’t subscribers, I hope you’ll consider joining!
Joe
Here’s how much Randy White meant to the Dallas Cowboys: In 1984, at age 31 —after being first-team All-Pro five times in six years — he decided to hold out for a better deal. That’s not an uncommon story. White went fishing out in East Texas for six weeks and tried to catch a world-record bass while America’s Team decided whether or not to make him the highest-paid Cowboys player ever.
Here’s the uncommon part: His teammates just about lost their minds without him. They wore black armbands with his number 54 on them to practice. They had “WHERE’S RANDY?” signs taped to the back of their helmets. They took turns publicly siding with White against the Cowboys, with one player telling reporters. “Give him the moon. He deserves it.”
“He’s the best player in football,” safety Charlie Waters said. “I don’t mean he’s the best defensive lineman in football or even the best defensive player in football. No, he’s the best player, period.”
I’m not sure that an NFL player holding out has ever received that much support from teammates … and it wasn’t just because Randy White was such a great player, though he was. No, it’s that Randy White WAS the Dallas Cowboys, as much or more than Roger Staubach had been, as much or more than Tony Dorsett, as much or more even than Tom Landry.
Whatever the Dallas Cowboys had come to represent as America’s Team — whether you loved them or loathed them — that was Randy White.
He was larger than life on the field, modest as the day is long off of it, the ultimate blue-collar football hero … and also the meanest son of a gun around. They called him the Manster — half-man, half-monster.
“If John Wayne were alive,” one Dallas columnist told Sports Illustrated, “he’d want to be Randy White. Not PLAY Randy White. Be Randy White.”
“I respect the way he played football and the player that he was,” Washington’s Pro Bowl guard Mark May would say. “But I still have some bitter feelings, and I’ll probably have them until the day I die.” (More on that in a minute.)