(Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on PressBox DFW on Feb. 6, 2019).
Truth be told, after all of the great talent that he uncovered, after finding Cornell Green playing basketball for Utah State, and Larry Cole under a banyan tree in Hawaii and Jethro Pugh in the 11th round from Elizabeth City State, the best scouting job that Gil Brandt ever did was rediscovering himself.
Brandt’s story is a Hail Mary, second verse.
The NFL placed a worthy amen to it last weekend with a knock on his door by Pro Football Hall of Fame president David Baker.
“Hall of Famer Gil Brandt!” Baker greeted him.
The video of the door-knock is touching. Brandt, for once, is speechless. His voice, usually assertive and cocksure, seems overwhelmed.
There is a whole generation of DFW football fans who have only a vague idea of what Brandt’s role was with the early Cowboys.
There were times, to be honest, when I’m not sure Tex Schramm or Tom Landry knew, either.
But Brandt’s core and sinew are all over the franchise’s DNA.
He engineered the scouting system that found Landry his players.
And he was Schramm’s closer, the one who got the contract signatures and who, when Tex needed him, knew the guys who knew the guys who knew the guys.
Their reunion is complete now. Landry, Schramm and now Brandt will be together again in spirit, enshrined in the Hall of Fame. And when the hundreds of thousands walk through the corridors in Canton in the years to come, there will be Brandt’s bronze bust, proclaiming him as one of the cornerstones of one of pro football’s legendary teams.
There are now 20 players with ties to the Cowboys in the Hall of Fame. Of those 20, Brandt had a hand in acquiring 14 of them.
The current owner of the franchise was voted to the Hall of Fame two years ago because – if I heard the voters correctly – Jerry Jones showed his fellow NFL owners how to make more money. There was the Pepsi deal, the Nike deal, the FOX TV deal, the Rams-to-Los Angeles deal, etc., etc.
And what did general manager Jerry Jones do on the football end? He owns the unique distinction of being only man alive who has fired or driven away two Hall of Fame coaches.
The legacy of Landry, Schramm and Brandt, on the other hand, is all about the football end – building a franchise from the ground up and guiding it to five Super Bowls and 20 consecutive winning seasons.
The Landry-Schramm-Brandt Cowboys advanced as far as the conference championship game 14 times. The Jones Cowboys’ last trip to the NFC title game was 1995.
Bronzed forever in Canton, the scoreboard will now show Original Cowboys 3, Jones 1.
And that’s where the irony and the reinvention come in.
Gil Brandt was 27 years old when Schramm summoned him to work for the first-year expansion franchise.
The time-honored story is that Brandt was a baby photographer in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wis. – thus, the inevitable quip about having “an eye for talent.”
I have no doubts that Gil was a photographer. But I prefer to believe the other part of the story, that Brandt, ever the hustler, gave cameras to the maternity ward nurses at the hospitals. Upon discharge, the moms would get their baby’s first photo and find $3 added to the hospital bill – Brandt would keep $2.75.
His passion, though, was always football, and he had a mind for it like a Sears catalog. He kept pages and pages of notes about college players – a draftnik, of sorts, before we ever knew what one was.
As the story goes, future Hall of Famer Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch remembered fellow Wisconsin guy Brandt giving the Rams a solid scouting report on the college kids playing in the annual Chicago All-Star Game. Draft scouting in the ‘50s mostly consisted of Street & Smith’s football annual, along with scattered game reports from bird dogs hired for a few bucks per game.
Brandt became one of those game day sleuths for Schramm, who then was general manager of the Rams.
In fall of 1959, Schramm was hired by owner Clint Murchison Jr., to run the new expansion team in Dallas. The draft was held Nov. 30, but the Cowboys were not allowed to participate pending formal approval by the league at its January owners meeting.
The new rival league, the AFL, was already on college campuses, signing players. When Schramm asked the NFL to send him some blank league contracts, Tex was told he would have to wait until January.
Somehow, though, Schramm and his newly hired closer Brandt “found” a blank NFL contract and made copies. Tex dispatched Brandt to hit the road and sign as many free agents as he could find before the January meeting.
The Cowboys were born.
Brandt, of course, hadn’t seen most of the players that the team signed in those early months. But he likely knew someone who had.
This was the essence of the way Brandt constructed his personnel system. He has never been a game film-watcher. His currency is information. He gathers it, organizes it, leverages it.
Brandt trusted his scouts, venerable football men such as Red Hickey and Bucko Kilroy. But he also trusted the network of college coaches he had developed – coaches that liked getting a Christmas card from the Dallas Cowboys every year and relished being invited to the Cowboys’ hospitality suites at conventions and all-star games. The Cowboys even hosted a hospitality suite every year at the NCAA Basketball Final Four, presumably because, well, Cornell Green.
In the 11th round of the 1967 NFL draft, the Cowboys drafted Pat Riley of Kentucky. Yes, that Pat Riley. He wisely stayed with basketball.
With the blessings of Murchison and Schramm, Brandt became the unofficial ambassador of the franchise. He flew 150,000 miles a year. He organized a European place kicking caravan – first stop Vienna, Austria, where he found Toni Fritsch.
I saw the Brandt information network first-hand in October 1975. I was just out of college and working as the publicity director for the World Football League’s Birmingham Vulcans.
On the afternoon of Oct. 22, the telex machine sent word from New York that the WFL was folding.
“Don’t worry,” said our cheap-ass owner. “I’ll take care of you boys . . . I’ll pay you to the end of the month.”
Nine whole days.
Back at my desk, the telephone rang. It was somebody from the Cowboys, wanting me to give him phone numbers, personality quirks, whatever I could provide on our freshly unemployed players. He said Gil Brandt had told him to call.
One of our Birmingham players, linebacker Warren Capone, actually was signed and played on the Cowboys’ special teams in the Super Bowl three months later.
The great Landry once said of Brandt, “I don’t think there’s anyone in the country who is better equipped at getting information than Gil.”
While Schramm chose to watch the game from the press box, Brandt was always conspicuous on the Cowboys sideline, where the CBS cameras could spot him and coaches watching at home could say, “Look — there’s my good friend Gil Brandt.”
Brandt made it a point to know not only the college player and his coach, but also the names of the player’s mom and the coach’s wife. He would send birthday cards to the coach’s kids.
I once called him to ask about Gerry DiNardo, who was coaching Vanderbilt.
“Sunflower seeds,” Brandt said. “He loves to chew those sunflower seeds.”
Politicians, entertainers, giants of industry – Brandt seems to know them all. Give him a name; Gil has a personal anecdote.
“I was talking to Lee Iacocca . . . ,” Brandt said once, leaning in as if he was about to spill the dirt on the CEO of Ford.
In the first minute of my first day in Thousand Oaks, Calif., in 1980 as Cowboys beat writer for the Fort Worth newspaper, the first member of the Cowboys I met was Gil Brandt.
“Misss-terr LeBreton,” he said, even pronouncing my name correctly. “Paul Manasseh says you’re quite a writer.”
Long before Google, Brandt had googled me, apparently, and knew that Manasseh was my former boss (and landlord) at LSU.
Skip Bayless tells the story of the morning that his first column appeared in the Dallas Morning News . Brandt called him to compliment him on the column. “That was smart, saying nice things about Dallas,” Gil said.
Bayless says he still doesn’t know how Brandt got his unlisted phone number.
But that has always been Brandt’s go-to social artifice. He knows more about you than you know about him. It’s uncanny, but disarming.
When Jones bought the Cowboys and fired Landry and, in due time, Schramm in February 1989, Jimmy Johnson kept Brandt around to help with the draft. Jones fired him May 2, without so much as a handshake.
Brandt had been talking to his information network. “This guy is in over his head,” Gil told anyone who would listen.
“He’s mortgaged to the hilt.”
Jones today admits that Brandt was right on both accounts. Yet, the parting was bitter. Jones changed the lock on Brandt’s office at Valley Ranch and had someone usher him out.
Over the next six years, Brandt spent a lot of time at his ranch in Montana. In 1995, Greg Aiello, a former Cowboys PR assistant who had become the NFL’s communications director, phoned Brandt to see if he would be interested in joining the league’s new network on Sirius satellite radio. Aiello said the new venture needed someone with “instant name recognition.”
Brandt was a natural.
After years of politely returning calls and cultivating friendships with reporters, Brandt suddenly was one of us. And he seemed to be everywhere. His Twitter account, which he updates often, lists 137,000 followers.
In time, Brandt’s icy relationship with Jones thawed. He’s a frequent guest in the AT&T Stadium press box. At the 2018 draft at the stadium, Jones gave Gil the honor of announcing one of the team’s selections.
This past November came the once-unthinkable. Jones, who once changed the locks on Brandt, welcomed him into the Cowboys Ring of Honor.
What Jerry seemed to realize is that whatever their differences were, Brandt never stopped loving the Cowboys and being a devoted ambassador.
Last Saturday in Atlanta, Brandt heard the same door knock from the Hall of Fame that Jones had heard two years before.
Biggest Cowboys comeback ever, I’m calling it. I wonder if Jerry realizes that a few days after he changed the locks in ’89, a guy that knew a guy who knew a guy probably gave Brandt a new key.