Cowboys

Legislature takes up ban on vaccine mandates at private businesses

Years after peak COVID, Texas lawmakers are taking steps to ban vaccine mandates by private businesses.

Amid a nursing shortage in Texas and beyond, the journey of a new nurse trying to make a difference.

An award-winning novel set near the border takes the western genre to a whole new place. We’ll talk with ‘Valley of Shadows’ author Rudy Ruiz.

Also: As a new NBA season approaches, there are big expectations building for the San Antonio Spurs’ 19-year old Victor Wembanyama.

Texas Standard: June 14, 2021

A mass shooting in Austin Saturday leaves one dead, 13 others wounded and drawing more attention to the issue of gun violence. Nathan Bernier of KUT Austin with more on a shooting that has shaken the Texas Capitol city. Also, a Texas CDC? A plan for UT’s Health Science Center to serve as a hub for fighting future pandemics. And free tuition, a high quality education, and a job after graduation… a push for members of congress to do more to promote the service academies to young Black and Latino students. Also, oil prices hit new pandemic era highs. Why greener energy may be part of the reason. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: August 5, 2019

Hate Will Not Define Us: it’s become a rallying cry in El Paso in the hours after one of the deadliest mass shootings in history. As we continue to track other stories making news on this Monday, much of our broadcast is devoted to the aftermath of Saturday’s devastating mass killing at an El Paso Walmart. What we know definitively, how the city is coming together, and how El Pasoans intend to move forward. We’ll hear from reporters with long ties to the region, and how the unfolding of this incident on social media may send warnings about how we talk about such incidents in the future. That and much more today on the Texas Standard:

The Life of Tom Landry, the Man in the Hat

Tom Landry and Charles Schulz died on the same day: Feb. 12, 2000. Mike Thompson, the Detroit Free Press cartoonist honored them both with a cartoon showing them entering the pearly gates together. Schulz was depicted as Charlie Brown and Landry had his arm around him. Landry said, “Now a few pointers on kicking a football…”

For Coach Landry, at least, I can’t imagine a finer eulogy.

I mourned Landry’s passing, of course, along with millions of other Landry fans. A day that was almost as tough, though, was the day Landry was fired, in 1989. That day, too, hit me like a death in the family. Landry had been our coach since many of us were children. And when he was fired, we were 40. He had been our father on the field. He raised us within the game, teaching us to be gracious in victory and dignified in defeat. And with one stroke of Jerry Jones’ pen, he was gone. Devastating.

Landry was known as the man in the hat. He was the stoic leader on the Dallas Cowboys sidelines, always impeccably dressed and sporting his fedora. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said, “If there were a Mount Rushmore for the NFL, the profile of Tom Landry would have to be there, wearing his trademark hat.”

While coaching, Landry was so focused he rarely smiled. He was often called “unemotional.” But I can think of words that would be more fitting: a man of character, honor, integrity, and faith. He was pure class, on and off the field. He was ethos personified.

In his 29 years as Dallas’ head coach, Landry led the Cowboys to more playoff seasons, by far, than they have had since. And here is another statistic hard to fathom: the Cowboys still have not played as many games without Landry as they played with him.

Under Landry, the Cowboys won 13 Divisional titles and played in five Super Bowls, winning two. They enjoyed 20 consecutive winning seasons, a record no NFL coach has ever come close to matching.

As glorious as those years were, none equalled Landry’s finest season in football. He played for the New York Giants professionally, and was all-pro one year, but that was not his finest season, either. He played football on scholarship for the University of Texas, but after only one semester, his career there was put on hold by World War II. He volunteered to join the Army Air Corps and flew 30 missions over Germany, crash landing once in Belgium. Though the wings were shaved off, he and all his men walked away without serious injury. Not bad for a 20-year-old.

One could consider his WWII service, in a Churchillian sense, his finest season, but as we are talking football, we have to go back further.

To get to his best season ever, we have to go all the way back to his high school years in Mission, Texas, way down in the Rio Grande Valley.

It was Landry’s senior year, 1941. He played both sides of the ball. He played quarterback and defensive back. Landry led the Mission Eagles to a perfect 12-0 season. They went all the way to the regional championship, which was as far as they could go that year (there was no state championship in those days).

The Mission Eagles won every game they played, holding every team scoreless, except for one. In 12 games they gave up only one score. Donna High School managed to squeeze out one touchdown against them.

Many years later, in his autobiography, Landry wrote, “That autumn of glory, shared with my boyhood friends… remains perhaps my most meaningful season in my fifty years of football. The game was never more fun, the victories never sweeter, the achievement never more satisfying.”

Landry’s near flawless season, and his impressive professional life thereafter, was honored in 1975 when the Mission School District named their football stadium the Tom Landry Stadium. And when he died in 2000, I-30 between Dallas and Fort Worth was named the Tom Landry Highway.

To me, one of the trivial truths about Landry that speaks to his greatness, is that his Cowboys never gave him a Gatorade bath, never dumped the ice bucket down his back.

After his coaching days were over, he developed a sterling reputation as an inspirational speaker. He always advised young players to keep their lives ordered in this simple way: faith, family, and football. He was also fond of saying, ¨As of today, you have 100 percent of your life left.¨

He took his own words to heart. After he was fired, while the rest of us were using our energy being mad about the disrespectful way our icon was sacked, Landry was already moving on with his life.

He didn’t waste time being angry or bitter. With characteristic optimism, he saw the silver lining. He said, “As a boy growing up in Mission, Texas, I always dreamed of being a cowboy. For 29 wonderful years, I was one.”

W.F. Strong is a Fulbright Scholar and professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. At Public Radio 88 FM in Harlingen, Texas, he’s the resident expert on Texas literature, Texas legends, Blue Bell ice cream, Whataburger (with cheese) and mesquite smoked brisket.

Texas Standard: September 15, 2015

The clock is ticking on the Waco biker shootout case: nine dead, 177 arrested, no formal charges-does it add up? Also, Rick Perry never made it to the big stage in the debates, never polled high enough. With the next event set for tomorrow night, has the structure of the debates become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Plus, the most valuable franchise in all of sports- Manchester United? The New York Yankees…Forget about it! The most valuable franchise is…the topic of one of our many conversations on today’s edition of the national news show of Texas: