Twenty-four seconds remain at Metropolitan Stadium. The cold has come down out of the upper Midwest and lodged in the turf, and the Dallas Cowboys trail the Minnesota Vikings by four. The date is December 28, 1975. Roger Staubach (b. 1942) takes the snap, drifts a step, and throws fifty yards into a wind he cannot read. He shuts his eyes as the ball leaves his hand. Drew Pearson (b. 1951) gathers it against his hip near the goal line and walks in. Dallas wins, 17 to 14. A reporter asks Staubach what went through his head. He says he closed his eyes and said a Hail Mary. The phrase enters the language. From that afternoon a long throw into traffic with the clock dying carries the name of a Catholic prayer.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the frame to read what happened in that stadium and what happened to the man who threw the ball. In The Denial of Death he argues that the human animal knows it dies, that this knowledge produces a terror no other creature carries, and that culture exists to manage the terror by handing each man a hero system: a scheme of significance that lets him feel he counts, that some part of him outlasts the body. The hero system tells a man what heroism is. It converts the fear of annihilation into a project. Becker thought every society runs on this and that men kill and die for it without naming it.
Staubach’s hero system answers two terrors at once, and the two do not sit easily together.
The first terror is the body that keeps a ledger. Football is the trade of collision, and the scrambling quarterback pays more than the man who stays in the pocket. Staubach left the pocket. He ran when the design broke and offered the body to the field, and the field took its cut in concussions, the count climbing into the dozens before the head told him in 1979, at thirty-seven, that the account had closed. Becker writes of man as the creature who soars in symbol and decays in meat, the angel housed in a skull. The captain who reverses the clock on Sunday goes home in a body that swells and bruises and finally refuses. No comeback answers the last one.
The second terror wears a stranger face. It is the fear that the whole enterprise signifies nothing. A man can throw a ball for a living, win games, draw a check, and vanish into highlights and a recliner. The terror is that it remains a game, that the scoreboard erases at the gun, that nothing here survives the body. Staubach felt this terror with a force most players never reach, because he had spent four prime years in the Navy and would not let a game be only a game. He needed it to signify. He needed the comeback to prove something about character, about order, about a moral arrangement of the world, or the four years had bought him a smaller thing than he paid for.
That is the subtraction story, and it is the hinge.
Staubach won the Heisman Trophy in 1963 at the Naval Academy. He took no professional snap until 1969, at twenty-seven, after his service commitment, which included a supply tour at Chu Lai in Vietnam. The quarterbacks of his cohort banked seasons while he counted materiel in a war zone. He came to Dallas old by the position’s clock, behind Craig Morton (b. 1943) on the depth chart, a project rather than a prospect. Inside the football hero system the four years read as deficit. He started late, he was behind, the body had less runway. Inside the hero system of duty the same four years read as offering, and a thing offered is not a thing lost. The subtraction tells you the rule. A hero system decides whether a loss is a wound or a sacrament. Change the system and the arithmetic flips, though not one fact of the record moves.
Now to the values, which is where the Becker point cuts deepest. The words a man lives by feel solid to him, fixed, the same for everyone. They are not. Each word means one thing inside one hero system and another thing inside the next, and the men who use it rarely notice they are not speaking of the same object.
Take discipline, the word stamped on Staubach by Annapolis and by Tom Landry (1924-2000). For Staubach discipline is the route run to the inch, the play taken as the coach sends it, the body drilled until the will has a trained instrument to command in the two-minute drill. Discipline points at the clock.
Carry the word to a Trappist in his stall and it points the other way, at eternity. His discipline is the Rule that empties the self, the hours kept, the tongue stilled, the body subdued so the soul attends to God and waits on Him. Carry it to a jazz trumpeter and discipline is the decade of scales buried so deep they disappear, leaving the freedom to answer whatever the room sends back. Carry it to a heart surgeon and discipline is the checklist and the sterile field, the refusal of the brilliant improvisation, the same hand doing the same thing the same way ten thousand times so the patient on the table lives. Carry it to a man across a high-stakes poker table and discipline is folding the hand the gut wants to play.
Five men, one word, five worlds. The monk’s discipline serves the dead, who are alive in God. The surgeon’s discipline serves the body before him and distrusts the very flourish the trumpeter spent his life earning. Staubach’s discipline trains the instrument so the will can improvise when the design dies. The word travels. The cosmos behind it does not.
Take the scramble, the move that made him. Inside Staubach’s frame the scramble is order’s reserve clause, form reasserted by a man after the form on the chalkboard has already failed. He leaves the pocket to buy the receiver another second to come open inside the design. The scramble resurrects the play by other means.
Landry, who shared the sideline with him, read the same act through a different system and never loved it. Landry’s order lived in the plan. He sent the plays in, he trusted the percentages, he built the flex defense and the shifting backfield and treated the man as the instrument of the design. To Landry the scramble confessed that the design had broken, a thing tolerated, never blessed. Two devout men on one star-marked sideline, both worshipping order, disagreeing about where order lives. Landry housed it in the system. Staubach housed it in the man who reasserts form when the system quits. They clashed early over audibles and the freedom to leave the pocket, and the clash was theological, though both men called it football.
Carry the scramble to a field general and it becomes the moment the plan met the enemy and lost, salvation sometimes, evidence always of a design that broke. Carry it to a founder and the same improvisation, renamed the pivot, becomes the virtue itself, the plan having been provisional from the first, a thing built to abandon. Carry it to a matador and improvisation lives inside ritual, the faena invented fresh inside a form that cannot change, death close enough to smell. The act looks like one act. The men have built it into five different shrines.
Take the comeback, the value that earned him the second of his nicknames and sits closest to the prayer he threw in Minnesota. Twenty-three times he brought Dallas back in the fourth quarter, fourteen of those in the final two minutes or in overtime. Inside Staubach’s frame the comeback is the secular resurrection. The clock running down is the stone rolling shut. The drive that answers it rolls the stone back. He is a Catholic, and the comeback rhymes with the structure of the faith he carries: descent, near death, return. The nation tuned in on Sunday afternoons to watch a man enact, inside two minutes and against a clock, the shape Becker says we crave above all, the reversal of the end. He says a Hail Mary and throws. The private theology and the public function rhyme so closely that the country named the throw after the prayer without thinking about what it had done.
Now carry the comeback to a Stoic and it dissolves. The Stoic holds that the clock and the loss are indifferents, that the win adds nothing to a good life and the loss subtracts nothing, that the only event is the present assent. The comeback frame is the error, the very attachment that makes a man suffer. Carry it to a Texas wildcatter and the comeback is the next well after a string of dry holes, the faith that the oil sits down there for the man who keeps drilling and does not run out of capital first. Carry it to a fighter past his prime and the comeback turns dangerous, the attempt to reclaim a self the body already surrendered, the most reckless prayer in sport. Staubach’s comeback is a resurrection. The Stoic’s comeback is a category mistake. The wildcatter’s is a bet. The same word names a sacrament, an error, and a wager, and the men holding it would each swear they meant the obvious thing.
Set Staubach beside Joe Namath (b. 1943) and the whole architecture stands out, because Namath answered the identical terror with the opposite cathedral. Same league, same animal fact of the body and the clock, same hunger to outlast it. Namath celebrated the body now: the white shoes, the fur, the guarantee in Miami, fame banked against oblivion, the present moment lit up bright enough to blind the end. Staubach subordinated the body and banked character instead, the one woman, the faith, the family, the clean line he drew when asked about Namath’s nightlife, when he said he enjoyed the same things, only with one woman. Two immortality projects on two coasts of the same sport. One man tried to outshine death. The other tried to out-order it.
Three coordinates, then, to fix the man.
Stand first at the Naval Academy in 1963, with the Heisman in his hands and a service commitment ahead of him that no agent could negotiate down. From here the football reads as the second act of a life already organized around duty, and the order on the field looks like the order he learned before the field. The captain was a captain before the cameras called him one.
Stand second on the Dallas sideline beside the man in the fedora. From here you see two theologies of order sharing a headset, the system man and the will man, and you see that Staubach’s gift was the article Landry’s plan could not contain, the reserve power that lived in a man and not in a chart. The franchise won because it held both, uneasily, for a decade.
Stand third at Metropolitan Stadium with twenty-four seconds left and the eyes closing as the ball goes up. From here the throw stops being a play. It becomes the thing the whole hero system was built to stage, the reversal of the end performed in public on a clock, with a prayer’s name waiting to be attached. The country watched a Catholic rehearse resurrection on a Sunday and gave the rehearsal his prayer’s name, and went home comforted, and did not ask what it had been comforted against.
