BARRY SWITZER accomplished the impossible: He made Jerry Jones look dignified.
Switzer and Jones got together for a news conference Wednesday to announce Switzer's appointment as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys and the result was even weirder than the Tuesday love-in staged by the Cowboys' owner to reveal that the previous coach, Jimmy Johnson, was leaving.For 41 minutes, Switzer hugged, mugged, hollered and hawked his autobiography. At one point, Switzer even answered a reporter's question with a plug.
"Read my book, darlin'," he said.
If we thought Jones was out of control the night he took over the Cowboys back in 1989, it was only because we'd never seen Switzer in action.
Don't misunderstand. I thought the widespread criticism of Jones' overexuberance five years ago was unfair, and I'm certainly not here to join the ranks of Barry-bashers. The truth is, it's hard to find fault with someone who is so relentlessly enthusiastic, no matter how goofy he might come off.
It's just that it seemed awfully strange sitting there watching the irrepressible Jerry Jones being embarrassed by the "other guy."
Actually, it seemed awfully strange sitting there watching the entire spectacle that unfolded this week at the Cowboys' Valley Ranch headquarters.
Judging by the hordes of reporters and the truckloads of TV equipment that jammed the parking lots, hallways and conference room, this Cowboy coaching change must have been the biggest news event in the Metroplex since the assassination of JFK. It certainly had to be the most publicized personnel decision in the history of American business.
There was lots of time to kill while the hordes waited for Jones to make his monumental personnel decisions and arrange his eerie news conferences. Some people whiled away the hours by debating the appropriate role of an owner in the management of a professional football team.
I happen to believe that an owner's appropriate role is whatever he wants it to be, so I spent the time pondering the universal meaning of it all. I wondered why the machinations of a football team's owner were so incredibly important, why the firing/hiring of football coaches should so thoroughly monopolize the news.
Maybe, I thought, it had something to do with that "sports is life" business coaches like to talk about at halftime when their teams are getting annihilated.
But sports is not life, of course, at least not life as most of us live it.
When the boss gives most of us the boot, we don't walk away with a boatload of cash like Jimmy Johnson did. When most of us have been out of a job for five years, we don't stumble into a multimillion-dollar windfall like Barry Switzer did.
So why are we fascinated by such events? Why do we care so much about what happens to the likes of Johnson, Jones and Switzer?
I regret to say I don't have the answer. But I have a theory.
In a world where problems seem overpowering and beyond solution, sports commands our attention because it offers instant gratification.
If a sports team can gather up enough good players and coaches, it can go from worst to first virtually overnight. If a team owner wants to fire a coach one day and hire a new one the next, he can do it - without approval by Congress, without a ruling by the Supreme Court.
In the real world, it may be impossible to know who has the best health-care plan, but it's easy to decide who has the best football team. In sports, there is a foolproof means for measuring success and failure: the scoreboard.
As Ross Perot likes to remind us, we are all part-owners of the great United States of America. And yet government seems far beyond our reach.
The Cowboys football team, a business that is privately owned and really is beyond our reach, somehow seems accessible. We are absolutely convinced that Jerry Jones is required to listen to us and that he will one day heed our wishes.
He isn't and he won't. But we can dream, can't we?