Sport: Hail to the Redskins

A rivalry that affects the towns as much as the teams

Nothing else about the makeshift football season was as well arranged as last week's championship match in the National Football Conference, the Dallas Cowboys vs. the Washington Redskins, one of sport's liveliest running arguments, where the score (31-17, Washington this time) is never really final. The grudge between these Cowboys and Redskins traces to historical events other than the familiar differences between cowboys and Indians.

When the Dallas team was formed in 1960, it was granted life in the National Football League above the objections of George Preston Marshall, who possessed the Redskins and had designs on the South. Marshall imagined a sprawling Southern TV football network with his Redskins installed, in the Confederate sense, as "America's Team." With this in mind, Marshall, who also owned a linen business, had kept the Redskins as white as percale. Shirley Povich of the Washington Post occasionally referred to the team colors as "burgundy, gold and Caucasian."

In the dim first days of the Dallas franchise, when the Cowboys waited until their second season to win their first game, the Redskins were scarcely better. By that second year, Dallas tied the Redskins. Come the third season, the Cowboys massacred them in Washington, 38-10. Football fans in the capital began to be annoyed.

To get even more even with Marshall, Dallas Owner Clint Murchison obtained a piece of the copyright on Washington's cherished fight song, Hail to the Redskins, played for a galling time at his sufferance. So half-time shows joined the area of dispute. One Sunday early on, commandos from Dallas, or maybe Fort Worth, smuggled scores of chickens into the Washington stadium as part of a scheme to disrupt the marching band. Though the chickens were discovered in time, and distributed to needy families in turn, the incident left a bitter taste.

This rivalry slices deeper than most, affecting the towns as much as the teams. Washington-based Columnist Art Buchwald, who bows to no one in his disdain for the Cowboys, has smoked seven cigars in a single Dallas game and does not remember exhaling. Speaking as a Texan (Spur, Texas; pop. 1,690) living in Washington, Writer Aaron Latham describes the ill feelings he harbors toward the Redskins: "It's a gut reaction. I distrust and dislike Government, and that's what the city is all about."

This impression of the Redskins as a personification of Government was helped hugely by the hiring of Coach George Allen in 1971, when Washington began to fight back. To the citizens of Dallas, Allen came to be known as "Richard Nixon with a whistle." Both saw service with Whittier College's rugged football squad, the Poets, and just as Nixon habitually spoke of world calamities in the idiom of sports, Allen regularly referred to football games in terms of Armageddon. There were other similarities.