One month from today, the Cowboys will be in Oxnard, Calif. and 2024 training camp will have begun, with the first practice slated for July 25.
It will almost certainly not kick off the way camp once did under head coach Tom Landry.
The Hall of Fame icon was a well-known disciplinarian. He took a hard-lined, businesslike approach to the game of football, and he expected his players to do the same. But Landry had come along in a very different era, when even the top players in the league typically held down regular 9-to-5 jobs during the offseason and arrived at camp having performed no real physical exertion (outside of, maybe, mowing their own lawns) since their last game six or seven months prior.
[affiliatewidget_smgtolocal]
Beginning in 1960, during the Cowboys’ very first training camp, the coach kickstarted the summer session with a nasty conditioning warmup that became infamously known as the “Landry Mile.”
A mile-long run. In cleats. Timed. Backs and ends had to finish in under six minutes; linemen got an extra thirty seconds.
“The Landry Mile wasn’t anything real significant,” legendary defensive tackle Bob Lilly once said. “It was a test of conditioning.”
But even for some of the premier athletes of the day, it proved to be a grueling challenge.
“I had never run a mile in my entire life. I failed miserably,” Ring of Honor running back Don Perkins would recall decades later. “It’s been 50 years now, but I still remember walking and crawling most of the final two laps.”
And there were consequences for not meeting the timed benchmarks.
“If they didn’t hit the target,” former Cowboys exec Gil Brandt once explained, “they’d have to run a number of penalty laps the next morning at 6 a.m.”
The Landry Mile became an opening-day staple of Cowboys training camp, with names of the top finishers often printed in the local papers. Some details of the run would vary from year to year. One summer, it might take place on a track. The next, Landry might utilize the sloping hills of wherever the team was practicing.
But the players knew the tradition would be waiting for them when they reported. And they almost universally dreaded it.
“I hated the Landry Mile,” said defensive end John Gonzaga. “I told Tom Landry, ‘If they ever make the field longer than 100 yards, I’m going to quit.’ But he said I had to run the mile anyway. He said, ‘I don’t have any time for comedians.’ So I ran it.”
“We knew we…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Cowboys Wire…