 Good day May 40 here. So I'm looking at this Dallas Morning News article from 2016 and rereading it is Skip Bayless the most hated man in sports. So that reminds me of my decade writing about the porn industry for many of those years. I'd be referred to as the most hated man in the porn industry. So I have been a Skip Bayless fan since about 1980. So Skip Bayless is nationally syndicated sports columnist, started out writing for the Miami Herald and he went to the Los Angeles Times and he got hired by the Dallas Morning News. So I've been paying attention to Skip Bayless for about 40 years and I just really enjoy the guy. And he's now on Fox but he's just a lot of fun to listen to. I just finished his rereading his 1990 book, his biography of Tom Landry, God's Curge and such a good reader. It's the second time I read it. And apparently both Tom Landry and Skip Bayless were Methodists and I grew up a seventh Day Adventist. So Seventh Day Adventists are a spiritual descendants of the Methodists. So Seventh Day Adventism is an extension really of Methodism but keeping the Seventh Day Sabbath. So Skip Bayless very much a man of routine. At the beginning of each week he orders five days worth of chicken and broccoli, no sauce. Those are his nightly dinners. This is this article is from 2016 so we're still living in Manhattan. So every weekend he'd stop by the same Manhattan Delhi by five sandwiches to bring to his weekday home in Connecticut for his daily lunch. There's a health nurse who exercises twice a day. Every Sunday morning he goes to church. Every Friday night is date night with his fiancee Ernestine. And every evening in between is the same chicken and broccoli and sports. So this article says that Bayless may be the most polarizing figure in sports today. He is insistent on everything no matter how contrarian or outlandish. He has an argument both for any sports topic. So he has an incredible touch for the topics around people's minds. He's a lot like Riccardo. Like he's kind of got a visceral sense for what people are thinking about and talking about. So the article talks about his rough childhood. He had two alcoholic parents. His regimented lifestyle, his fixed principles, his unwavering sense of confidence that underlies it all. And it quotes some close friends of his who've known him for 50 years. He's totally different in person. The skip I know is a quiet guy. When we see him on TV, my wife says I can't believe that skip. So essentially he sacrifices everything for his job. So he's how old is he now? He's he's about 67, 68 years of age. He's divorced. He's childless. He sees his good friends only once or twice a year. So he was named after his father. He was Chris and John Edward II, but he was always caused called skip. His parents owned a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City. Both of his parents were alcoholics. Says his father was really rough on him. My father was just an evil man. And he's the black sheep in the family. So he has a brother who credits their father for his success. So Rick Bayless is a popular TV chef on PBS, published in nine books. Open Summer Chicago's best restaurants is a favorite of the Obamas. He's never publicly lamented his upbringing. He cites his father as his greatest influence. And skip and Rick Bayless, these brothers, they have virtually no relationship. So it's a little bit like Aaron Rodgers, the Packers quarterback in his family, virtually no relationship. Skip says that he and Rick were never close. We have nothing in common except a mom. And skip was the oldest. So skip, except as a scholarship to Vanderbilt, left his two siblings alone in a volatile home. They resented my leaving them in a lurch. Skip's father died of cirrhosis of the liver. While skip was away at Vanderbilt. He returned to Oklahoma for the for the funeral, but he refused to carry, help carry the casket. In the 1990s, Bayless legally changed his name to skip, cutting off a final tie with his father. The only time skip Bayless ever got drunk was with Joe Namath. So the only time I ever got drunk was at my high school graduation night had the equivalent of two glasses of wine and same with skip. So 1977 skip Bayless is 25 years old. He was a sports writer for Los Angeles Times. He had the exclusive that Joe Namath was retiring. Namath agreed to meet at a bar. Bayless didn't drink. He ordered red wine to be social and he politely sipped his way through two glasses while Namath told him old stories. And Bayless remembers I looked at my watch, I realized I had to leave, I got up, I planted to turn, I completely lost my equilibrium and crashed into a man at the next table falling on the floor. I looked up and Joe Namath was leaning over me and he says an Alabama accent son, you're drunk. So Bayless is still a T toddler today. So his former sports editor Dave Smith says skip was not well liked. He had an ego like nobody in the world. He was very reclusive. So skip wouldn't go drink with the other sports writers. So they resented him. Some of them wouldn't even speak to him. When his newspaper The Times Herald forwarded in 1991, Bayless began a fact service. He would send his column electronically to subscribers for $99 a year. And then he wrote a trilogy of books on the Dallas Cowboys. So he met his fiance in 2004, Ernestine Sclafani. She was in PR and she brought entourage actor Kevin Dillon to ESPN for the show called pizza. And he skipped Bayless took it to dinner. And he tells her you'll never be more important than my job. That's that's basically what my father told my stepmother that his mission to God comes first. That when my father was dying in his final testament, he wanted people to know that he diverted his entire life, his entire adult life to pursuing theological truth. That's what was on my dad's mind in his final days. So now they both live in Century City, I believe. Skip Bayless compares being a TV personality to being a vampire, you get bitten and you turn into a vampire. So this book, God's coach is just so much fun to read. If you're a Dallas Cowboys fan or football fan, it's really hard to put down. So Tom Landry, he loved to present a humble or shucks exterior, but he very much enjoyed being a celebrity and he would always return sports writers calls and he would call them by their first name. It always be very polite no matter what they'd written about him. So in 1983, Landry did an American Express commercial where it shows him walking into a bar. He says, you don't know me, but I'm the most famous cowboy in Texas. You never know when you'll be surrounded by redskins. And then he's surrounded by a bunch of redskins players and he says howdy. So various Dallas area TV reporters thought maybe they could have some fun with him. Landry was bald. So they did a story. One reporter did a story giving Landry a hairdryer for his birthday. And when he gives Landry the hairdryer, Landry says, I wanted a curling iron. I mean, no other coach of football would go along with the things that Tom Landry did. I mean, he'd do just about anything. Like for another Dallas TV station, Landry ducks into a phone booth, as if he were changing into Superman attire. Oh, he did goofy bits to promote radio stations. Like he'd say, Hi, I'm Tom Landry. And even I listened to K rock. So by 1980, he was 55 years of age, right? And he was he was past his prime. But he was still juggling his religious business and football commitment. So his son went broke, I think with oil speculation. So that was one incentive for Landry to keep working. Landry consistently devoted the fewest year round hours to football of any NFL coach. The sports writers loved him. Landry was considered a saint because he always promptly returned phone calls. And he was always civil. He even returned skip bales as calls. The Cowboys great wide receiver and kick return of Butch Johnson said Tom Landry knew exactly how to play the camera angles during games. He'd turn away and say under his breath, God damn it, but he'd turn away from the camera before he'd swear. So Landry, the coach became addicted to his adulation. So he suffered from delusions of grandeur. So Dexter, Kling scale, the Cowboys safety from 1982 to 85 said by 1980, we were through with the great wonderful 70s. Roger Storbach was gone. Players were starting to understand that they could use PR for their own personal gain. We were realizing that if we just blindly played our technique in Landry's scheme, you would wind up in surgery the way so many of the 70s Cowboys did, and that there were ways to preserve yourself. And the players would say, you know, why is Tom keeping all these old coaches around him? Skip bales notes that Tom Landry was a Christian in church. He was a Christian when he was praying, but he did business and operated the Dallas Cowboys like a pagan and a corporate CEO be a Christian, a Donald Trump. Nature of the NFL is so violent, takes you back to Roman times. We weren't people we were gladiators. Is it Christian for me to want to blast the crap out of somebody for the pleasure of those in the stands? It's not the same as hitting a tennis ball the same type of fury. Sometimes we would hit each other and cause cause paralysis. The average life expectancy for an ex NFL player is around 52 or 53 years of age. You're doing so much banging of the brain and tearing of the limbs and damaging of the organs. Who knows what else you're causing when you ingest all the painkillers that they want you to ingest. So Coach Landry was down on wide receiver Doug Donnelly because he wouldn't take a pain injection and play with pain. The Dexter Klink scale says, I wish I'd just walked up to Tom Landry at rookie orientation introduced myself and gone on back home so I could hold on to my image of him as opposed to the reality. For years, people on TV said Jim Baker was a Christian, but his friends knew he didn't always do Christian things. Pat Somerall and John Madden can talk about Tom Landry's relationship with Jesus Christ. But the way he operated the Cowboys is just like a pagan. When I'd hear people say what a great Christian speaker a coach Landry was, I think, man, I wish he talked to us like that. Here's a great quote. The Cowboys were really hung up on image. Whereas the Steelers were more concerned with the end result, which is winning. So skip. The Cowboys used to practice at Thousand Oaks California because everyone in Cowboys management had, you know, a woman there that they were carrying on a high octane affair. And so there was this one Blonde that skip got to know and she was having a high voltage on off affair with a prominent married assistant Cowboys coach, mostly in road hotels. She was also seeing a rookie wide receiver and she was also seeing a TV sportscaster traveled with the team. And I asked her why she was putting herself through all this. She said, there's something about this Dallas Cowboys team that makes a woman lose her head. Seems like they only draft beautiful guys. They wear the sexiest uniforms. It's like this incredible power fuck. And it's weird. You don't feel so guilty about it because of Tom. Tom Landry makes it okay. Being such a Christian and all. So God, God looks the other way for God's team under Tom Landry or sins are waived. Dallas Cowboys played the 1980s with no fresh bullets. It was mostly Landry system versus the world and the world began to win. By 1982, but Butch Johnson says we were no longer a football team. We'd become rock stars with people lining up at hotels to see us. Biggest competition was dressing for the team plane. Tom had his image too. We'd be warming up before games and we look over at him and he'd have on his full length cashmere coat and fur lined hat. By 1982, we become reflections of reflections. So before a key game in 1982 season, which would have given them home field advantage through the playoffs. Most of the players are up, you know, banging and screwing around until four a.m. And then they I think lost that game to Minnesota 31 27 because they'd have all these groupies and so they'd bang all night. Randy White, the manster of the Cowboys defensive tackle. He was the most successful of the Dallas Cowboys steroid users in the late 1970s early 80s. So when Randy White came to the Cowboys in 1975 as a middle linebacker, he weighed about 235 pounds. The flax defense overwhelmed him even as a strong side linebacker. So he's moved to defensive tackle. And Randy White was driven maniacally to try to succeed in football. He had to find a way. So he began ingesting injecting steroids and lifting massive amounts of weight and it helped him bulk up to 270 pounds. He turned into a raging, incredible Hulk. So Randy tells Skip Bayless, I'd look across the line of those Pittsburgh Steelers. So the Steelers were pioneers in the use of steroids. And I'd see them with their sleeves rolled up and those huge arms and I had to do something. I figured they were using steroids too. So you look at like the Dallas Cowboy offensive line in the 1970s, they got these bellies hanging out over their belts, but the Steelers offensive line raw, roided up. Very muscular. So Larry Cole played next to Randy White and he said Randy was a little man who became a big man, a manster, half man, half monster. Randy White was so strong, so quick, so crazy during games. He often blew through a blocker as if the poor fellow had the molecule density of a ghost. So Bob Ward Cowboys fitness consultant said about 25% of the Cowboys were using steroids. And ex defensive and Pat Toomey, who left Dallas just before Bob Ward arrived, said tax-tram brought in Ward because he envisioned that the day all players would be bionic. And Skip Bayless wrote a column about this the next day a Cowboy star asked him, we're supposed to take steroids to get bigger and stronger. And if we're supposed to take Damarole shots to dull the pain, to play with pain, why shouldn't we be tempted to use a little cocaine at night to get all the pain and the pressure. Skip interview, Denny White, what it was like to play for Landry. Denny said, one of the hardest things about being a Cowboys quarterback is making a decision whether to do what Coach Landry tells you to do or what he really means. So by this time, Landry's not so sharp. So Storback, I mean, Meredith, Storback, White, Steve Pallure, they all had to try to interpret and guess what what Tom Landry really meant. So there was this key game. I'll never forget this moment. I was watching it live 1983. I think the Cowboys were 12 and two and the Redskins were 12 and two. So all the marbles are on the line. I think this game was played in Dallas. And I think the game was 10-10. And the Cowboys have the ball on something like the Washington 40 yard line. And it's fourth and one and the Cowboys decided to go for it. And so Doug Cosby, the tight end messenger comes in with a play called 36 switch. And but he tells Denny White, I think he means 37 switch. So Denny White tries to do what he thinks Tom Landry means. At this time, Landry thought otherwise. So on fourth and one, Denny White audibles to a play sending fullback run spring off tackle. So it was basically against an 11 man line just like running into a brick wall. And the play takes too long to unfold. Springs is thrown for a loss, as was Landry. And CBS camera captures Landry in a rare flash of emotion, which is replayed repeatedly the next few weeks. No, Denny Landry yelled as White audible. No, no. I kind of became an epitaph of White's career. Washington ended up winning 31 to 10. So there's a whole chapter about perhaps the most fun season for the Cowboys was the 1985 season. I remember that I just come back to America from spending a year in Australia. The Cowboys were not very good, but they won the NFC East. And Cowboys offensive coordinator Paul Hackett reviewed the two upsets of Washington, the two upsets of New York said, for that team to win the NFC East was one of the all time great upsets in the history of sports. People just couldn't see it because it happened over several games that are just one. So the 85 Cowboys were not very good, but somehow they managed to steal the NFC East. And the reason why is because of the defensive backfield, which was nicknamed Thurman's thieves. So Dennis Thurman would come in when they needed an extra defensive back. So Cowboys made a franchise record 62 sacks. Everson Walls became the first player to lead the NFL in Innoception three times. So by 1985, it appeared Landry preferred to win with inferior talent because how much satisfaction or credit could he get if he won with superior talent? There was so much decay. On the coaching staff, Landry was more comfortable with the old school coaches, the Southern gentlemen, the old school, Southern racists. So Gil Brandt, the scouting, had he preferred to lose with his guys and win with other people's recommendations. Talks about Landry and Brandt even talk bad about Jerry Rice, the best receiver in football ever. And before the playoff game, doughnuts. So Dennis Thurman Dexter Klinkscale remember boxes and boxes of doughnuts on locker room tables, before the divisional playoff game against the Rams in Anaheim. And lots of guys were kicking back eating doughnuts. We had the look of a loser. So the Cowboys lost 20 to nothing. Paul Hackett, the offensive coordinator, he was underwhelmed with quarterback Denny White's talent. Hackett believed in the Bill Walsh philosophy. So the QB just goes through a progression of read. So he looks to number one, receive a number one, if he's covered, then go to receive a number two. If he's covered, then go to receive a number three. If he's covered, then you throw the ball away. So you don't really care what the defense is doing. If your first option is covered, you go to your second. If that guy's covered, you go to your third. If all three are covered, you throw the ball away. But in Landry's scheme, the quarterback and the receivers would read and react to the defense. And trying to combine these two systems was like combining solar systems, like these planners collided in Denny White's mind. So Paul Hackett said, we cannot win in this league with the offensive tackles we have at staggering how poorly this team has drafted for the last eight years. So the Cowboys did not draft well after 1975 until 1988. You compare this team with the 49ers and it's a joke. Paul Hackett could not believe that Tom Landry and his staff would call it a day at 6pm. So Landry put in fewer hours on the job than any NFL coach. So Hackett wanted the staff to stay late two or three nights a week to prepare a game plan. But Landry forbade that. It's not the way things are done here. And he talked about Tom Landry falling asleep during coaches meetings. Skip Bayless ran into Terry Bradshaw, the former Steeler quarterback and CBS commentator in the 1980s. And Bradshaw said Skip, look, sad truth is the game has passed Tom Landry by. It's a young man's game. Tom just isn't willing to put in the hours these other guys do. Why should he? At his age, he had a great run. He should have gotten out several years ago. You have to tell people in your business to quit treating Tom Landry like a God, making it harder for him to quit. And Skip Bayless concludes his book was God's coach. Tom Landry, a great coach. In the 60s and 70s he got good results. In reality, no. It was Storeback, Gill Brandt, Tech Shram, and even the owner, Clint Murchison, they deserve credit for Tom Landry's first ballot, Hall of Fame selection. So I found it interesting that both Skip Bayless and Tom Landry were both Methodists, both born-again Christians. And Bayless says he had a month to research this book after his proposal was accepted and then three months to write it. And my editors debated whether or not to bring it out that I Skip Bayless was a born-again Christian. And he says I wanted some credibility that this was not some secular attack on Tom Landry's faith. He details that Tom Landry would lie to players about their injuries. And they're playing status and how he would humiliate them. It seemed he had to check his Christianity at the locker room door. So in church, Landry was a Christian. In business, he was a pagan. Now, is it possible to be a winning coach? And a Christian Skip Bayless says yes, and he notes examples such as Joe Gibbs and Dan Reeves. They differ from Landry in that they admit their faults while Landry basks in his sainthood. So Bayless says Landry was an ordinary coach who won with great players, such as quarterback Roger Storbach, who changed many of Landry's cause of the line. In his final years, Landry turned senile. He would just lose it on the sidelines, get overwhelmed calling plays. And Skip says that Landry and Jerry Jones have always been the best in common. Each benefited by this franchise changing force. For Landry is the transcendent leadership of quarterback Roger Storbach. For Jerry Jones, it was coach Jimmy Johnson's rage to win. Landry's teams begin their slide after concussions forced Roger Storbach to retire. Jerry Jones's descent began after he fired Jimmy Johnson. So Jerry Jones needs to fire Jerry Jones, but he's never, he won't fire himself as GM Cowboys since 1996 at two and seven in playoff games. They'll probably never even get back to a championship game while Jerry Jones remains general manager. So Skip Bayless says that many of the Cowboys' miracle wins hinged less upon Tom Landry's brilliant strategy and upon the improvisations of the quarterback's Dom Meredith and Roger Storbach and the receivers. When things went well, Landry was glad to take full credit. When they didn't go well, he blamed the players. So Landry began to mistake media hype for reality. He was hypnotized by the myth of his own genius. He treated his assistants tyrannically. He listened to nobody, failed to keep up with the times, the tactical and real changes that made his earlier innovations obsolete. So after years of running some of the most original offensive and defensive schemes in the NFL by the 1980s, the Cowboys were playing with a predictability that made them easy pickings. Culturally speaking, Landry never outgrew the authoritarian style typical of small town Texas coaches during the 1940s and 50s. Got a Brian Curtis article here from 2016 saying by 1996, Skip Bayless was as polarizing a figure in Dallas as he is now across America. Most of the local sports writers didn't like him because he was a loner and he wouldn't drink with the boys. He doesn't drink. And he published in 1996 Hellbent about the Cowboys Super Bowl win under Barry Switzer and reports this rumor that came from the Barry Switzer camp that Troy Aikman was gay or bisexual. So many of the black stars on the Cowboys believe that Troy Aikman was bisexual. But Bayless simply reports it as that it's a rumor. It's presented as a rumor in Hellbent. It was circulated by Troy Aikman's own head coach Barry Switzer. So Bayless talked to Aikman's agent, Lee Steinberg, he talked to a Dallas police source, team source, Aikman sportscaster, pal, Dale Henson, they all said there was no evidence that Aikman was gay. So the rumor that Troy Aikman was gay takes up about six of the books 290 pages. And Bayless concludes that you could find no evidence the rumor was true. So Skip says about writing this first book it almost put me in an early grave because I barely slept for four months. Of all the books I wrote the Tom Landry book is the one I'm most proud of and it's probably the one that gets the least acclaim. The editor put a subtitle on it that I was always squeamish about I think was a little bit of a turn off. The hymns, hype and hypocrisy of Tom Landry's Dallas Cowboys was just a little strong. And Skip says there's a huge difference between talk radio and talk TV. Like on the radio, I can talk in your car for 1012 straight minutes. And it's not a problem. But on TV, if I speak for more than 30 seconds, I'm pushing it, you'll look look away because you can't stand to stare at a talking head for that long. I will lose you. Your mind will wander to the pimple on my forehead. Or the one head that's out of place or my shirt that doesn't really go with my suit or anything that might distract you. Okay, let's see if any comments in the chat, anything I need to catch up on here. Oh, so Biden coordinate Yahoo. Finally is coordinate Yahoo. That's true. Ultra testosterone says are you all on welfare like Angelo John Gage? What are other negative side effects to lithium other than the metallic smell you put on weight and you draw? So my Daphne by contrast, that gets you energised. So Biden going to go back bomb Syria again. What else? What else am I, what else am I missing in the chat? Final, final core for responsible questions and comments. Elliot says sugar ruins everything. And Scott says, says he prefers Rick Bayless to Skip Bayless.