The following is a production of Dallas Cowboys dot Com and the Dallas Cowboys Football Club.
Cowboys.
This is Mick Shots, streaming live on Dallascowboys dot Com and the official Dallas Cowboys at now. Here are Bill Jones, Savannah Humoller, Everson Wolves, and Mickey Spagnola.
Well, two of us are here today for Mick Shots, brought to you by Miller Light here on Dallascowboys dot Com. Thanks to holidays. We are not there on Monday. We're here on Tuesday at the Star. Savannah and myself are here. Bill Jones is off to spring training with the Texas Rangers. Everson Walls is out of town and he never tells us where he's going, so we always assume he's going to somewhere secret spot in New Mexico.
I don't know if he's.
Following up an Oppenheimer or what, but he's not here. But we have a special guest with us today, Robert Blackwell, former director of video for the Dallas Cowboys, and good to have.
You with us.
Thanks thanks for having me on.
And we understand that Robert, after he retired finally following the twenty twenty season, has now gotten into doing a podcast of his own Real Football two ease, Real.
Real Football Stories with Reel r Eel like a real film. Very good.
That's awesome And where can we find that?
It's everywhere Spotify, Apple, Amazon.
Okay, And we're glad to have him with us on this day.
Otherwise, I don't know if we would have.
Done this well, I think, Savannah, what do you think we could have done it?
I feel like we could have done it.
We were talking about, you know, trying to find a special guest we want to have the show, and producer Supreme texted us last week and said, we have Robert Blackwell, so we're excited to have you.
Yes.
So anyway, just to catch everybody up on a little bit of Cowboy news over the weekend or actually it was Friday, I think when everybody else had off.
We had a long weekend.
Mike Zimmer, who's back as the Cowboys defensive coordinator. They rounded out the defensive staff, hiring one final familiar name, Greg Allis as assistant defensive line coach in charge.
Of defensive ends.
Paul gunn Is going to be the defensive run game coordinator or former defensive coordinator for Cincinnati and the Raiders, and he's been coaching for twenty years and had been with Mike in Cincinnati and Minnesota and then former NFL player seventeen years.
Jeff Zagonia has.
Come in and he will be the defensive line coach and he had done that as an assistant or a head defensive line coach last with the Washington Commanders. So the Cowboys needed to complete their staff. And as a matter of fact, I ran into Greg Ellis on Friday. He was very happy to be here. And I'm sure you remember did you turn his card in in nineteen ninety eight.
Yes, I did. I was representative for the draft from nineteen eighty eight until the COVID year, so thirty two years, thirty two years. I went to the draft, build out the tournament, and you were.
And what people don't understand a lot about the draft is the Cowboys Draft. The whole organization is here. Uh And in the days I guess before I don't know when it would have started, but Robert would be the Cowboy representative at the draft. They would call him on the hotline phone and he would take the card up to the commissioner.
Well, you really don't. It's a misnomer. You don't take the card anywhere. You fill out the card and they have representatives there and they'll take it and then they run to the next table and tell whoever's next who you took before it's announced, right, because as soon as your card goes in, the clock starts for them, right, you know, and they may wait three or four minutes before they announced.
So you didn't have to run up. Now, you don't ride bathlessly, you.
Don't run anywhere. One time we did give them the card and snatch it back. You know, you're not supposed to do that, but we did snatch it back because they wanted to change.
And then one year or wasn't it late or close to being late?
One year was a time ran out?
When was that?
I think it was when we wound up taking Roy Williams because they were training. We were trying to do something and time ran out. And as soon as they say Dallas passes, every cameraman in the area is standing right in front of your table with a lens in your face and you're just staring at them, you know, And we didn't, I mean, nobody jumped ahead of us.
We've got to pick in, yeah, yeah, but that was a close call, right.
Yeah, yeah, but my first three drafts on Mike Urban, troygg Minims fist.
Wow, yeah, you did well right there.
Okay, Robert.
So I was listening to your podcast yesterday, just kind of getting prepared to talk to you today.
So you did.
Forty seasons, eight hundred and thirty five games that you shot. How did you keep track.
Of all that?
That's a long time?
Just add it up.
You added it up.
Did you have to go back and get the media, gad and you add it up? So eighty one was eighty one was my first season, and I didn't miss a game until I had tested positive for COVID. Wasn't really sick and was really over it in that twenty twenty season, But there was like three or four of us that week tested positive and they didn't want us to go the following week, and I knew I was going to retire at the end of the season, so
I said whatever. So it was like maybe eight hundred and thirty consecutive gamest Cowboys game.
My consecutive streak ended when I had a foot infection in twenty eighteen and I had spent a week in the hospital and they let me off on out on Friday, and the opener was on Sunday and it was an away game, and I was thinking, nah, I probably shouldn't go to this.
Yeah, do you have your all your games counted up?
I had done everyone from eighty nine on until that twenty eighteen season opener. Yeah, regular season and playoffs and so Robert and I and there's not many left here.
Would have been with every.
Head coach, right, I didn't wasn't here when Clint Murkison was here. Murkison was still the owner, so every owner and every g outright.
When I first started, he was starting to become ill. He was on a cane. Then he went to a walker and a wheelchair pretty fast. Yes, he was the owner. When I started, I was hired Textu Ram hired me to be the assistant in the coaching film department with sixteen millimeter film, right, and my boss was Bob Friedman at the time, and we shot sixty milimeter film. We had a processor in the basement at sixty one sixteen North Central down there, and people asked, where's your office.
I said, we'd go in the parking garage underneath, walk in the doors and go passed where they keep the trash. Turn to the left and we're down there. It was a little, nice little office. We had a great machine. But right did that for five years, and then we switched over videotape and kind of slowly then morphed into a combination of tape and digital. And now it's all digital.
So when the.
Practice facility was at Forest and Abrams, you weren't there.
Your office was at the well everybody.
Everybody was at the coaches and everybody was at Central, Central, Central and Yale.
Yeah.
I think SMU owns the building now, right, And we would drive seven and a half miles to practice, come back, process the film. And if the coaches weren't upstairs, if they were upstairs back in their officers, I'd take them up there. If they weren't, I would drive. I lived kind of over by the practice field. I would drive and had the code to the door and I would just set the film inside the door. So when they came in the next morning.
What was what was the process of the film then versus how simple it is now?
Well, everything everything back then was mechanical. The film mechanically went through the camera. It mechanically went through the processor, you rolled it up on a reel and what you had. It was very expensive to make a copy of film, so whatever you shot, you had one copy, and the coaches had to share. You know, I'll take this, you take that when you're done, give it to me. So they shared back then. They don't share it anymore.
So, if I remember correctly, you guys after games had to process it and then were you responsible for shipping it to.
The back Then back then you traded your game with your next two opponents. So we had to process the film and then break it down and then make two or three copies of that film. So it took after a game, after we got back to the office, it took five hours to get all that done. So it took a while. Even even road.
Games when you just mail it to a team, well, no, you.
Don't mail back then, you had to you put it in a fiber film box and I would take it to the airport and I would either go to Delta Dash or American Airlines Priority Parcel or whatever, and we would put it on a flight to that city and they had theirs coming on a flight.
To us, and you had to go to the airport to pick it up.
Well, a lot of times I would go to the airport, drop it off and say, well, they're they're playing's going to land in two hours, and I'd just stay there. Why would I drive all the way back from DFW back down to Central and all the way back right, you know? And it was a funny story. Boy, my boss and and Nate Fine, who was the original film guy forever at the Redskins. They did not like each other. And we would ship the film to Dulles and tell him it's going to National and he he would he
would call and say where's the film? We go? Oh, it went to National, sorry, and then he would tell us it's on a flight, and it's not on that flight, it's on the one after that, you know. So they were always playing games with each other.
And by the way, I don't know if you know, but Dulles and National were not close note or not.
No, it was at least an hour right drive.
And their offices are close to Dulles.
Right right, that's right, because I remember going there to do some stuff at their practice facility and it was real close to Dulles. So Dulles, if I remember, was north of the capital you got me. National was almost in watched it was in Washington.
It's almost by the wall. It's just the river. Yeah.
So I mean when you fly in to National, you came over the Potomac.
Uh, you have to make that turn if you're coming the wrong way.
Yeah, you're down like really low.
And then all of a sudden and we knew it and people were going to hold on right and you just make a right turn like crazy and you're on the runway.
So uh, talking about developing film, So explain to everybody your process once you got to Valley Ranch, because it ended up Savannah. Part of that process was our original office for the website.
So what happened though when we moved, we actually took the processor to Valley Ranch, built a really nice state of the art lab, used it one year.
That was it.
That was one year. One year we went to Video Tech. If we had known all that was going to happen, we could have left it down on Central and gone down there pros and just brought it back out.
So our office it was there was two levels. It was an upstairs and a downstairs. Right was the downstairs.
You're talking about that little space we gave you back in the back. What that was you when you have the process, so you have to have the chemicals have to be replenished while it's running, and you trickle that through a little meter, little gauges and you you just how fast the replenishers going in. But we had these fifty gallon drums in the upstairs area that and so
gravity just fed it down. And then underneath where you walk down, underneath there was where we kept they were called cubes of the developer that you had to mix up to put in there. So that was just the storage. But once we vacated that area, you guys took that over. It was a nice hill area underneath, right, and then you went upstairs it was it was a cool little area.
So the upstairs had these tubes right, were trickling the chemicals down below. So our office was upstairs. We had three desks up there, and then downstairs was it considered the black the dark room or no, that was just where we stored Oh, that was the storage. Yeah, and that turned into Brad Sham's office and then our first office to do podcasts from.
Oh really back in the day.
And it was no windows, it was just no it was all tiled just too dark, right, and then they put to make the sound better, they put carpet.
It was all just gray tile, yeah, it was.
And you shut the door.
And there were times when we'd come back from away games and it'd be late, and I think our first my first radio hit was at like eight or eight thirty, and so we'd get back from the East Coast or the West coast three or four in the morning.
I just go down there and sleepy, that was mine.
You gotta do what you gotta do, right, Yeah, but that, Yeah, it was pretty spartan back then, right, it was as it compared to what it turned off.
Please, Yeah. I mean the funny thing about the Forest Lane facility. If you walked in the door, you kind of turned to the right, and it was all the lockers and they were just wooden, and they weren't very wide. They were really crammed in there. And then you went up the whole a little bit and it was a very small training room. And you went up a little bit farther and buck By Cannon had his equipment area tiny tied. I don't know how you did it tiny, But if you went to the left, there was what
they called the meeting rooms. But they were just those accordion doors that magnet magnet together, so if you were in there talking, then the person next room could hear you talking. You know, there was no so it's crazy.
That's all they had.
And that whole building, the entire building, would fit inside the locker room at Valley Range. That's how big Valley.
Range it was.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because I remember the team meeting room at the practice facility. They were sitting in those elementary school desks like you know, the one where you kind.
Of come in from the where it's kind of like hooked together.
Yeah, they go, two hundred and fifty pound guys sitting in them little desks.
When I started, if you were two sixty five years too big to be an off right line right, you know, all you too big.
That's why when Nate got there it was it was a revelation because Tom didn't want a three hundred pound offensive lineman.
I remember the day he came, when we first saw him, it was a training can, training can of one thousand oaks, you remember they were there were I think it was a weightlifting period, and so Randy White overlifting weights and they drive up you know, he had to drive over to the practice field, right, you could walk, but yeah, and he got out of they were talking to him, and Randy just stopped and was looking at him, you know, just looking at me, and went over, how much do you weigh?
Actually, Randy had a lot to do with them keeping nate, because when they finally got on the practice field, he told the coaches.
Hey, this this guy's got something.
Even though yeah he's you know, got nicknamed the kitchen right away that he had something. But yeah, what two sixty might have been Tom Rafferty, Yeah that was considered large.
Yeah in the day. Now it's a linebacker.
So at the old practice facility, did you have a tower to go up?
And we had it was only it wasn't even one hundred yards.
Right, It was maybe forty before the motel had got there.
Yeah, you had the building and it had that old, dilapidated painted cowboy blue fence around a metal fence, and at the far end when you walked outside, we had a scaffold that you walked up. It wasn't even it wasn't even more than twenty five thirty feet high. Today forty is like a minimum. Oh really, yeah, it was low and they shot one camera. It's all they shot today. I think when I left we were shooting ten right. Wow.
So when I came, we had a handheld sixteen milimeter camera and Coach Stallings, I had all those great guys. When I first came, Coach Stallings had me come and I would shoot the dB one on one from the ground. I'd be behind the wide receiver. He'd go out and I'd shoot that. So that was the first second camera we ever shot.
How did you ever get into the video part of football?
Well? I have a degree in cinematography and photography from Stephen F. Austin, and while I was in college, I actually produced a film for US Fishing Wilife Service. I took a year off school because one of the professors that I was friends with got me into that and produced that film for Fishing Wilife Service and through the grant had a sixteen millimeter camera and I did another film in the summer of seventy six with one of
the professors. Very interesting. We traveled to the Western United States, went to every major Indian reservation archaeological site in the
US Western It was unbelievable, unbelievable what we did. But anyway, and so I came back to Dallas after graduate and my professor down there, who I still talk to today, he hooked me up with another guy who was a little older than me, and we shared a studio space in Snyder Plaza and just did product stuff and it was still photography and I had that and I thought, well, I have this camera. I needed to do something with it. So I called Joe Boring. Remember Joe, No, he was
a scout. He always scout. Joe Boring, Yeah, still with us.
He was.
He was the last. He was a junction boy, and he was the last four sport letterman at Texas A and.
Mhow and he was there.
He was a head coach at Garland at that time. Right, So I called Joe and I said, who films your games? What's the deal with that? And I told the story on the podcast in episode one. He said, well, one company has the contract to do almost every high school in DFW area. It was called Educational Enterprises and it was down off Dragon Street by industrial fellow that owned it was named Jake Milton. So I got on the phone. I called Jake, explained to him the situation. He goes yeah,
let me come out. I'll drive out where your office is and we'll talk about it. So he comes out and we talk and he goes, I could really use use you to do that, you know, because I had my own camera and knew what I was doing, And so I started shooting high school games. And he said, I just got the contract to shoot SMU football and basketball, so you can do that. So I shot all the years Dickerson and James for at SMU. Oh wow, Yeah, that was my first football was doing that Texas Stadium.
They played at Texas Stadium. So through that there was a gentleman named Roland Rainey who he actually runs the Cotton Bowl now I guess he still does. He was the facilities director at SMU, and when I didn't have anything going on at Snyder Plaza, which is right next to SMU, I'd go over to Hombee Stadium and hang out with those guys and just you know, talk. And one day he's and he shot. Roland actually shot and we shot like I think we shot three or four
cameras at SMU game. And one day I'm sitting there, he goes, Hey, I'm going over to the Cowboy office. Do you want to go, and I said sure, so I got in the car. We drove over there. He walked down the basement. He goes and doing something with mister Friedman and Bob, how you doing? I meet you and we left. A year later, Jerry Zimmerman, who was one of the part time camera guys, was going to go start going to work for NFL Films and Bob calls rolling and goes, I need a guy. I need somebody.
He goes, well, call Robert. He can do it. So he called me. I went over and talked to him and rest shot the eighty one season and at the end of the year, he goes, do you want to help me with the quality control editing at the end of the year, And I go sure. So that was it. Home and away game never made a resume in my life.
Really, wow, Home and away games, Oh, every game. When you first started, every game, every game, every game, so you were there for the catch. That was my first year practice.
My first year was the catch when we lost the championship game in San Francisco, right, So the when we beat them about ten years later, that was payback for me. Right.
Well, that's that's pretty cool, all right, we'll take a right Here on mick Shots was our special guest Robert Blackwall, the Cowboys, former director of video and Savannah and I will continue to hold down the fort here on Mickshots.
I'm Dak Prescott, quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.
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As we continue here on mix Shots at Savannah A. Mickey and Robert Blackwell's our special guests since Bill Jones decided that going to spring training is more important than clearly mixshots on a Tuesday here after the Monday holiday. And you mentioned the nineteen eighty one game, and that helps me transition to yesterday at the Davie O'Brien Award in Fort Worth at the forth Worth Athletic Club, they also not only honored LSU quarterback Heisman Trophy winner Jaden Daniels.
It's the winner of the Davy O'Brien Award.
Every year they.
Pick a collegiate quarterback that stood out and give him an a Legends Award.
And the Legends Award went to Danny White.
Oh wow, how about that?
And I was fortunate enough to be there and it was good hooking up with Danny. They give him a really nice trophy. It's a bust of Davy O'Brien and then a plaque on the bottom on the stand with your name and the year you're inducted into it, and Danny was in town and we had a great conversation. You know, he still does the Compass radio podcast analyst, and he's been doing it for about, I don't know, eight years, maybe something like that.
But anyway, so I have a story about that.
When we went to play the preseason game in Hawaii. Yeah, yeah, that game was my eight hundred consecutive game, really, and so we're on the sideline and he was there doing, you know, getting doing pregame stuff, and I told him, I go, this is my eight hundred consecutive game. He goes, really, and I go, yes, and you were quarterback at number one.
Oh my gosh, Oh.
He's the eighty one.
Made him feel really, he just went, you got to be kidding me, I said, no, eighty one.
Eddie was.
He was pretty funny because it's a black tie affair. And so when he was doing the press conference, he goes, yeah, he goes, I had to pull this thing out of mothballs because I figured, no more awards for me, no more black tie affairs. Eddie goes, I still had my tucks back in the day. And I think people forget because you know, he ends up talking about he went to three led the Cowboys, so he took over for
Roger Staubach. Staback retired after the seventy nine season. Danny became the starting quarterback in eighty and took them to three consecutive NFC title games.
They lost them, so they never got to the Super Bowl.
And everybody who kind of remembers him as well, he couldn't get us to the super Bowl. And it's kind of ironic now because if the Cowboys went to three consecutive NFC title games today, that would be a big deal.
Absolutely Right back then, it was ah, you can't get it.
And it was only one measuring stick, right, that was it.
And so that was the eighty one game, the NFC title game, the catch game with Everson By.
A funny story about that. We shot two in zone cameras. Back then Jack Murray who worked at remember yet Chandlid as a sports film guy, he would shoot games with us good travel I remember that. So we went to that. We had played them earlier in the year, right in the regular season. I don't remember where we were at that point, but for the championship game, we shot out of a suite on that lower ring.
Level at Candlestick Park, right, and they had.
Fans in there, they'd sold the seats San Francisco. They're in there throwing, yelling, scream and throwing popcorn and everything. We're trying to shoot the game. It was it was crazy.
So on your show you had talked about the process of after a game and getting the team the footage. What was the process back in the day like for being able to shoot the game, process the film and then shoot it out to all the players.
Well, you didn't shoot it out to all the players exactly. There was There was maybe two copies of the game and it was the real It was a reel of offense, a reel of defense, and a real of special teams. And that was it.
And you would edit every walk they get it all together.
Well, you edited the games you received from the other people. You didn't really edit your stuff till the end of the year. The coaches would take the complete copy of the game play one to the last play, and they would put on the projector and that's what they would show. You know, there was no really no pull these out.
Pull that out. Now, when we got opponents film, you couldn't cut up their film because that belonged to them, So we had to make like a couple of copies, process those, and then we would have a sit down and edit. We'd have eleven reels here, put the film on, look at the viewer, put it in the viewer, and if it was the first and ten, put on the first and ten reel, it was second, six second or two to three second, six four. So he had all these different categories all the way down to goal line.
And you first play first and ten, second, six, you put on the reel and when you got and you do the second game. When you did that, you would take those eleven reels, put some leader on the front, and take them upstairs, and that's what they would watch. That's all they had.
Now, would you say, coaches, video now is more demanding based on how the NFL is these days.
It's just gotten crazy with data. I think that's the biggest deal. PFF data everything. It's all data driven. You know, the video is just the video. And you know people talk about nowadays about making cut ups, and you don't really make a cut up. You make a computer file that tells the computer to play this play first, didn't play this play, And they're all in the server and it's not making anything, it's just playing those plays out in the order you tell them to play it.
So when when did you guys transition? What year did things changing?
Eighty six? The league went videotape? Okay, and that was the year we went to London to play right and the preseason game. I think I remember about that. That's when the verdict came down. Yes, you know, and everybody we were over there when the verdict came down. We were in London and mister Shram, you know, he's all nervous about it. And it comes down. They goes a verdict we lost, and he goes what he goes, Yeah, they awarded them one dollar.
You know, were you in the hospitality room when that phone call came in?
I may have been, yeah, because so we're in this high hospitality room and the commissioner, Pete Roselle calls to get text to tell him what Robert just said.
Yeah, we lost and they awarded him one dollar.
H It was a lawsuit by the USFL and they were hoping to make some money out of it. And so the judge says, yeah, they're right, but the punishment's going to be the nfl.
Owes them one dollar.
Right. So text is on he's on the phone with Roselle and we happened to be in the at that time, and we weren't prepared to write anything, so we started scratching notes on napkins, right and and and Texas going oh, this is so great.
And he's going on and on and he's real loud.
Yeah, and he was never loud.
Yeah right, it's oh, Pete, I love you.
Yeah, this is the best thing.
And finally when he when he hung up, Texas wife Marty, she goes, hey, text, if we opened the windows the queen.
Can hear you? He was saying, it was just celebrating.
Oh yeah, and that was before the game, right, yep, yeah, for the game that was that was amazing.
So so that was when you guys started with eighty six.
Eighty six and we didn't know, we didn't know what to do. We had cases made, these brilliant, nice cases made for every piece of equipment we had, and we took them. We took the whole thing to London and you had to make a carne as you still do, which lists every piece of equipment, where it was manufactured, what the value is, had to be on that show. Every single scene you took.
Remember that.
Yes, So when we landed and Buck buck by kennan equipment guy, had to do the same thing with everything he took. So when we landed, Buck and I went
to customs and everybody else takes off. We were there, I don't know how long that three, four or five hours, and they would make him open a player bag and look at every thing that's in it, you know, because they I don't know what, I guess they don't you bring things in, you know, especially the electronic stuff we had, you know, because it was it was worth a lot of money, could be used anywhere, you know, So that that was crazy.
So for you working all these years, what would you say was your favorite time of year?
Draft?
You've done so much at the drafts every single year, training camp, in season, what what was your kind of favorite portion of the year.
I guess really your favorite anybody's favorite portion would be if you're in the playoffs. You know, just because and I say this a thousand times on my podcast, We're not the only people that work hard. We're not the only people that work long hours. We're not the only people do this. I'm just telling you the stories of what it's like, because I have people that started in the sixties and seventies on my show, tell tell them what it was like back then. So but just you
start the season and the NFL is really funny. Doesn't matter how you end. Everything's renewed in July. Everybody has a chance. You know, some people really don't, but they don't realize it, you know. But you go through that, and you go through the training camp. We used to go to training camp. I was there seven weeks in Thousand Oaks. One week to set up and we were there six weeks. I can tell you a little bit about that earlier or later. But you go through the
season and the season is like monotonous. It's like groundhog Day, you know. You know, every Monday, you know what you're doing. Tuesday, we're doing this, Wednesday, we're doing this, Thursday, we're doing this, and you do all that, and once you make the playoffs, then that's kind of a reward, you know, for all that hard work, and you feel bad for the guys
that don't. But that's the best time of year, is the playoffs because even though it's sudden death, you're still it's a reward for all the work you've done.
So when you got there.
They made the playoffs in eighty one, made them in eighty two, eighty three, got eliminated.
Early by the Rams, and then went in the hole. And then eighty four is when I showed up.
And that was the first year they didn't qualify for the playoffs since nineteen sixty five. They started in sixty six and made the playoffs or winning seasons. I shouldn't say they missed the playoffs in seventy four, but all the other years in between they were in the playoffs.
Well, the league wasn't very big back then either.
Right, fewer teams, yes, and other teams weren't.
The Cowboys were kind of ahead of their time back in the early eighties when it draft and things like that.
Yeah, I mean before I started going to the draft in eighty eight and everybody when I started working, there might have been twenty five people working. And when the draft would come, everyone would go into scouting and everyone had a job to do during the draft, and that those years, the draft went around the clock, right, I didn't stop. So we're there and everybody talks about the computer and all that stuff. I never saw that. There
was all books. Walls of books were written reports and when somebody who get drafted, you had to go get his book, pull his part of the book out, put it in a folder, fell out this sheet, tear that off, give that to this person that went around the table, and then they put it with where whatever team drafted him. It was very mechanical. It wasn't yeah, I don't think it was a computer involved in what we were doing there.
Did you have a favorite draft?
It's just the first I went in eighty eight, and then when eighty nine came and Jerry bought the team, Stephen and Charlotte were with me at the draft just to see, and I think they became bored very fast, because I described being at the draft as hours and hours of sheer boredom interrupted by a few seconds of terror when you're on the.
Clock, right, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because you're just setting it most of the day, you're just setting there.
You know, back then it was it was well, at one point it was seventeen rounds before it went to twelve.
Luckily, when I started was the first was when they started making it two days right, right, it didn't have to go round the clock. But what what's funny is you're you're you're sitting there and it's just all this is going on and you just have to observe. And it was. We were in a ballroom very Marquee on the sixth floor. There might have been up in the balcony one hundred people. When when I first started, that was it? Yeah, and now it's it's it's not it's a TV.
Thing because they didn't let every time Dick and Harry into watch.
Oh, I don't know.
It's like a combine.
Combine was this big secret thing and we were we have to go shoot the combine every years, big secret thing. You couldn't get in. You couldn't get in another selling seats. It figured out they could make a buck.
So how much interaction would you have uh with the players when the season started or whatever time?
You're with him all the time.
Yeah, yeah, do you have a favorite one?
Now?
We we would Uh. I really like Russell Maryland. I still talk to him. Tony Tolbert. I still go to lunch with Tony every once in a while. But uh, and I would uh when I was working, I would help Troy out with stuff for his broadcast so we could look so, you know, stay in touch with him, right, you know, and might see Mike every now and then, Mike Carvan. But h Randy White, I live in Prosper Randy White lives out there, running to him every now and then.
So is he still in his still same place, same place?
Yeah?
That Uh. We went and did an interview with him one year it must have been I don't know, five, six, seven years ago. And uh, he has cattle, you know, he's got he's kind of he's got all this land, but everything's growing up around his place.
Well he has it. He's like two houses, yes, and he has some property a few acres. And next door to him is this mansion known by Tory Hunter.
Oh is that who?
It's huge, right, Tory hunters baseball?
Right?
And I remember one year the cattle were all over the place and on the back side of his land is this it's a huge another huge mansion, right, And I said, those people should have to pay for the atmosphere, right, because it's free, right they get and and he was talking about the cattle, and I said, well, can you get them over here so we can get a shot with you and the cattle in the background.
He goes, oh yeah, hang on.
So he goes in the other barn or whatever it was, and he gets some sort of treat that the cattles love. He throws it out there and here comes. It's a stampede to get to the fence where we were standing because they had got their treats, right, but it's surrounded. At that time, they were getting ready to build a like two hundred homes across the street or something. Right, they all did it now, right, Yeah, that was Yeah,
Randy would be a favorite of everybody. Okay, let's take our second last break here on mix shots on Dallascowboys dot Com.
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That's what I like. Tom shuts.
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Twenty fourth and run through the twenty eighth. Learn more and register at Dallas Cowboys game time dot com. Robert, I want to talk about your podcast for a minute, Real Football Stories. What inspired you to begin this podcast?
Well, I'm really good friends with Mike Perkins. Who is He's the video guy at the Jaguars. His father's Ray Perkins.
Oh really, yes, okay, coach the.
Giants played for Bear Bryant, coach Dalla, and we were just talking. He's younger, he's in his fifties and we were just talking that we need to every well be back up every year. Started a few years ago, we started we have a reunion every year that try to get all the old guys to come to in Jacksonville. He hosted the Jaguars host that we go in the owner suite, I have lunch, we do all this stuff. It's a two day, a three day deal. And we were talking that all these guys are here and we're
all telling the stories. We said, we need to document this, you know, before it's gone. Yeah, you know, because these are guys that were from the sixties, seventies, you know, have all these stories. So we said, we need to
do a podcast. So he's kind of my silent partner in the background, and I just wanted to document all these guys before their stories are gone, you know, because you know, there's football fanatics everywhere, you know, like I have listeners in twenty six different countries, you know, around the world. It was amazing, you know. But my first guest the first episode was me and and Friedo was
my producer to start with. Yeah, Friedman tragically passed away in October, and so the first was about me talking. But my first guest was Al tremmell Al was eighty five at the time, and he was the original film guy hired by Vince Lombardi at the Packers in sixty four, sixty three, sixty four. So he came on and we talked about the Ice Bowl. He was at the Ice Bowl, Super Bowl one, Super Bowl two. So I just kind of went from there and we went to a roundtable
that's kind of out of control. We had. I had six guys and we just everybody's just telling stories and ragging on each other, and we talk about the combine. We talk about the draft because we all went to the draft. I went to the draft. I was representative for thirty two years, and all of us, there was about maybe ten or twelve video guys that went to
the draft. I guess we were the responsible people. I don't know, but anyway, and the one podcast that I really like is I talked to Jim Ponds, who was the started with the original film guy with the Jets. He started in their mail room at the Jets and said two or whenever it was, and then they needed somebody to want to hire an in house film guy because every back then all the teams contracted the film work out, you know. So they wanted to bring it in, so they hired He said, I can do it, So
they hired him. And uh, the interesting story about him, he hired John Sider, which was a friend of his a few years later, to be an assistant. They were both rock and rollers. Jim Pons who played with the Turtles from sixty seven to seventy and he played with Frank Zappa. They toured, They toured with the Doors, and so we did a we did a football we did a Jets podcast, and then we did a rock and roll podcast because John Sider was assistant. Was a drummer
for Spanking Our Gang. Then he was the drummer for the Turtles for a while and then he went with another band. So we told rock and roll stories for an episode. It was really good.
So you need to get a hold of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it said that stuff to him, or Pro Football Hall of Fame too. I mean, I'm sure the history of the video stuff would be fascinating to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
In fact, they just included video or film or video people, equipment, people, pr and trainers in the Award of Excellence at the Hall of Fame. So we had four or five people go in last year.
Oh really, I didn't realize that bub B Kennan went in last year. And so is there a wing.
There's a right outside of the theater there's a big Award of Excellence area and they put your name there. Huh. We had five guys go in, two of them posthumously, and well one couldn't make it all went in for the Packers, right, he just couldn't travel. He was eighty seven now. And Mickey Dugich, who was the original film guy in the NFL for the Rams Nicest guy in the world, he went in posthumously. He's he passed away several years ago.
So you had never done anything like this, like podcast stuff, no radio, no TV.
No, it's not hard.
Oh, it's the greatest thing in the world. You get paid to talk, right.
Yeah, yeah, you just give your opinion. It's like the thing about my podcast is if you go to sports podcasts, I'm not gonna say all of them, but ninety five percent of them are people that never did anything, never did They just like to talk and they want you to hear their opinion, right right, Well, that's not what I do I'm gonna let you talk to people who were there, who did it for thirty forty years, you know, and they're going to tell you what it was like
back then. Jimpon's again with the Jets. Four coaches when he started, that's all. They had, four coaches. It's amazing.
Well, if you ever go back and look at the media guides from the early sixties, the Cowboys didn't have that many instant coaches.
When I started in eighty one, there might have. There's probably maybe ten, right, maybe normal Allen, you know, he was the forerunner of a quality control right guy. Yeah, you know, and not very many. But when I started, Ernie Stalkner, Jim Myers, Jerry Tubbs, Jean Stallings, you know, all those guys, you know. And I tell the story all those old guys. When we were in Thousand Oaks at training camp, they would go to this place called
the Velvet Turtle. Yeah, I remember, I remember at a bar. Yes, And every once in a while, Dick Nolan and Ernie would say, come on, you're going with us tonight, and they would go. I wasn't young, I was in my early thirties, but they would take me and they would just sit there and drink and just tell these stories.
Yeah, you know, and it was just amazing, which was back in the day. I'm gonna forget the name of the place.
Texts used to go out all the time with the writers, right, uh yeah, the Black something like you had Velvet Turtle. I don't know if it was the Black Bear or whatever. It was the bar, and if you were out at night, you always wanted to go there because Texts would be there holding court and basically arguing with the writers who was right and who was wrong.
It's different days, right.
I tell you a story I haven't told in the podcast. In the dormant one thousand Oaks, right Canale Hall, I was in the dorm with the coaches, almost one dorm. My door was here.
I was.
I roomed with Bob, my boss, and Al Lavan, right, the running back coach. But so I had a bed up kind of by the door there. One night late and I hear these two guys are arguing outside and they're not yelling at each other, and I figure out it's Text Shram and Jim Dent and they were just going at it. And I was like, oh my god. So I'm standing by the door, thinking because his text door was right across the hall from Mone. So I think I'm just gonna said, if it comes physical, I'm
up to open the door and go out there. And so it never. They kept you on and finally they calmed down and went in and he left. And I told that story to Rush Russell and who did the Cowboy Weekly. He was more or less invented the Cowboy Weekly newsletter. I told that him years and years ago, and he said, I was standing next to text I was about to grab Jim.
Oh, I was there, were you? It was eighty six and they were gonna sign herschel Walker and.
I was standing there and we were talking to Texts, and Jim thought that herschel Walker was in Texas office. So we were in the lobby area and then Texts had that office there and his bedroom, and Jim goes, well, I'm going in there. You got herschel Walker in there, and yeah, I got nothing, nothing, And.
The Weekly guy he's standing there, and he goes he finally broke him up. He had to step in between, right.
And so the next morning, in the lobby ay of that dorm, they had like breakfast stuff and the media could go in there and whatever.
So we're in there first thing in the morning and Text walks in and he goes, hey, Jim, you want to come into my office?
Note just like that, right, And it was like bygnes or by God see text with just the next day everything's back to normal. But they were they almost came to blows. You're exactly right, it was. It was amazing. Well, this has been a fun, fun day for us, and I appreciate Robert, you coming in and we were able to do this and again, uh, let them know how to find real sports.
It's real Real Football Stories is the name of the podcast, and reel is spilled r E E L like a reel of film. And it's on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, all the podcasts platforms.
Okay, well that sounds like fun, and uh, we may have something else we need to listen to right now.
It's been a pleasure, Robert, thanks.
For being with us.
Appreciate and hopefully we have our gang back together next Monday. Find out on Dallascowboys dot com.
And that's it for mix shots on this Tuesday, Go Cowboys.
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