Mister Cowboy
The nerves start, as Lilly looks out at the 300-pound players one-third his age. Then anxiety turns to terror when the coach sends him into the game. And Bob Lilly, once one of the most feared men in football, wakes up in a cold sweat.
It has been four years since Bob Lilly has had that dream, and maybe that is part of the reason he wrote a biography of his life and career as a Dallas Cowboy. Thirty-five NFL seasons have come and gone since the man known as “Mr. Cowboy” took off the number 74 jersey for the final time.
Now Lilly’s book, A Cowboy’s Life, will bring back gridiron memories for Cowboys fans who remember the awesome force that was Bob Lilly. For Lilly himself, it was an emotional journey that took the Hall of Famer from dusty, west Texas, where his supportive, yet disciplinarian father taught him to listen, learn and make the most of every opportunity, to gleaming Texas Stadium, where Tom Landry was the father figure who taught him the importance of moral values and how to set and attain lofty goals.
“I really didn’t want to do the book, but my wife, Ann, thought it would be good for posterity—for grandkids and great-grandkids to know who I was. But after I got into it, it was kind of fun,” Lilly says, sitting at the kitchen table of his modest home. “It had just been so long that I didn’t know if I could remember all the facts. But it’s good to leave a little legacy because I did have a pretty good career in football,” Lilly says with a grin.
At 69, he is still chiseled and handsome, a kind, quiet giant of a man—the man who lived the dream of every boy who ever held a football.
Growing Greatness
Named an all-American defensive tackle at Texas Christian University in 1960, Lilly demonstrated greatness with potential to escalate. From his first day in the NFL, Bob Lilly broke new ground with a series of firsts and records that added new chapters to the NFL history books:
- ▪ He was the first player ever drafted by the Dallas Cowboys.
▪ He set a Super Bowl record when he sacked Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese for a 29-yard loss in Super Bowl VI.
▪ He was inducted to NFL Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
▪ He was the first inductee into the famed “Ring of Honor” at Texas Stadium.Tom Landry once said of the kid from Throckmorton, “Another Lilly will not come along in my time. We are observing a man who will become a legend.”
During his 14-year career with the Cowboys, Lilly missed only one game. “I was part of an era of toughness,” Lilly says. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t hurt. But my teammates were the same. We all played with broken bones. Back then, you took a shot of Novocain, put on a splint and you got out there and played. We were all tough.”
Being named a college all-American helped define Lilly in a way has nothing to do with football. As a prize for his honor, the young Lilly was given a 35mm camera and 200 rolls of film. He had never even taken a snapshot but became enamored with photography. During his NFL career, he snapped hundreds of photographs. Roger Staubach, Bob Hayes, Walt Garrison, Calvin Hill and all the other players and coaches who were a part of the greatest sports franchise of all time were captured by Lilly’s lens. Many of the photos sprinkled through A Cowboy’s Life were taken by Lilly himself.After he retired from football in 1974, Lilly began taking his photography seriously. It helped make ends meet. Lilly was a beer distributor for a few years, but sold the business after he witnessed the aftermath of a drunken driver crash. His pension from the NFL is $112.50 a month.
Today, he is a nationally recognized landscape photographer and spends hours in the most scenic areas of the country, watching and waiting for the perfect light. Lilly sells prints of his best images on his Web site, www.boblilly.com.
There is a room in Lilly’s home dedicated to his passion. Expensive printers and computers fill most of the room; discs and hard drives fill the cabinets. Lilly only recently made the change from traditional film to digital. But good photography is not about the equipment, but the mind and eye behind the camera. This once rough-and-tough football beast has an eye for beauty.
Walking across the manicured grounds of Sun City, Texas, in Georgetown, where Lilly and his wife have lived for 11 years, he seems a natural part of the outdoors. With camera and tripod in hand, it is apparent that football is a fond, yet distant memory. He no longer keeps up with the nuances or the players of today’s NFL, preferring instead to keep track of the latest in the photography world. Talk of new cameras and techniques brings light to his eyes. He is now as dedicated to photography as he was to football.When the 2008 Dallas Cowboys season comes to an end, time will run out for another legend of the game. Texas Stadium is to be demolished leaving only a memory in Irving, Texas, where Lilly made so many memories. He takes it in stride: “I understand that things change. The game has changed. I have a lot of good memories of coach Landry and my teammates in that stadium, but I understand that life and football are going to go on.”
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