Thursday is the Cowboys’ final practice at Valley Ranch, their practice facility since 1985. ESPN’s Ed Werder, Jean-Jacques Taylor and Todd Archer have been around the team for most of that tenure and offer up their memories from the collapse of the team’s indoor facility, the Jerry Jones-Jimmy Johnson feud and Charles Haley’s mean streak.
IRVING, Texas -- One of the first stories I wrote about the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News was about the team’s new indoor facility and how unhappy it made the residents of Valley Ranch.
The giant structure stood above all else off MacArthur Boulevard, and the residents hoped the team would do something. I remember one even suggesting the team plant some giant trees to help mask it from the road.
The team never added those trees.
Six years later, I was trapped under the structure after a microburst lifted up the structure and slammed it to the ground. A part of the door was resting on my hip and I couldn’t move it. Two players, Brandon Williams and DeAngelo Smith, helped two of the Cowboys’ writers, Nick Eatman and Josh Ellis, lift it up just enough so I could wiggle free.
It might have been less than a minute, but it seemed a lot longer.
The bruises and scrapes that I suffered were nothing compared to what happened to others.
There are times when severe weather blows through now and my heart races. It wasn’t that way before. As I watch practice now on the two remaining grass fields, I can still look over to the third field and see the twisted mess in my mind. Something like that doesn’t go away.
Though that will be my ever-lasting image of Valley Ranch, there are others that stick with me. Terrell Owens’ next-question rant was kind of funny. Marion Barber spraying his deodorant wildly as the media asked questions to Patrick Crayton was moronic. Wedging into spaces near Tony Romo's locker seemed unnecessary. Standing on the seats at players' lockers always seemed inappropriate, but that was the only way to get a recorder into a scrum.
The Bill Parcells news conferences were epic. For four years Parcells ran the show, and if you paid attention you learned a lot. After one news conference, however, Parcells wasn’t pleased with something I wrote and he called me to his office.
I walked in and thought, 'So this is what it looks like? Tom Landry worked here.' Then Parcells gave me a pretty good lashing, and I remember him saying he had a copy of his contract from New England in his desk if I wanted to see it. I thought that was odd, but took his word for it. By the end of the conversation Parcells was cracking a joke.
One trick we all played was the timely run to the candy machine near the scouting lounge. You would have to walk by the entrance to Jerry Jones' offices, then the coaches offices and finally the scouts' offices. If you were lucky, you were able bump into somebody, glean some information about a contract situation, coach or player and get a bag of M&Ms. The perfect win-win.
None of this will happen at The Star in Frisco, sadly. The football operations will be in the Ford Center. We will be headquartered in the office building.
The new building will be fantastic, but it won’t have the charm of Valley Ranch.
