[Mike Shropshire]When the Tuna Went Down to Texas : How Bill Parcells Led the Cowboys Back to the Promised Land (pdf){Zzzzz}

Bill Parcells was living in self-imposed exile from the National Football League sidelines. The Tuna had earned living-legend status after coaching the Giants, Patriots, and Jets from the skid-row district of the NFL and transforming those teams into champions. The final weeks of the 2002 season found Parcells working as an analyst at the ESPN studios. His heart aching, Parcells was like a televangelist with no cripples to heal. The Tuna urgently yearned for another lost cause.

In Dallas, Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones -- described by author Mike Shropshire as "a man involved in a heroic struggle to overcome what had been diagnosed as a terminal face-lift" -- was suffering through sleepless nights. Although his once-proud pro football powerhouse traveled beneath a banner that read "America's Team," it had suffered three straight 5#150;11 seasons. This team was so sick, it had bedsores.

After a clandestine meeting aboard Jones's private jet, parked at a New Jersey airport, Parcells agreed to abandon his East Coast roots and travel south to restore life to the Cowboys. The Tuna and Jones needed each other in the worst kind of way, so a shotgun wedding was performed. The pundits of the national media joined hands and shouted, "Parcells and Jones can't stand each other! They're too set in their ways! It'll never work!"

As usual, the pundits were wrong. With Parcells the ultimate motivator and so-called Jock Whisperer applying his craft, Dallas rolled to a 10#150;6 regular-season record and shocked the NFL by making the playoffs. When the Tuna Went Down to Texas details the saga of how this unlikely partnership of men "too brittle for tango lessons, but not yet blind enough for assisted living" amazed the sports world and serves as absolute proof that while the truth is not always stranger than fiction, it's usually a lot funnier.

Publisher: It Books (November 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060572124
ISBN-13: 978-0060572129

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Well-written and insightful
By Patrick Christ on July 23, 2006
As someone that knows Mike Shropshire personally, I can assure you that he does not love Jerry Jones (quite to the contrary actually). Armadillo, doing what he accused the author of doing, wrote a review in pure ingorance, taking ambiguous pieces of humor and taking them directly into technicality, a problem that many readers today seem to have with works of literature. The book is well-written and bases itself solely on what it is supposed to do: get into depth with Bill Parcells in his first year as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys and related material, which it does.