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By Mike Piellucci 2h ago
19 in ’19 highlights the 19 most impactful Cowboys, Rangers, Mavericks and Stars throughout the history of each franchise. Our staff voted on the top 19 from all four combined lists to create these overall rankings. You can find all of our team lists and profiles here.
The secret was in the eyes.
They were far from the only tool that shaped Bob Lilly into one of the greatest defensive tackles in NFL history, of course. The rangy frame, the wiry strength and the cobra strike of a first step all contributed to the 11 Pro Bowls, the two All-Decade teams and enshrinement in both the Cowboys Ring of Honor as well as the Pro Football Hall of Fame. They made him the first truly important player in Dallas Cowboys history, which in turn made him the first truly important professional athlete in Dallas team sports history.
But the eyes fused the entire package together. According to his wife of 46 years, Ann, Lilly had 20/12 vision in his prime, and he used it to suss out the smallest details to claim every edge he could on the field. He’d scan the opposing huddle for glimpses of offensive linemen tightening chin straps – that meant they were preparing to pass block, and, he says with a cackle and a North-Central Texas drawl, “It mean(t) they’re going to get hit in the head.” When they lined up, he’d gaze down at their fingertips; the tighter they were pressed into the ground, the more likely those linemen were to fire off the snap and run block. He’d eyeball the fractions of space between the guard and center to gauge whether he would be double-teamed.
(Photo: Focus on Sport/Getty Images)
The eyes became the bedrock of his favorite football parlor trick. He studied opposing linemen’s movements until he pieced together their timing off the ball. Once he had it, he’d occasionally blow his own assignment by overrunning his block and winding up in the opposing backfield. “It really kept them off-balance if you do that once or twice a game,” he says.
Tom Landry was less amused by the strategy.
“He said, ‘Someday, you’re going to slow down, and you’re not going to be quick enough to do that,'” Lilly recalls. “I said, ‘When I’m not, I’ll quit,'” before unleashing another laugh.
Lilly turns 80 on Friday, but he is still sharp-witted and straight-backed, still wears his ring from Super Bowl VI on his finger and still has all of the bearing of the man best known in Dallas as “Mr. Cowboy.” Truth be told, he’s never been comfortable with the nickname. “It embarrasses me,” he says. He’s shy by nature, and besides, he points out, there are many other great players who could carry the mantle of Mr. Cowboy.
“I’m just Bob,” he insists. And for the bulk of his life, Bob has used his eyes to excel in another talent altogether. [HR][/HR]
Bob Lilly became a photographer just prior to becoming a professional football player.
It was 1961, and Lilly was coming off a standout senior season at TCU, for which he was named a consensus All-American. One of the teams that honored him, the Coaches’ All-American team, had a colorful sponsor: Kodak, who gifted each player with a motormatic camera, 200 rolls of film – 100 color, 100 black and white – and prepaid mailers to send their pictures in to get developed.
Lilly never cultivated an interest in photography growing up as a boy in Throckmorton, Texas and Pendleton, Oregon. But he was about to hit the college all-star game circuit, which provided plenty of new surroundings to document. He spent the ensuing months all over the country: Chicago, Honolulu, Buffalo and, finally, after the Cowboys made him their first-ever draft pick that spring, training camp at St. Olaf’s College in Northfield, Minnesota. He brought his new camera with him every step of the way.
Photo Credit: Bob Lilly
At first, he says, “it was just a novelty.” Lilly photographed everything from empty stadiums to fellow Cowboys to whatever caught his eye on the road. Sometimes he even got pictures of himself, like the time he was invited to sit in the cockpit of a commercial jet. Most often, he photographed children, particularly those of teammates. He’d frequently show up at practice with developed photos in hand to distribute to their parents as gifts.
“Some of my old teammates have told me, ‘If we didn’t have those pictures, we wouldn’t have any pictures of our kids when they were little,’” Lilly says.
Novelty bloomed into passion during his second season. Lilly began subscribing to publications like Popular Photography and frequenting Afterimage Gallery in Uptown, one of the oldest photography galleries in the country. He coaxed his road roommate and linemate on the original Doomsday Defense, George Andrie, into the hobby. Together, the pair would hunt for photos or track down suppliers who could give them discounts on high-end Leica cameras, which were light and quiet – perfect, Lilly says with a sly grin, “so we could sneak pictures in the meeting rooms and things.”
He even jury-rigged a darkroom in the spare bathroom of his two-bedroom apartment, swapping in a red light for the lightbulb and sliding a print washer under the faucet. Then he slapped plywood on half the room, added photo trays and placed a photo enlarger over the toilet to complete the setup. He’s had a dark room or a digital photo center in every home he’s lived in since.
But it took about five years for Lilly to find his calling as an artist. His tastes gradually shifted away from people and towards landscapes. Once he cracked open a book by Ansel Adams, arguably the most revered American landscape photographer ever, it was all over. When he attended part of a seminar Adams conducted in Arizona, it only confirmed that this was the work he was meant to do.
He found himself drawn to the West, with its rugged beauty and forgotten secrets. He’s photographed so many of its natural wonders, among them Bryce Canyon and Arches National Park in Utah, The Wave in Arizona and New Mexico’s White Sands. Long ago, he learned that an ideal photo was all about light and subject – not necessarily in that order – and he’s spent untold hours in deserts stalking the right moment to crystallize in his camera. [HR][/HR]
He pulls out a black-and-white photo of a cluster of cacti in Arizona’s Saguaro desert. Sunlight creeps into the left side of the shot before the scene dips into shadowy darkness.
“I love stuff like this,” he says. “It kind of tells you a picture of where you are. There’s only one place in the United States where these grow, and that’s Arizona.”
Lilly’s just as fond of ghost towns. Nowadays, he keeps a map of them at home, but he’s has been photographing abandoned places long enough to remember a time when he located them by using guides or through word-of-mouth whispers among fellow photographers. “There’s always something surprising in a real ghost town,” he says.
It can be as big as the ruins of an old mission outside of Claunch, New Mexico, a relic of the conquistadors. It can be as small as another photo he pulls out, of a battered old truck he found elsewhere in the state.
“It’s just fallen down in the ground, and it’s got weeds growing through it, and the door might be open or we’ve opened it, and the seat is worn out – the light is right,” he says. “It’s eerie. You just wonder, who left this truck here? Where had this truck been?”
Unlike many photographers, he prefers to work with a partner or two. Often, it was Andrie. Other times, it’s his brother-in-law, or fellow artists he befriended over the years. He relishes collaboration, how two or more minds working in concert can imagine – and realize – far greater possibilities than he ever could on his own.
“I think maybe part of that comes from team sports,” he muses.
Lilly retired in 1974, so he’s been a photographer far longer than he was an athlete. Yet he still sees parallels between the sport he conquered and the vocation he’s chosen. Each one, he says, required every bit of his studied eye.
“Football is like a triple-chess game. Once you get about three or four years, if you’re very astute, you not only know what your defense, is but you know what they’re going to do,” he says. “I think that’s the way photography is. It’s the little things. It’s the little things that catch your interest. It’s details … You learn all these things over a period of time, just like football.”
Photo Credit: Bob Lilly [HR][/HR]
Three decades after he owned it, Lilly can recall nearly every detail of the New Mexico Gallery of Photography and Fine Art in Mesilla, New Mexico.
The adobe foundation, which required a journey south of the border to Juarez to mass-produce the correct mix. The terra cotta floor tiles. The painstaking renovation to create a small apartment in the back, in which he and Ann briefly lived until settling into their home in nearby Las Cruces. The artists who passed through.
They opened the gallery in 1984 after moving from Waco, where Lilly and Andrie partnered as Coors distributors. It was a lucrative business – no small thing for a player who estimates he made less than $500,000 over the totality of his 14-year career. But, Lilly says, “It didn’t ever feel right.” He stuck it out for more than five years, until he found himself at the scene of a car crash in his territory. Only when he opened the vehicle’s door to lend a hand did he realize it was a drunken driving accident.
“I’ll never forget the beer cans coming rolling out at my feet,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I probably had some influence on this.’ I told Ann, ‘I’ve got to get out of this.’”
So they sold the business and decamped for New Mexico. Lilly found kindred spirits in Mesilla, an artist’s town of about 2,000 people most famous for being a hangout of Billy The Kid’s in the Old West. The town hosted artisans of all types: Painters, glass blowers, brass workers, sculptors. Lilly’s aim was to help grow the photography scene. He purchased a building from 1835 and the plot of land it sat on in the town square for $15,000. Then he got to renovating.
The finished product was two large rooms, one for painters and the other for photographers. He employed a rotating cast of artists who would come through for a day or two at a time, working at the store in exchange for a sales commission plus the opportunity to sell their own work. That allowed Lilly to flit in and out, alternately minding the store and going off to create new work. He kept a ledger of his favorite shots and routinely circled back to them with members of the photography community he met in town. Sometimes, he set out for as long as a week at a time to shoot in places like Flagstaff or Horseshoe Bend, Arizona. It became the opposite of his life in Waco. Purpose had replaced profit.
“I don’t think I made any money, but I had a lot of fun. (The gallery) more than paid for itself,” he says. “It really was a fantastic time.”
That was 30 years ago. In 1989, he sold the gallery and relocated to Graham, about two hours west of Dallas. He chose Texas over New Mexico and family over adventure. “That time of my life is pretty much over,” he says matter-of-factly.
He and Ann moved to Savannah, Texas a few months ago; for the time being, at least, many of his photos and photography equipment are tucked away in cardboard boxes. He intends to unpack them, but he’s also realistic. Opportunities are fewer, as are collaborators. George Andrie died last year, and, Lilly says, “my buddies are pretty much gone that I took pictures with.”
There’s also the matter of his vision: It’s not bad, but it’s not 20/12 anymore, either. Details that were obvious 30 years ago take longer to appear now. The right photo is simply harder to come by.
“But I’m always looking for them,” he says. His eyes are still wide open.