Bounty Bowls were key moments in Eagles-Cowboys rivalry

YOU TRY to explain to people what it was like, in the days before the coach only talked into a microphone on a podium and the trainer was forbidden to answer questions about injuries and every interaction with, well, with everybody on the team had a chance to be videotaped by another media outlet or by the team itself.

It was a time when newspaper reporters had only one deadline a day, and when news that you broke stayed broken for 24 hours, not until the next tweet. It was a time when Buddy Ryan was the Eagles' head coach, and when a game wasn't memorable if it didn't have a nickname. So, the Pork Chop Bowl was different from the House of Pain Game, which was different from the Body Bag Game, which was different from the Fog Bowl, which was different from the Kneel-Down Game, which was different from the Bounty Bowl, which was different from Bounty Bowl II.

This is about the Bounty Bowls, both of them, a series that began 25 Thanksgivings ago. But it was about a lot more than that, about a moment in time, a lost time.

The framework is fairly well-remembered. At the second-half kickoff, Eagles linebacker Jesse Small took an unmistakably direct route to Cowboys kicker Luis Zendejas, and did it with obvious intent. At the last second, Zendejas ducked down as Small and his ill intent arrived. Zendejas actually ended up being penalized for a low block on the play. The Cowboys were obviously angry, but that seemed to be that. After all, there had already been a brawl in the end zone after a late hit on Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman - a brawl that Crazy Ray, the Cowboys' ever-helpful quasi-mascot, attempted to break up. So this was just part of the deal.

You have to remember the circumstances on that day in Texas Stadium. It was 2 years after the Kneel-Down Game, when Ryan ordered quarterback Randall Cunningham to pretend to kneel down to kill the clock at the end of a win and instead stand up and throw the ball in the end zone. Ryan did it to get back at Cowboys coach Tom Landry because, during a game played with scab players during the NFL players' strike, Landry reinserted some of his picket-crossing regular players back into a game that was becoming uncomfortably competitive.

For decades, the Eagles had been subservient to the Cowboys. That day of the kneel-down, it changed. After Ryan choked on a pork chop the next year and spent a night in the hospital - "Good-looking nurses and the Playboy channel on TV," the coach reported - Cowboys president Tex Schramm proclaimed the next game "The Pork Chop Bowl." But now Landry was gone and Schramm was gone and the Cowboys were 1-10 in Jimmy Johnson's first season. Johnson was ready to grab onto any available lifeline to keep his team interested - and Ryan graciously provided one.

Johnson was furious after the game. He said the bounty was $200 on Zendejas, who had been cut by the Eagles earlier in the season, and $500 on Aikman. Johnson said: "I have absolutely no respect for the way they played the game. I would have said something to Buddy, but he wouldn't stand on the field long enough. He put his big, fat rear end into the dressing room."

Ryan's reply: "I resent that. I've been on a diet, I lost a couple pounds, and I thought I was looking good. And he goes and he calls me fat, and I kind of resent that a little bit."

Between wisecracks, Ryan denied everything. But, as I wrote the day it happened, Zendejas wasn't the first to make the claim against the Eagles: "He talked about a bounty, as Ron Wolfley of the Cardinals and Dennis McKinnon of the Bears had done in the past. It is hard to believe that everybody is just making up this stuff, although that is Ryan's position."

But that was not the end of it, not nearly. Zendejas said that a couple of Eagles, including special-teams coach Al Roberts, told him about the bounty. Soon after, Zendejas claimed to have a recording of a phone conversation with Roberts in which he admitted what happened. Meanwhile, the Cowboys demanded that the NFL investigate and the NFL did indeed investigate.

Day after day, the story built - the allegations of the recording, the NFL investigator coming to Philadelphia, the Cowboys going full-Zapruder on the game film, and Ryan laughing in their faces - all of their faces - day after day after day.

"Be realistic," he said. "If you had a bounty out, why in the hell would you put it on a kicker who's been in a 6-week slump? You hope he doesn't get hurt. You want to be sure he kicks. I mean, hell, don't touch him, be careful. That's the way you approach that stuff. That's the reason it's so damn ridiculous, see?"

The NFL investigation, such as it was, was troubled from the start. The problem was that lots of teams put bounties on players - or, rather, awarded players for big hits. As an NFL front-office guy told me at the time: "A lot of teams in this league do exactly the same thing. I would say that many teams probably do something like it . . . Money, television sets, a lot of things like that are given out for big hits. It's an incentive. It's a reward."

Ryan would acknowledge giving out T-shirts for big hits, but that is all he would acknowledge - likely because the world could not handle the truth. The NFL did its due diligence and concluded that, surprise-surprise, there was no evidence of a bounty - because the Eagles denied everything and because Zendejas refused to turn over the alleged recording.

New commissioner Paul Tagliabue returned that verdict in a quick news conference in the hallway outside Eagles owner Norman Braman's box at Veterans Stadium.

It was the same schedule as this year's: Thanksgiving in Dallas and a rematch in Philadelphia 17 days later. It was being ballyhooed on the national broadcast as "Bounty Bowl II."

Snow had fallen earlier in the week, and the city, which ran the Veterans Stadium, didn't shovel. The sun melted the snow in some parts of the stadium, but there was plenty of residual ammunition in other parts. The result was one of the great days of anarchy in Vet history - which is saying something - with a mortified Braman having to endure the whole thing seated next to the commissioner.

Snowballs rained down from the start. They also rained up into the television broadcast booth, with Verne Lundquist and Terry Bradshaw doing the ducking. Noted non-wuss Ed Rendell - a former district attorney at that point, and a future mayor, governor, postgame commentator and sports columnist - bet somebody $20 he couldn't reach the field with a snowball.

Players were relatively safe, because they could keep their helmets on, but nobody else was. Even the pleadings of Eagles players such as Reggie White and Jerome Brown couldn't get the crowd to stop.

PS: The Eagles won, 20-10.

"It's a disgrace," Braman said after the game. "I want to tell you, we're going to do something about it. We don't want this type of behavior here, and we're not going to have it. We're not going to sit for it. That's all. I don't know how many people we ejected, but the behavior in here today was absolutely an embarrassment. It was a disgrace."

The Cowboys were furious, again. Braman was furious. Buddy was Buddy.

"When there's snow," he said, "you're going to have snowballs."

It really was an incredible stretch of days. But there was one more thing. At the end, life intervened on the circus, tragically. The afternoon before the Dallas rematch, while working out at Veterans Stadium, Eagles quarterbacks coach Doug Scovil collapsed and died. Scovil had not only fixed a lot of Cunningham's mechanics, he also had been a father figure for an unmarried young player whose parents were dead and who was kind of rootless. We often wondered, years later, about what might have happened had Scovil lived.

He died at 1:04 p.m. Saturday and they kicked off at about 1:04 on Sunday. There is no such thing as a decent interval in the NFL sometimes. Scovil understood that - he was always in a hurry and always trying to teach his quarterbacks to be above it all, almost like a football CEO. His personality was not Ryan's - whose was? - and he undoubtedly thought the bounties and the bluster and the rest of it were just distractions for busy people trying to do their business.

But there it all was, and we all contributed to coverage of the mayhem: bounties and snowballs and furious news conferences in cold hallways, Johnson yelling here, Braman yelling there, the commissioner being escorted to the safety of his limousine. Mostly, though, I wrote about Scovil. I look back on it now and cannot believe what a time it was.

On Twitter: @theidlerich