“Houston YES – Dallas NO!”
“Dallas YES – Houston NO!”
Randy Harvey wrote an interesting commentary in the Houston Chronicle this morning on the absence of venom in most Houston vs. Dallas sports rivalries these days. He touches quite accurately upon the lone exception, the Rockets and Mavericks of the NBA – where enmity has been heated by back and forth trash talk between Rockets GM Daryl Morey and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. That ne may heat up a little in 2014-15 with the free agency signing of former Rocket Chandler Parsons by the Mavericks this past summer. – Our take on this example is that it seems to grow more from the way leadership people have said publicly unflattering things back and forth than it does from anything rooted in a Houston vs. Dallas vein. – It was more like the rivalry that the Astros felt with the Dodgers when they had to both contend with competition on the field and the always running mouth of LA manager Tommy Lasorda.
As childhood memory serves, the Dallas Eagles and Houston Buffs of the AA Texas League were fierce rivals on the fan level, as were the NFL Dallas Cowboys and Houston Oilers. The Eagles-Buffs rivalry fed from an ancient feeling of separation and competition between Texas’ two largest cities on every level of competition for attention, identity, esteem, and economic domination. It was a blanket that covered all. People born or settled in Houston stayed in Houston. People who were born or moved to Dallas stayed in Dallas. Most of us among the people in Houston that we knew never had even traveled to Dallas. We just “knew” from our talk with older Houstonians that people from Dallas were “a bunch of stuck up snobs who were long on words and short of real working ability for anything useful. They may as well not have hands because cannot build or fix anything with the ones they’ve got.”
On the other hand, word got back to us too. – Dallas people thought Houston was little more than “an overgrown hick town.” As one story along those lines went: “Every time East Texas piney woods towns get run over with too many people, they just run them off to Houston to live in that larger mound of city hicks.” – Stuff like that just made us so mad, as it surely must have stirred the pot up in Dallas with their own tales about what the hicks in Houston said of them.
By the time in 1960 that Dallas got both the Cowboys of the NFL as an expansion team and the original Texans as their city’s first AFL team, Houston got the Oilers as their first professional club in the new AFL, as well.
In short, Dallas fans threw most of their support to the NFL Cowboys. The assumption of many was that the AFL would be short-lived – and that when it failed, a few of the stronger clubs might be absorbed by the NFL, but that one of those would not be the Dallas Texans. The city already had the Dallas Cowboys. Meanwhile, down in a more diverse and transiently populated Houston, many new Houston residents and Grade A NFL fans chose to also follow the Cowboys rather than the Oilers for similar reasons to those who picked that same way in Dallas. These Houstonian Cowboy fans wanted to support a Texas team that they felt sure would win the eventual survival battle. In other words, the Cowboys bore a cachet of higher esteem than either the Dallas Texans or the Houston Oilers because they already the real deal – the NFL.
By the time of the first Super Bowl in 1967, the Dallas Texans had been run off to Kansas City. They had been rechristened as the Chiefs and become the champions of the AFL that would lose to the Green Bay Packers of the older NFL in that first playing of the big post-season. By 1970, the AFL would merge into the NFL and emerge renamed and slightly reconstructed as the American Football Conference of the NFL.
Bottom Line: Even with the AFL-NFL merger of 1970, the Houston-based Cowboys remained Cowboy fans – and they have raised their children and grandchildren in that same allegiance. And today, with television and the Internet, plus all of the corporate mobility and homogenization of city cultures by franchise food and other retail stores, the art of generating a really hot geographic rivalry seems more improbable with each passing year.
Astros fans today could get very worked up over beating the Rangers in the World Series, but that isn’t going to happen now that both clubs are in the same league. That being said, we have to ask, “So what?” It isn’t geographic competition that stirs the souls of Houston fans. It’s the desire to win it all in the World Series against anybody! – As for the “Silver Boot” award, you can take that boot and shove it! – Who needs it?
Thank you, Randy Harvey, for stirring up the subject.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
October 1, 2014 at 2:51 pm |
Bill,
Thanks for shedding a little light on the Houston-Dallas animosity of the past. I’m not a native Houstonian, so I’ve always had the impression that Dallas had a superiority complex and Houston an inferiority complex, but it’s interesting to know more about the roots of these phenomena.
As far as the improbability of a geographic rivalry developing between the Astros and Rangers, I’m not sure whether you’ve hit the nail on the head or not. When I lived in Pittsburgh, PA, the Pirates and Phillies were both in the NL East and there was true animosity between both the baseball teams and their respective cities, most of which had to do with the fact that it was an intrastate rivalry. Over time, especially if both teams start to do well again, I could see such a rivalry developing between the Astros and Rangers. You may well be correct, however, in pointing out how the influence of TV, the Internet, and merchandising on modern allegiances may prevent that from happening; those issues certainly weren’t in play in the late ’70s/early ’80s when I lived in PA.
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