Early training camps were memorable

The newborn Dallas Cowboys came out feisty.

Because their first-year training camp conditions were so unpleasant, so shoddy, the players hanged Gil Brandt in effigy for putting them there.

It was the summer of 1960 in Delafield, Wisc., and a group of players secretly fashioned a human figure out of feed sacks, then attached a large “Gil Brandt” sign to it.

Brandt tells the story on himself. The players wanted the upstart personnel director of the upstart Cowboys to catch their drift: They weren’t happy.

As castoffs of established NFL teams from New York to Los Angeles, many of these players felt it was quite punishment enough to be stuck with some expansion outfit from North Texas.

Moreover, these early Cowboys were training-camp squatters.

They had no fewer than five summertime sites in their first four years of existence, often going where the preseason schedule took them.

“Money was paramount in those days,” Brandt said. “When you played one of those preseason games, you got $25,000.”

But back to hanging Brandt in effigy ...

He painstakingly checked out each training-camp location in advance. That was his job — well, one of them. He had many.

Brandt received a promise from St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy officers in Delafield, Wis., which was to be the second-half summer home for the ’60 Cowboys. (They began the summer at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore.)

“Don’t worry, these dorms will be remodeled,” an officer on staff at St. John’s told Brandt. “When you come back, you won’t even recognize the place.”

Famous last words.

After spending a month in Forest Grove, Ore., which was 150 miles away from the team’s first-ever preseason game in Seattle, the Cowboys moved five states east to Delafield, Wisc., in late August.

“The plan was to spend the last two weeks of camp at this military academy in Wisconsin,” Brandt said. “I was a young guy, and I took some colonel, or whatever the hell he was, at his word.”

And so?

“When we got there, the same 40-watt lightbulbs were in the dormitories. There were bats flying around the hallways, no screens on the windows, and mosquitos galore,” Brandt recalled. “It was a disaster!”

As if this wasn’t professional hardship enough, players and coaches traveled four hours in a prop plane to get there, then took a 90-minute bus ride to reach the academy.

“I noticed a big military statue out front when we pulled up,” Brandt said. “The next morning, some of the guys had tied together a couple of stuffed burlap sacks, with a sign that read ‘Gil Brandt’ ... [and] that’s where they hung me in effigy.”

It was probably warranted, although I’m guessing Brandt would’ve chosen the name of a certain colonel to use on the dummy instead.

Frank Clarke: ‘The audacity’

Middle linebacker Jerry Tubbs, an impact player on those early Cowboys teams from the get-go, remembers hearing that it was an offensive lineman behind the Brandt prank.

“I guess one of the offensive tackles had a pretty good sense of humor,” said Tubbs, who came to Dallas in the ’60 expansion draft from the San Francisco 49ers. “Personally, I didn’t go into things like that too much.”

No one interviewed for Old ‘Boys Club expressed any involvement or firsthand knowledge into what has remained something of a “whodunit” for 48 years.

Receiver Frank Clarke, ex of Cleveland in the same expansion draft as Tubbs, looks back now and sees guys with no room to be petty ... being petty.

“Didn’t we have the nerve?” Clarke asked increduously. “Here we were — most of us has-beens with other clubs — yet we had the audacity to complain about training camp. We should’ve been grateful for the opportunity.”

Eddie LeBaron, a star with the Redskins before he joined the Cowboys, knew paradise when he saw it. And this wasn’t paradise.

“I remember it being cold and decrepted,” LeBaron said of St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy. “It looked like an old castle ... [and it was] leaking.”

Tubbs came up his own apt description: “Ancient fort.”