Tony Romo, My First Book & The Grateful Truth Behind His CBS Suspension | Engel Angle

School's back, which means two things. Football is back, and we don't wanna hear about your fantasy football team. Neither do we wanna hear about your child's athletic exploits. They're both boring. Mac Engel, Fort Worth star telegram, angle angle podcast, stolen water media, sunset lounge. Thanks very much for joining me. My topic du jour comes by way from a long, longtime friend of mine who sent me a message on Facebook messenger that almost sounds like my space anymore. Says, hey, what do you think of your boy Tony Romo? I thought about this a lot actually. Because there are certain people in your life that come in and they may not be there for very long, but they make an eternal impression. Or there might be people who come in your life and then they're they're out, then they come back. And then that relationship changes. But I don't think it really hit me until I thought about this recently that Tony Romo Tony Romo made a really big difference in my life. My life. And I wanna be real clear about this. I'm not some BFF with Tony Romo. I'm not. I have his phone number. I doubt he would call me back. I don't even know if he has the same phone number. I have not spoken to him in years, and I doubt I am at the top of his Christmas card list. But when I think of Tony Romo and I put it in its proper perspective, the word that comes to mind is grateful. Tony Romo was back in the headlines for the wrong reasons. And I'm sure you've seen this by now, but he is now the CBS lead NFL analyst for its top NFL games each Sunday. He's been in that spot since 2017. And now that spot is in a bit of a precarious position after he was busted for what appeared to be driving under the influence in his native Wisconsin last month before a golf tournament. TMZ, of course, got the video footage, and it's not particularly flattering. Now I know a whole bunch of lawyers online have gone on to watch this and say, any lawyer with assault would have gotten Romo out of this. Now he did not test positive. I think he declined a breathalyzer, which is a smart move. But my first thought when I saw him was, man, he doesn't look very good. Now I'm not talking about he hadn't shaved or anything like that, but he just he kinda looks like he's let himself go a little bit. I think he's 45 or 46 years old. And I I I had some sympathy for him. I think as you get a little bit older and you require you require some scars, some of which are of course self inflicted. Your sympathy goes up when you become a parent, then it really goes up. And when I saw him in that moment was I was like, man, he doesn't look very good. And I kinda felt sorry for him a little bit because it's embarrassing. And I also had the same thought of his man. You can't do that. I have pretty strident views about driving under the influence, which is in this day and age, especially given the amount of money that he has, not that that matters. But in this day and age of rideshare services, Uber, Lyft, etcetera, there's no reason. There's just no reason. And you can get a rideshare in any first world country. So certainly in Wisconsin, he could've he could've called a rideshare or a buddy because in his native Wisconsin, he's got friends everywhere. And he also has friends who don't he doesn't even know because he's Tony Romo. And that's a mistake. He can't do that. And from what I've from what I understand, after he was busted, he called the executives at CBS and told them, hey, look. This is what happened. So they weren't blindsided by it. And then they suspended him. Do I think they will fire him? Let me back that up. Do I think they should fire him? No. This is a first time offense. And yes, it is embarrassing. It is embarrassing because he put that network, that brand, those other broadcasters, those people in the position of having of having to answer for him. And you never wanna do that. You never wanna do that. But Tony's a really, really smart guy. He made a big mistake, but he's a smart guy. And I suspect he played those those conversations well and and owned it. And certainly in his time with the cowboys, he was pretty good about that, about, you know, rhetorically understanding what needed to be said. Not he wasn't perfect, but he he got it for the most part. And I would imagine he handled this pretty well. But he is suspended, and there is no timetable on his return. I suspect the biggest problem for his and his potential return isn't so much what he did. It's whether or not CBS wants to get out of the contract that it gave him several years ago where they paid him a reported $17,000,000 a season to be its top analyst. Because at the time, there was a potential bidding war between CBS and ESPN because they wanted to put him on their Monday night football telecasts, which they felt at the time were substandard. And that led to them overpaying to I shouldn't say overpaying. That's not true. But reaching out and and eventually hiring maybe the top booth in the game, and that is Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. Those two guys cashed in big time. And the one thing about sports media and television sports media that not maybe everybody knows is that when it comes to those broadcasting tandems, say, in the NFL, let's use the NFL, the top guys get all of the money. And everybody else now look. Everybody else is getting well paid. Don't don't get me wrong. But they're not getting $15,000,000 a year. They're getting somewhere in the 6 figures. They're not getting crazy money like Tony Romo did. And even though CBS has the money, I've never met or seen a network a network executive who would not take the opportunity to shed costs if they could, especially in light of the fact that since Tony Romo just became the media star of NFL broadcast in his rookie season alongside Jim Nance in that booth, he's had a rather pendulous time going from adored to reviled, which is not a terribly uncommon path for analysts in that role. We love them. We love them. We love them. Then we get tired of them, and then we kick them around a lot. And as I watched him sort of evolve in that role where his first year out of the out of the gate, everybody loved him because he had this sort of seer like ability to predict plays before they actually happened. And his accuracy rate was uncanny. It was so good. Well, as time has passed, it's become apparent that he has fallen into the trap that so many former players do, which is they get more and more removed from their playing career. And as a result, they don't know quite as much because they aren't as current because they're bored by it. I don't think Tony Romo should be fired by CBS. A suspension, an admonishment, timeout. Those are all perfectly reasonable and acceptable. If they fire him, they're doing it because they don't wanna pay him anymore. That's why they would fire him. And the other part of it that I thought when somebody asked, what do you think about Tony Romo as somebody who's a few years older than he is? It might be a perfect opportunity to recalibrate and see, do I really wanna do this anymore? Do I wanna be a do I just wanna call games? Because I think what Tony's bigger challenge, and this happens to a lot of former players who played a long time, they get bored. They miss competing because there is nothing else like the chance to be out there and compete with somebody else to win, to look at that scoreboard and say, I won today. There there's nothing else like it. And that's why so many of these guys have such a difficult time transitioning to a more conventional work work life. And there's nothing conventional about being an NFL broadcaster. I mean, you travel quite a bit. It's twenty weeks out of the year that you're gone Thursday, Friday to Sunday, depending on if you're flying private or commercial, which that can be taxing. I mean, that's that's almost half the year sometimes that you're gone Thursday to Friday or Friday to pardon me, Thursday to Sunday or Friday to Sunday, depending on how you wanna schedule your your meetings with the players and coaches, the quarterbacks, and whatever a couple of days before the game. That can be a lot. And not all not a lot of them like to do it. And it also can be tremendously unfulfilling for some of them as they sort of move away from their playing career. And the biggest thing is I've noticed what Tony has done. Tony's playing golf all the time. I had a friend of mine who's pretty connected guy in in Dallas sports, and he said, I think Tony's biggest issue is that he's addicted to golf. He would not be the first middle aged man addicted to golf, by the way. That's it's pretty that's pretty common. And Tony, if you're unfamiliar with his backstory, Tony was a really good golfer as a kid. Tony was a great athlete. There's there's a lot of different elements to his ascension that people are unfamiliar may or maybe forgot. Tony was a really good athlete, but he didn't get that kind of notoriety and attention. One, he's a white dude. Two, he's not a huge guy. He's not six foot five, but he was a great basketball player in high school. He was a good tennis player, great golfer. He played with his dad all the time. He was a really good quarterback, but he played at a smaller high school. And so he didn't get that kind of attention, so he had to beg to get an opportunity to play at Eastern Illinois University. And if I remember correctly, I should know this, but I think they gave him $5,000 as the scholarship to he was a glorified preferred walk on is what he was. He was not the number one quarterback going into Eastern Illinois University. And these are some details I know about him. And, you know, as I sit there and look where he is now, I wonder if he should be a coach. But what people don't maybe not always necessarily know is to be a coach, especially on the NFL or college level, certain college levels. Let's say, like a power four job. That's a lot of hours. That's a lot of hours. And you don't get a lot of chance to play golf and and fool around with your, know, you your kids and wife and family, stuff like that, you're working a lot, way more than a broadcaster. And for a lot of those guys, they don't have that they don't have that kind of drive to spend that kind of time necessary to be coaching, to be evaluating players, to be assessing. No matter how much grab ass time that is spent in coaches meetings, in the hallways of NFL and college coaches office because they waste a lot of time. It's still time that you're there where you might wanna be doing something else. So I thought maybe this would be the opportunity for him as he steps away from CBS is determine, do I really wanna do this, or should I do something else? Because Troy Aikman, who appeared on this podcast many, many moons ago, openly talked about his time early on as a top analyst for Fox Sports. He's at ESPN now. And sort of the there was an unfulfilled feeling that he experienced in a great broadcast because it wasn't like winning a cowboys game. It wasn't like playing a football game. It's more like, hey. We had a great game today, but you're like, oh, okay. Well, so? And that's what it is. You do your job. Enjoy it. Make a lot of money and enjoy your life. Because there's one part to sports broadcasting that virtually no one wants to acknowledge that Brent Musburger, the former voice of CBS Sports said a day or two after he was fired back in ninety, eighty nine, ninety, someplace in there. He goes on a late show with David Letterman. And Letterman basically teased Brent Musburger up to talk about how good Musburger is and how ridiculous it is that CBS fired him. And Brett Musburger said, Dave, fans don't care who calls the games. And he's right. Television ratings for sporting events are completely unaffected by who calls the games. How many times have you ever watched a game and stayed with it or sought it out because of the broadcaster? Have you ever turned away from a compelling game because of the broadcaster? You may have turned them down because you didn't like them. But did you turn it off? No. There have been a few broadcasters in my lifetime that I sought out their game just to hear their voice, and they're all no longer with us. Vince Scully, Keith Jackson, John Madden and Pat Summerville maybe. It's about it. And that's no disrespect to any of the great voices and professionals who call games now. The game is the game. And the reason why some of these guys are paid more than others are highly regarded because they are a little bit better. Joe Buck's awesome. Joe Buck is great. Jim Nance is terrific. I don't think Al Michaels is quite as good as he once was, but Al Michaels great. There's a there's a there's a bunch of other ones, but I'm not going to be any more or less motivated or compelled to watch a CBS NFL game depending on if Tony Romo is or is not calling the game. Sometimes those executives know it. Sometimes they don't. I'm hopeful that they return him to the booth and that this time away in this period of embarrassment, potential embarrassment motivates him to sort of follow the path of Troy Aigman and just embrace where he is. And more to the point, sort of work a little bit harder at it. And the reason I say work harder at it is that one of the problems that broadcasters face, former players face, is that when they immediately go into the booth, they know they don't have to study it that much. They don't have to study the teams that much. They don't have to study the players that much because they are fresh off of their playing career where they have been swimming in that information weekly for years and was also new and fresh. But it changes after about the second or third year. Players change. Coaches change. All of it changes, and they don't keep up with it. And you can totally tell. And with Romo, you could totally tell. And after that second or third season, he started to get criticized. And if there's one thing I learned about Tony Romo, and this does not make him unique, he heard it. He he just wasn't he wasn't putting as much effort in in he wasn't putting as much effort into studying the teams and and what he was getting ready to do. He was just basically BS in his way through the game because he could. Well, by that point, CBS had already given him a whole bunch of money. And the charm of Tony Romo's first year had worn off considerably. And then you could see in the last year or so, he sounded like he was he was putting a little bit more effort and energy into it. But it it's still not the same. So now he's suspended. And now CBS has a decision to make. Again, I I'm gonna say this again. I don't think they should suspend him. I I hope he comes back. And the reason why I say I'm grateful for Tony Romo, it's because, you know, he's unintentionally. But, without him, I would never have done this. Hello. It's Mike Reiner of Your Dark Companion here. Let me ask you. Are you looking for something to fill the long dead air hours of your day? Well join the Sunset Lounge DFW and your dark companion on patreon.com, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. Replace those sad, slow hours with sports, pop culture, music woven into interesting conversations. So step inside the green door, have a seat at the bar, and get in the groove with those shows and so very much more. This is the very first book I ever wrote. This was, back in 2007, Tony Romo, America's next quarterback. And this was his first full season as the starting quarterback at the Dallas Cowboys. And I've shared some anecdotes about this, but this is why I'm grateful. Even though I am I'm sure he's not grateful for me. But this is an interesting thing to to go into as I sit here and think about what do I think about Tony Romo. So in 2005, I had been promoted to Dallas cowboys beat reporter for the Fort Worth star telegram. And at the time, Tony Roma was the backup quarterback behind Drew Bledsoe. The head coach was Bill Parcells. And at that time, while I was really intimidated by my surroundings, even though I had been a pro sports reporter for five or six years by that point, the NFL is a different beast. Bill Parcells was a different beast. The NFL is a different animal. I couldn't conceive that the starting quarterback of the Dallas cowboys would be an undrafted guy from an one double a school, Eastern Illinois, would be an FCF school now. I couldn't conceive that. I just thought, well, this guy's lucky to be a backup. And I disregarded people who said, Bill really likes this guy. Like, I couldn't conceive it. I'm like, they got Drew Bledsoe. 2,005 season ends in a disappointing fashion. They don't make the playoffs. The next season starts. Tony Romo goes in secure as the backup quarterback, and I should have seen this, but I disregarded the importance of it. I still kick myself about it. Dallas cowboys first preseason game in 2006 was at Seattle. Tony Romo played the entire game. That is very rare, especially then. Twenty years later, maybe less so, but twenty years ago, very, very rare that a backup quarterback in the first preseason game would play the entire game. I thought, That's probably coincidence. They just didn't wanna get Drew Bledsoe hurt. And I kept hearing they really like him. They're getting ready they're getting him ready to play in case something goes wrong. So in my mind, in case something goes wrong means Drew Bledsoe gets hurt. Six games into the season, Drew Bledsoe is benched at halftime of a game against the New York Giants in in Irving, Texas Stadium. Put in Tony Romo. He's a disaster. And the part that I never did quite understand, although I did later, Bill Parcells did not tell Drew Bledsoe to his face that he was sitting him down. I always thought that was a BS move. This is your guy. You've known Drew Bledsoe since he was a rookie out of Washington State University when you were with the New England Patriots. You owed it to that guy. You brought that guy here to the Cowboys. You owed it to him to tell him face to face, but instead, you had a backup. You had a quarterback's coach do it. That's a bullshit thing to do. But not totally atypical in the world of the NFL. Passive aggressive dominates NFL locker rooms and NFL offices just as just as much it does the office building down the street from your house. So Tony gets the job, and they make him the starter. I'm thinking season's over. There's no way they're gonna win anything now with a guy who's never been a starting quarterback. A point that Jerry Jones indirectly basically supported a week or two later. Something that Bill Parcells disagreed with me about, by the way. But everybody's wrong. Tony Romo's star right out of the gate, much like his broadcasting career, takes off, Not to the moon, not to Jupiter, not to Saturn, to Pluto, which back then was still a planet. Unbelievable. Tony Romo is the star of stars. Undrafted guy, big smile, nice guy, funny, takes over the cowboys, and he is leading them with Terrell Owens, and they're gonna go to to the playoffs and kill it. And it was around that time, Tony's time as the starting quarterback begins to waver. Now by that point, I had already been tasked to go to Tony Romo's hometown, Burlington, Wisconsin. Very, very nice community about 40 miles south of Milwaukee to interview anybody who could talk to me about this new quarterback of the Dallas cowboys. This includes his mom and dad, his high school coach, wonderful guy, and anybody else in town who can tell me about the guy they know as Tony Romo. That would have been in November, I think. Pardon me. That would have been in November. So I go to the hometown and I meet his mom and dad. Could not have been any nicer. Knock on the door. It's a very modest home. They show me around. They show me his bedroom. Packer stuff, obviously, they couldn't have been any nicer. Here, we'll take you to lunch. They take me to lunch, local place, drive me to the high school. They had done this interview by that point probably three or four times, and it was a very nice, very nice community. The mom and dad couldn't have been any nicer. Really super people. Show me the golf course, the municipal golf course where Tony had worked. Probably played dozens of rounds of golf in his life. It was just a very nice Midwest middle class setting. It's really nice. And it was funny on my way out of town. I forgot about this until just just a second ago. I go by Tony Romo's favorite pizza spot. I walk in and there's the owner or the manager or whatever. I introduce myself. Says, Oh, Tony, Tony. Let me make you something to eat. I'm like, Oh, man. I don't want to be rude. I just ate two hours ago. I don't want to be rude though. So I sit there and eat like half a pizza and I feel like a stuffed whale. And he said, are you gonna see Tony? I said, yeah. I should see him tomorrow. I was flying back from Milwaukee to DFW that night. He said, let me get let me give you a pizza. Let me give you a pizza. I'm like, what? So he makes me a pizza and gives it to me. I leave Burlington. I go to Wisconsin. I go to Milwaukee. I get on the plane and I have my pizza and I put it in the overhead compartment. I get home, put it in the fridge, go the next day. I see Tony Romo. I thank him. I said, here, here's your pizza. He sits there and eats a few slices at his locker stall. That was in 2006. So unfortunately, very and like a week later, two weeks later, I get a phone call from a publisher that says, We want to write a book about Tony Romo. Do you want to do it? Yes. Yes. Yes. A career ambition of mine had been to write a book. And I was going to do it. I was like, yes. I needed a foot in the door just to have a book published. Okay. This is what we need. We're gonna keep an eye on the season. And if, you know, they go things keep going well, we're gonna we're gonna contract you to do it. Great. This is very, very exciting. Well, the season sort of tails off and they kinda limp into the playoffs. They get to the playoffs. I'm not hearing from the publisher or the agent, and then they lose that first round game, the wild card game in Seattle where unfortunately, Tony Romo baubles the potential game winning field goal. He gathers it up, and he runs for the goal line, and they trip him up one yard shy of the first down. Cowboys lose. Bill Parcells retires. And after that game, and still see it as clear as day, there is Tony Romo in his locker crying like somebody near him just died. It's tough to see. His face is all white. Then they bring him into the postgame press conference, and I'm sitting in the front row. And I asked the one question that I think needs to be asked. Do you see any reason why this, why you wouldn't be the starting quarterback next year? He says, basically, he's like, this isn't time to talk about that. He's probably right. I get on a plane, fly back to DFW, the Red Eye, and I have to go stand outside the gates of the or the entrance to the Dallas Cowboys practice facility, what was then Valley Ranch in Irving, Texas. I'm there with my competitor, Calvin Watkins of the Dallas Morning News. We're just standing there at six in the morning, seven in the morning, whatever it is, in cold weather as guys come by and they stop and talk to us for a second. Never forget when Jerry Jones came out and he was driving his car. He didn't have his driver with him. It's just him. We talked for a minute or two. Thank you. And talked to some other players and Tony stopped for us. And he looked awful. You could tell it just tore him apart what had happened. It just killed him. And he stopped, and we only asked a question or two. And, you know, he gave us an answer, he was gone. So the net that entire offseason between 2000 and pardon. June, the Dallas cowboys hired a new head coach, Wade Phillips, and there were still a lot of concern that maybe Tony Romo wasn't the guy that the NFL had figured him out. At this time, the publishing firm calls me and says, we still wanna think maybe about doing this Tony Romo thing. So if he starts out well and they're doing pretty good, we'll we'll contact you. I said, okay. And at this point, I hadn't given a lot more thought. I was like, okay, this probably ain't gonna happen. So one lesson I learned in August of that year, was reminded of, I shouldn't say I learned it, but it was a reminder. I had written a story about Tony Romo where I quoted through my own words, but it came from a Dallas cowboys offensive assistant coach who said, the trouble with Tony is we're not quite sure what he's gonna do unless he's handing the ball off. Now if you hear that sentence, that can kinda sound a little cutting. Pretty critical. But I know what he was saying, which was Tony's a bit of a gunslinger. Can be a little erratic. And we're not we're not quite sure how this gonna go sometimes. So I'm in the locker room, and Tony's sitting by himself. I'm like, oh, wow. I can go get Tony Rommel by by myself for a second or two. I go sit next to him. He says, you know, Mac? You wrote something about me. And he quotes it almost verbatim. And when you're in my position, you're like, it is right. And it doesn't sound good. And I said, well, I wrote it. I'm not gonna apologize about it. I didn't throw any I didn't throw anybody under the bus. Those are my words. I wrote it. And I didn't necessarily think it was wrong. It was not well phrased. Tony goes on and has an amazing first month of the regular season. Cowboys are killing everybody. He's destroying everybody. Publisher calls me and says, Mac, we want you to do it. I'm so excited. They say, okay. We need we need it in two weeks. So I'm sorry. What? Yeah. We need this we need the manuscript in two weeks. What? I I don't think Ernest Hemingway wrote the sun also rises in two weeks. Old man on the sea maybe, but there's no way. I'm like, two weeks? What do you mean two weeks? Yeah. We need 25 to 30,000 words in two weeks. I will send you the contract. What? This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Of course, I signed it. So then I go to the Cowboys director of public relations, a man named Rich Dalrybull, who has since left the team. And I said, Hey, Rich, just to give you a heads up, I'm writing a book about Tony Romo. And Rich's enthusiastic response is, Oh God. Which if you knew him totally tracks. So I write this book and I've got all this material that I had obtained in my interviews when I wrote about him for the Fort Worth Star Telegram. I'm like, Oh, great. I've got this stuff. I'll call his college coach. I've got this. I can interview this guy, this guy, this guy. Can do this. I know I can do it. And so I'm writing at about 10:00 to 01:00 in the morning consistently. And about a third of the way through or however long the way through, my computer dies. Dies dead. D e a d. It doesn't matter how long I put my finger on the restart button. The screen was black as night. I called the IT guy. And IT guys just operate on a different wavelength of I don't give a shit what your problem is. And I'm in a half panic. And I said, I've got all this stuff on it. Can I he's like, yeah, it's it's toast? It's gone. Like, do you mean? It's gone. Gone. So probably 10,000 words are gone. I didn't have any emotion in me to scream or cry or show any emotion. I was so now I've got a week left and I was so despondent. Day later, it hits me. I don't know why I'm going in my email and I click on the out and I see there and it's got an outbox like a sent. I scroll and I scroll in. There it is. There it is. There are three of the chapters that I had emailed to my brother in Philadelphia so he could read them. I hadn't completely lost all of it. I was so excited. I was so excited. Now by this point, Tony is aware that I'm doing this. And word gets to his agent that I'm doing this. And all of a sudden, that agent who had no interest in talking to me, now he wants to talk to me. And also word gets to Tony's mom, a very nice woman, that I'm doing it. She won't even talk to me. That's a true story. She wouldn't even talk to me. And I still am baffled by it. I I think I understand it, which is, hey, you're profiting off our son. What I did was perfectly legal. I mean, just writing a story about a public a book about a public figure. So eventually, the book, Tony Romo, America's Next Quarterback, does come out. And it hits shelves the day after Thanksgiving. And I always remember going to the local Barnes and Noble. And they hadn't told me it was out yet. And I saw it on the shelf. And I was very excited about that. I don't want to go back and reread this because it was twenty years ago and I can't even imagine how bad it is. So I see Tony in the locker the next day and I said, Hey, the book's out. Can I get you a couple copies? And he said, No, don't worry about it. Already went out and bought one. He bought it and read it like in a day. And there's a lot of self own in this book, the beginning of the book, about how wrong I was about him. Because I was. I really was. It was totally genuine. It wasn't an act. Was like, Hey, I was really wrong about this guy. This guy's killing it. He's great. And he was really, really good. But one thing I I recognized that happened with him in his timeline with the cowboys is that he did change. Anybody would. Anybody would. You're talking about an undrafted one double a football player who's playing in front of ten, twelve thousand fans a game, if that. And now he's the starting quarterback of the Dallas cowboys. Yeah. That's gonna change you. And all of a sudden, has access to people and events that he never would have had access to previously. And now he's making money, tens of millions of dollars that he couldn't have conceived. And if you looked at the very nice, modest home that he grew up in, he was not blessed with that kind of wealth. No criticism of his parents by any stretch of the imagination. That's a very rare strata of income that people get to. And he did. But it does change you. And as he continued on in his timeline as a starting quarterback of the cowboys, you could tell that it the visibility was an adjustment for him and his family. And some parts of it he handled better than others. But he was always a really funny guy. He's a very bright guy. Extremely bright guy. And he was a really good player. And I remember interviewing Bill Parcells about him for this book actually. And the one concern that Bill had for him was his size. That once he started getting hit, that that might take a toll. Because he wasn't a big guy. He wasn't six foot five. And some of these other guys can take hits a little bit better. And remember, the way they hit quarterbacks then in 02/2012 is much different than they do now. And Tony did rack up some pretty significant injuries, clavicle, lung, whatever. And then in in the course of that, of his career, he being he became very, very close with the Jones family. In fact, one detail that I did use for one of my later books that always surprised me when 02/2011, Tony Romo early in his early in the season suffered a season ending injury. I think that one was his clavicle. And Jean Jones, Jerry Jones' wife, went up to his seats. They call it the Jerry Perch there at AT And T Stadium. And she said, we broke down and cried because they knew what that meant for the season. They just lost Tony Romo, and they weren't wrong. And there was there was Wade Phillips, and the season went in the toilet, and they weren't very good. You fired Wade Phillips and on and on and on. And that's how much Tony meant to that family. So and around that time or actually before that time, I left the beat and I was no longer covering the cowboys. In fact, I went to a life and art section at the Fort Worth Star Telegram because of personal reasons. We were having our daughter, and it was better for our family that that I would leave. And my last day covering it, I sent a text message to a handful of players. One was Jason Witten. One was Tony Romo. And Tony sends me a text back. He said, it was a very nice message. He said, I guess we can be friends now, which kind of caught me off guard. But I understood what he was saying, he appreciated me for the book. It was well written. And I didn't see him again for a couple of years because I wasn't covering sports. But then I circled back and he was getting a little bit older. And then I started covering the cowboys again. I was a columnist and a columnist. You gotta offer your opinion and your thoughts and this, that, and the other. And the one thing I had really seen that had changed in Tony was that he very much was aware by that point because by that point, he had really started to hear it. And as a Dallas as a quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, you're gonna hear it. You are gonna hear it good and bad. And he had really started to hear it. And I think it took its toll. It would on anybody. And he he intimates to a gathering reporters. And when we win this thing, we we're gonna know who was who believed in us. Basically, what he was saying was, I know what all you guys are saying. And when we win this thing, I know who were the believers with us and with me and those who weren't. That's what he said. And by that point, I also became very aware of that he and this happens with some of these guys, becomes very aware of who in the media works for whom. How big are your outlets? And with me, I wasn't at a big outlet. I'm not at a huge outlet. Bigger than some, not as big as the Dallas Morning News, certainly not as big as ESPN, and I got treated accordingly. It was a slight. Did I take it personally? I think I'd be lying to myself if I said I did. That didn't bother me a little bit when I was younger. Yeah, think it probably did. But not so but not not terrible. It was just it was more of a reminder of, okay. I get it. So then in 2016, Tony Romo was the starting quarterback to start the season. He suffers a broken back early in the season in a preseason game at Seattle. And the Dallas cowboys have to give the job to a rookie out of Mississippi State, Dak Prescott. And it becomes apparent early in the first month. Dak's pretty good. And also becomes apparent, I'm seeing with this what I saw ten years prior with Tony Romo and Drew Bledsoe. So I called Drew. And Drew said, yep. Just you wake up one day and you kinda hit between the eyes. And I saw it happening. And around that same time, I'm getting a bunch of text messages from people who are flooding me with information about Tony's behavior at that time. They were totally using me to report about how he was conducting himself behind the scenes in the locker room. And because they didn't wanna do it themselves. So I'd verify it with another person or two, and it wasn't a particularly flattering look for Tony. And I knew he saw I'm guessing he saw it. And I would definitely say that was it's probably not the greatest thing for my my relationship with him. But I I reported what I knew. And I even like I said, there's a couple details in there that I reported what I didn't know that weren't great looks for him anyways. But, you know, sympathetic, you know, that would have been a hard time for him. You're the starting quarterback of the cowboys. You have your job. They have a good team, and you can't play because this rookie that nobody expected comes in as kicking ass, and you gotta watch. That would have been hard. So he retires. And then the Dallas cowboys do not do a final press conference for him. And instead, CBS introduces Tony Romo as its new lead analyst. And a friend of mine who had been at CBS Sports for a long, long, long, long time says, this guy's gonna be amazing. He's gonna be John Madden. I was like, wow. That's a lot. He's he's like, well, he's like, I'm telling you this guy's gonna be great. And on the conference call pardon me. On the conference call, I'm on it. And one thing about Tony, Tony would be Tony could be really funny. And I think if I ask a question, he might bury me. But I've earned it. And I owe it to him just like I would anybody else. If you wanna do it, go ahead. I've earned it. Not with everybody, but certainly with him. I'm like, I've earned it. So if you wanna kick me around here, so I put my, I hit the button to get a question in. I didn't think I was gonna get one in. And then my phone comes up and says, Mac Engel, Footwear Star Telegram. And I asked my question. I said, hey, Tony, blah blah blah. And I think I asked him a question about whether or not he was gonna actually gonna try to come back. Tony said, is that your question? And he says, Mac wrote a book about me about ten years ago. And he kinda has he kinda just teases me with it. And then he doesn't answer it. Doesn't answer the question. And in that moment, I'm thinking he's gonna he's gonna tee off on me. And he really didn't. He could've, but he really didn't. And because he just didn't know how those things are gonna go. And that's really the last time I've talked to him. But since I but since that day, I have seen him become this media star. And now I really wonder if he wants to do it. You know, he's on this hiatus that he didn't want. But like anybody, I hope he makes the most of the time to determine if this is really what he wants to do. When somebody asks me what I think of Tony Romo, I think he's a really good guy. Really smart guy. A really funny guy. Really funny guy. Really nice mom and dad. Really good family who has been extremely fortunate and who earned that good fortune. Tony Romo busted his ass when he was young to be where he was to have a chance. I don't think you realize and appreciate how small of an opportunity that was that he created for himself just by continually working at it and figuring out this is not my ceiling. This is not my ceiling. This is not my ceiling. And he kept going up. I was inspired by it truly. And he is an amazing story. So whenever I think about Tony Romo, I think, you know what? He's probably not my biggest fan. But without him, there isn't this. And for that, I will always be grateful for Tony Rommel. See you next time. This is a Stolen Water Media production.