It hadn’t been a good couple of weeks for America’s Team when I showed up in Dallas last Wednesday to start covering the Leake Auction downtown. The Dallas Cowboys, or more accurately, their owner possessed of the Texas-sized ego, Jerry Jones, had recently booted the team’s coach, Wade Phillips. Then I found this amid the Leake lots. History, or at least a sense of irony, dictated that I share it.

This is a 1988 Ford E-150 custom van decked out to commemorate the deific Tom Landry, fired by Jones in 1988 as one of his first acts after acquiring the Cowboys as indirect fallout of the 1980s savings and loan scandal. Canning the fedora-hatted gridiron genius, at that point the Cowboys’ only coach in its history, instantly made Jones the most hated man in Dallas. To some, he still is. Results from Leake in Dallas have yet to be posted, so I don’t know if this Ford sold. It was billed as a piece of tailgating heaven, and I’ve got to wonder how attractively this very worn van would fit outside the new, mind-blowing Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, which I managed to drive past.