Walt Garrison, a hard-nosed running back for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1960s and ’70s and a member of the Hall of Fame who became a cult hero in Texas, his home state, as the rare Cowboy who actually was a cowboy, has died. He was 79.
The Cowboys announced his death on the team website on Thursday. The announcement did not say when or where he died or cite a cause.
A de facto mascot of his team as well an iron-willed ball carrier, Garrison, who was born in Denton, Texas, was as Texas as the blue star that covered the 50-yard line on the turf of the Cowboys’ stadium.
With a pinch of tobacco often between his cheek and gum, as seen in his long-running series of television ads for Skoal smokeless tobacco, Garrison spoke in an accent that twanged like a pedal-steel guitar; wore cowboy hats seemingly as wide as the Rio Grande; and carried a sharp knife in his back pocket for whittling sticks.
“I would have to describe myself as being a country boy means,” he said in a documentary about his career. “I don’t like to live in town, I don’t like downtown Dallas with the crowds and the stoplights and everything. I like it out.”
As a football player, Garrison lacked flash. Selected by the Cowboys in the fifth round of the 1966 National Football League draft, he tallied only 40 carries during his first two years, and he later joked that in those seasons he was so anonymous that the Cowboys head coach Tom Landry thought his name was Number 32.
“I don’t think Tom remembered my name until my third year in the league,” he said.
During his nine years with the Cowboys, Garrison never reached the 1,000-yard plateau in a season, generally considered the standard for a star running back; his best total was 818 yards on 176 attempts in 1969.
Even so, the six-foot-tall, 205-pound Garrison played in 119 regular-season games and 13 playoff games for the Cowboys and still ranks ninth in career rushing yards for the club, in part because he seemed to turn every attempted tackle into a wrestling match.
“He wasn’t really very fast, he wasn’t very big, he wasn’t very anything, really, I thought,” Landry said in the documentary. “But the thing we discovered about Walt Garrison was, he had a heart about as big as he was.”
Garrison maintained an admirable average of 4.32 yards per carry for his career, which according to one former teammate was about what he seemed to get on every carry.
“If you needed four yards, you’d give the ball to Walt Garrison, he’d get you four yards,” Don Meredith, his Cowboys quarterback and another colorful Texan, once said. “If you needed 20 yards, you’d give the ball to Walt Garrison, he’d get you four yards.”
Teammates considered him remarkably tough, even by the standards of a game known for its violence. During the National Football Conference championship game against the San Francisco 49ers following the 1970 season, Garrison fractured his clavicle and suffered a leg injury, but he soon rallied to come off the bench and catch a touchdown pass.
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