Jan. 1--It's been said more than once that the very thing that makes Tony Romo great on the field -- his almost Jedi-like ability to make something out of nothing -- is too often also his greatest undoing.
Let's take that rationale a step further. The thing that makes him so likable -- his candor and honesty -- is also what creates doubt in people's minds that he can ever be the Super Bowl-caliber leader and quarterback Dallas Cowboys' fans so desperately want him to be.
Strangely, it's a whole lot about perception, and, while you would think that Romo might have learned a little something about that after last January's trip to Cabo before the Cowboys' playoff game with the Giants, I submit that he still doesn't quite get it.
His postgame news conference after the 44-6 debacle in Philadelphia on Sunday is a prime example.
He stood there, in obvious pain from a rib injury after being hounded by the Eagles all afternoon, and spoke directly from what we all fully expected to be a broken heart.
But was it?
Here's the exact transcript of Romo's response when someone asked him how he dealt with such a devastating loss. It made me proud of him...and it made me flinch, too.
"I wake up tomorrow and keep living. You don't [deal with it]. You just keep playing the game. It's a fun game, and it's enjoyable. We're going to try to win next year. We're going to try to get back in the playoffs, and we're going to try to win a Super Bowl.
"If you don't, OK. If you do, OK. Then you're really a great player. If you don't, you're just a solid, good player, and I'll have to deal with that, not you guys. That's just part of the job.
"I've had a lot worse things happen to me than a loss in a sporting event, that's for sure. If this is the worst thing that ever happens to me, then I'll have lived a pretty good life."
In other words, folks, it's just a game, not life or death, and he's right. It's a mature, grown-up philosophy, an attempt to try to put it all back into some semblance of proper perspective.
Only one problem. As much as I agree with Tony Boy's candor and admire his willingness to state his life philosophy out loud, I seriously doubt that Cowboys fans were looking for rational perspective from their quarterback at that point.
They wanted heartbreak. They wanted pathos. They wanted their quarterback to stand there and tell them how bad he felt, how he would do anything in the world to change things if he could.
While I suspect that Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman both share Romo's overall philosophy on life and games, I don't think any of us ever heard either of them shrug and say after a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking loss, "Hey, too bad, but the sun will come up tomorrow."
For most Cowboys fans, the sun won't come up again for many, many months.
They want their quarterback to not just understand their despair, but to share in it, not stand there with that smug, I-get-it-and-you-don't half-smile, in that goofy-looking hat and tell them that things aren't really so bad after all and that they could be a whole lot worse.
The season just ended in ignominy and disgrace, for crying out loud. Act like it. Don't stand there offering homilies and life lessons, as sincere as they may be. For most Cowboys fans, it was the worst day of a truly horrible year.
"I feel like I'm going to throw up," one of those diehard fans from Washington state told me by long distance an hour or two after the game had ended.
"Things could be worse, son," I replied. "At this very moment, Jerry could be telling everyone that he intends to keep Wade Phillips as head coach."
How precognitive was that?
The sad story is that Romo has regressed, not gotten better, in the last year. Some of it was due to injuries, of course. But a lot of it is that he just doesn't seem to be learning from his mistakes. That's what scared Bill Parcells when he was here.
Parcells kept warning us -- media and fans -- not to anoint Romo yet; that he still had much to learn, especially in the area of judgment and protecting the Football. That obviously hasn't changed.
But Romo also, at some point, needs to begin understanding that perception matters a great deal when you're the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys . Letting fans know that you're mature enough to take the bad with the good may be honest, but it doesn't make them feel any better because many of them aren't feeling that way.
On the night of Phillips' introduction at Valley Ranch two years ago, while touring the Cowboys' locker room with owner Jerry Jones, the new head coach made an exaggerated show of kissing his fingers, then planting them on the nametag above Romo's locker.
It was Wade's annoying way of also planting a kiss on Jerry's you-know-what, a habit that's been hard for him to break but has apparently assured his ability to keep his job.
Romo was 10 starts into his NFL career then, the next young savior-quarterback in a long line of Cowboys quarterbacks.
Nobody was planting kisses on Romo's locker this year. Instead, he suffered through the most adversity he's faced as the Cowboys' quarterback, both on the field and inside his own locker room.
How he handles that adversity -- and ultimately learns from it -- will determine whether he becomes the quarterback most of us believe he can be.
His first step, both on the field and off, is to stop being his own worst enemy.
Jim Reeves, 817-390-7760
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