Remember that Smith Barney commercial in which John Houseman said, "We make money the old-fashioned way...we earn it"? Well, you've got to earn a title like America's Team, not just claim it. And then wear it with the old-fashioned respect it deserves.

Being a professional football player has always been something very specialto me. When I first began playing for the Green Bay Packers back in 1958, a lot of guys in the league chewed tobacco and, to tell you the truth, wern't very professional, either in appearance or attitude. As a matter of fact, professional football wasn't really all that professional then, either.

The first television contract back then was somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000 - it certainly wasn't a great deal more than that. But Vince Lombardi impressed upon us that we had to bring a degree of class, a degree of professionalism to the game. He would hold America's great corporations - IBM, General Motors, etc. - up as an example to us, telling us we had to preform like they did. And Packers tooka it upon themselves to represent pro football in a positive manner. So much so that, in the end, the great corporations were holding us up as an example - in preparation, commitment, and discipline.

I guess that's why I've always been sensitive to anything that detracts from what we tried to do in raising the image of the pro football player.

I have had occasion to be proud of several ex-NFLers - like Alex Karras and Merlin Olsen, who went to Hollywood and succeeded in a very different and difficult environment. They used intelligece and emotional mmaturity to compete and excel in the outside world. But I continue to be sensitive to the image of the professional football player, and to anything that undermines all the hard work of so many to overcome the image of our dumb jocks.

That's why I hate the Dallas Cowboys of today. After all those years of attempting to shed the "dumb jock" image, here they arek, down on the field acting like fools and reinforcing the image so many of us have tried so hard to change. All those years of working hard to remake our image destroyed in a few taunting seconds. And every time I see them dancing and prancing around, conducting themselves like idiots, I'm embarrassed for them - and for all my fellow football players.

The Cowboys of yesteryear - the Tom Landry Cowboys of Don Meredith, Bob Lilly, George Andrie, Lee Roy Jordan, Roger Staubach, Jethro Pugh, and Calvin Hill - were a wonderful group, one possessing quality and dignity. And as such, they represented the true virtues of the cowboy in our culture, the ones we became familiar with every time we saw John Wayne up there on the screen portraying one with his quiet, strong, honesty, his integrity, his pride, his selflessness and all the other attributes of the hardworking cowboy.

Today a few, a very few, of the current crop of Cowboys possess those same attributes - players like Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Jay Novacek, and Daryl Johnston. But, unfortunately, they are trapped in a situation they can't control and have to endure most of the rest of their teammates playing with an arrogant, egotistical "me-ism" that demeans the entire club and everyone who went before them. It's an attitude I can't stand. It's easy to see why a bunch of surly, strutting, swaggering players call themselves America's Team. But I can't understand anyone else doing it.

However, there is one team now and forever, that reflects America's virtues and is worthy of the title America's Team: the Green Bay Packers.

The Green Bay Packer team of today is a special group of players and great role models. There's Reggie White, a religious man and a great leader. There's Brett Favre, as pure and as decent a kid as you could find anywhere, unspoiled by success. And then there's Adam Timmerman, an articulate sweetheart of a kid, who, after hearing of a farmer in Iowa who had cancer and never had the opportunity to attend a ballgame, arranged to have the farmer come to Green Bay, got him two tickets and looked after him all weekend - even taking the farmer home for dinner. Adam didn't even know him, but he heard the guy was in trouble and having a tough time of it, so he stretched out his hand to help him.

These are the virtues America can identify with, the virtues of a real America's Team. And role models America can be proud of.

Compare these virtues with the virtues of the Dallas Cowboys. Charles Barkley said that "a lot of young athletes of today are great role models if kids want to grow up to be a drug dealer or pimp." Well, that's what I think of when I look at the Dallas Cowboys of today. There they are, stutting and swaggering around, giving off all the wrong signals for the kids of today.

This is not America's Team. This is more like America's children, trying to find out who they are, posturing and screaming and making idiots of themselves in front of the TV cameras. Every time I see them on TV, I don't know whether to root for the defense or root for the prosecution. No, this will never be America's Team. If this is, then woe is America.

America needs real heroes, not players who call Dial-a-Prayer and ask for their own messages. Or players like Erik Williams, who came down on the back of defensive limeman John Jurkovic's leg and ended his career in Green Bay in as lame a cheap shot as I've ever seen. I hate that. And I hate the Cowboys who play that way. That sort of stuff wouldn't play in Green Bay.