*pictured above is the latest x-ray of Tony Romo’s spine.

Once upon a time there was a Man who seemed to have it all. He had played football in college and won a national championship. He made a fortune in the oil bidness. He took that money and bought himself America’s Team, then fired a beloved head coach, who probably did need to be put out to pasture, although perhaps not so brutally as The Man did it. He hired a coach who put together a team that won three, (3!), Super Bowls in four years, and would have won 4 in a row if the goddamn refs had called pass interference on Deion Sanders, but that’s another horror story.

The Man even borrowed money from the Teamsters, twice, lost it, and somehow didn’t get killed!

The Man’s life was truly blessed, except for one thing.

He was fucking crazy.

As a result of his insanity The Man did things like fire beloved coaches with no ceremony. He drove off the successful coach who brought him three (3!) Super Bowls, (you can just fuck right off with the idea that Barry Goddamn Switzer did anything but stand on the sidelines for that third one), because he couldn’t share credit. He thought Quincy Carter was a legitimate NFL quarterback and that this guy was a legitimate NFL back-up quarterback.

The gods punished The Man for his insanity, cursing him to suffer for more than 20 years in the wilderness that is those NFL teams with no trophies. Even worse, the gods gave him a Kid With A Golden Arm

a man who brought him everything The Man wanted, assuming all that The Man wanted over the past 13 years was one (!) tainted play-off victory, a bunch of extraordinarily poorly times turnovers and two (2!) broken backs.

The Man was sad. But he was also still crazy and he just knew, KNEW, that his gottdam star, the kid with the golden arm, would get him another one of those shiny trophies that The Man loved so much.

But The Man also had a Son. And that Son had a profile picture that was apparently so large that even smushing it couldn’t get it to post, and so the author gave up and moved on to what was important here, and what was important was that the Son wasn’t crazy, (at least not yet; that gene pool ain’t going away), and was big enough to keep his father from drafting Johnny Manziel and smart enough to hire people who knew that no matter how good your quarterback was you still needed an offensive line to keep him upright, even if they weren’t glamorous.

And so the Son started to assert himself and lo, America’s Team started to get good again. And they started to win more than they lost, except in the play-offs, and The Man’s Goddamn Star With The Golden Arm was a big part of that, especially the losing in the play-offs part. And in 2014 The Man saw his team win a play-off game for the first time in a decade and that victory wasn’t at all tainted by the referees missing three penalties on one play, any one of which would have meant that his team would lose, only to lose the next week on one of the worst calls ever, because that was a catch, and to make matters worse The Man’s Kid With The Golden Arm threw that pass that Bryant caught.

But The Man knew that his star, his Boy With The Golden Arm, would win him a Super Bowl the next year, because they were really that good. But then the next season started and the best receiver they had broke his foot in the first game and then the Kid With The Golden Arm turned out to have a collarbone made out of balsa and that was pretty much it for the season.

After the season the man’s son got in his ear and when it came time to draft new players they took a RB in the first round, which was probably the man’s idea because let’s face it, even though it worked out it was pretty nuts, but in the 4th round the son took over and drafted another QB, Dak!

And no one thought much of it at that time, figuring that Dak would learn the game behind The Man With The Golden Arm, but then his spine turned out to also be made of balsa wood, (or maybe it was regular bone and just couldn’t handle the weight of all that gold in the arm), and he broke it 40 minutes into a fucking preseason game and once again, The Man was sad.

But then the real season started and it turned out that Dak was pretty damn good. And more importantly then Dak being good, that kid they took at RB was really fucking good, at least until that domestic violence thing comes back to bite him in the ass, and the offensive line was again healthy and beating the snot out of people and, for reasons no one fully understood, the defense wasn’t a sieve and the secondary was actually playing like the understood that you’re not supposed to let people run past you like a New York subway turnstile and the Cowboys were 5-1 in a surprisingly not-shitty NFC East and things looked good. And The Man should have been happy but instead he was still sad.

The Man was sad because all of this success was coming from the new guy, the guy that took the place of his gottdam brittle star. And that guy didn’t have a golden arm, he had a brown arm and if he kept winning then The Man knew that he wasn’t going to get the credit that he, The Man, deserved, he’d at most get 3/5 of the credit, and he just couldn’t stand for that.

So one night The Man got drunk(er than usual) and made some bad decisions , some really bad decisions and his wife shot him in the face with a plastic bullet, (just for the irony because of his plastic face you see) and The Man died and the Son breathed a sigh of relief because he didn’t have to hear anymore shit about the gottdam star and how they needed to get him back in and take Dak out for the good of the family, the team and goddammit ‘MURIKA!

The next Monday was Halloween, and the Son, after spending an evening doling out Tootise Rolls, Tagalongs, Root Beer suckers and other discount candies to the neighborhood urchins who promptly and justifiably egged the Christ out of his house, settled in with a good scotch and stared into the fire, contemplating the many shiny trophies Dak would bring him, and thinking that maybe he should have some ham.

Maybe it was the scotch, or the headache he was getting from the constant pounding of eggs against his house, but the Son thought he heard, very faintly, a voice from the basement. It was weak and far off, (for the Son’s house was very big), but it sounded like “I want my golden arm.” The Son giggled to himself at the lunacy of such thoughts and took another swig of scotch. He picked up the house phone to tell Jeeves to release the hounds on the urchins egging his house but instead of a dial tone the voice was on the line and it clearly wasn’t his imagination anymore and the voice was louder. “I want my golden arm!” it said, and then beep-boop-beeped the phone while trying to hang up and the son knew that The Man was back, because The Man could never learn how to use the fucking phone, although that had come in handy that time that the Son had distracted him with a Fisher-Price phone that he told The Man was a direct line to the commissioner during one of the drafts and that’s why Johnny Manziel went to Cleveland. Suddenly the Son wasn’t all that terrified, and he giggled while remembering The Man yelling “Manziel MANZIEL!!!” over and over again into a plastic phone. Oh he and the commissioner had had a good laugh over that one at the wake.

The Son poured himself another scotch and settled back into his chair. He leaned over to poke at the fire and suddenly the voice was right outside his door and it was no longer weak. “I WANT MY GOLDEN ARM!!! WHO HAS MY GOLDEN ARM!?” it screeched. There was a tremendous boom against the door; wood splintered and while the lock held it only just did.

The Son, terrified, reached for his AR-15, (because our story takes place in Texas and you’re constitutionally not allowed to tell a ghost story in Texas that doesn’t involve someone at least grabbing an AR-15). “Back off Dad” hollered the Son, “I’m locked and loaded”, (you’ll recall all that scotch earlier), “and I have a God given right to stand my ground and empty this automatic weapon right into your incorporeal essence! Also it makes no sense to bring Romo back when we’re 5-1 with a fully meshing offense revolving around Dak and Zeke! And Bryant’s not even playing yet!”

There was brief pause. The voice gave a chuckle, albeit the sort of evil chuckle that wasthe last thing at least five co-eds heard before Craig James…well, you know. The voice started again, louder, more confident and, (and somehow this was the most terrifying), satisfied. “I want my Golden Arm, and I know YOU’VE GOT IT!!!!” The door boomed again, more wood splintered and the lock gave way. The Son had a brief glimpse of teeth, teeth that had clearly been bleached to hell and back, and then the power cut out as one of the legitimate-candy deprived urchins hit the power line connection to the house with a brick.

The next day the Son was nowhere to be found. The door was shattered, the wall across from the door filled with AR-15 bullets, the chair overturned. For some reason a Fisher-Price phone had replaced the antique phone he’d kept on his desk.

Someone had drank all the scotch.

The team, left to its own devices, kept Dak at quarterback and put the Kid With The Golden Arm on the bench. Dak led the team to the Super Bowl, where he sustained a high ankle sprain in the 1st quarter. The Kid With The Golden Arm came in and led the team to a 32-14 win over some team from Buffalo. As The Kid raised the Lombardi trophy high, of course with his Golden Arm, the power in the stadium cut out quicker than Ray Lewis can burn a white suit, and a disembodied voice rang through the stadium:

YEEEEEHAWWWWWWWWWW, I AM FUCKING CRAZEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

If you’d like to know more about the history of ‘The Golden Arm’ tale, you can start here.