Private Lives;

As a quarterback, Roger Staubach was a scrambler. As a CEO, he had to learn a whole new style.

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This is strange. "The Staubach Company," reads the motto in the brochure, "Where Real Success Is Earned." Right. But how else, if not by earning it, does a company become a real success?

Roger Staubach could tell you. That's Roger T. Staubach, former (1969-80) quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, one of the most resourceful field captains in the history of football. And, yes, one of the most successful. The Cowboys' all-time leading passer, he marshaled them four times to the Super Bowl (two times to victory) and set four Super Bowl records for himself: most touch-down passes (8), most yards passing (734), most attempts passing (98), and most completions (61).

With a career like that, he might as well have hit oil. What unearned success?

He won't tell you himself, not in so many words, but around the office of The Staubach Co. they talk about "the infamous Rolaids commercials." That is what chief financial officer Jim Leslie calls them, the advertisements that came out in 1981 when it seemed as if Roger Staubach was on every radio station and television channel in the country, spelling out relief, one idiotic letter at a time, for all those folks who suffered from gas.

That was easy success -- easy money at any rate.

Sports heroes are a bit like rich kids: They get to the tops of their heaps through inheritance. They don't really earn it; it came with the genes, a gift. They've got to take care of it, discipline it, grind it down to something useful. Otherwise, like a rich kid's capital, it is a wasting asset.An athlete's body is a wasting asset anyway -- but this only means that he or she is all the more tempted to cash in on its market value in the quickest, easiest ways that come alone. Like endorsing a cure for painful gaseous buildup in the digestive tract.

"Rog took a lot of ribbing on that one," says Leslie, a native Nebraskan who left Coopers & Lybrand in 1982 to join The Staubach Co. He may also have learned a lesson about earnings -- that it is folly to let Sunday's hero do the work for the weekday's businessman. At any rate, 1982 was the year that Rog got "real serious" about the business.

The business, founded with a partner in 1977, is commercial real estate, mostly the tenant-service end -- leasing and brokerage. And soon after Staubach got serious about it, revenues began climbing. In June 1983, they were $1.05 million. By the following June, they had more than doubled to $2.8 million. In June 1985, they had almost doubled again to $5.4 million. Profitability in 1984 was in excess of 20%; this year, says Leslie, it is still as strong. The business grew in personnel, too. The year of the Rolaids commercials, there were 20 people working at The Staubach Co.; today there are 120.

So that was a real success -- earned, too -- especially considering that real estate was hardly the quarterback's second great vocation. He had sort of wandered into it. In 1969, recently discharged from a tour of duty with the Navy in Vietnam, more recently recruited by the Dallas Cowboys, Staubach had been looking for something to do in the off-season. A friend of his happened to be in town -- the same man, in fact, who had recruited him for the Naval Academy -- and he suggested that Staubach sell insurance for Henry S. Miller Co.

"I wasn't really interested in selling insurance," says Staubach today, very plausibly. He doesn't look like a man who would be interested in selling insurance. He looks like a cowboy, not the football sort, the Marlboro: lean and leathery. "But they promised to send me to sales school, and since all I had from the Naval Academy" -- he means besides the Heisman Trophy and seven varsity letters -- "was an engineering degree, I figured it was a pretty good deal. So I went for it."

Sales school?

"Yeah, you know: where you learn to make appointments." He mimics a salesman on a cold call. "You can't see me at 2 o'clock, huh? Well, what about 2:45? No good? OK, let's say 4 o'clock. . . . No? Tomorrow at 7:30?" His perfectly weather-beaten face creases in an easy grin. "Sales school," he says.

Staubach sold a good deal of insurance, not liking it much, but grateful (now) for the experience. It introduced him to real estate, the main business of Henry S. Miller Co. "They didn't want an athlete selling real estate, for some reason," he recalls. "But I persuaded them to let me give it a try." Soon Staubach was chalking up new sorts of stats. "I remember the first building I ever sold. It was in 1971, an apartment building in Tyler, Tex., and after that I was always one of the top producers down there."

In 1977, he and an associate at Henry S. Miller, Robert Holloway Jr., broke away and set up their own business, The Holloway Staubach Corp. Dallas was growing fabulously by any measure: The population had increased by nearly 22,000 from 1977 to '80, and more than 23,000 new housing units were completed in 1977 and 1978. Real estate operators were making millions on the boom, especially on the glamour side of things -- development. In fact, The Staubach Co.'s offices are in an elegant blackglass box, part of a five-building office complex that Staubach and Holloway co-developed on the LBJ Freeway.

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