Requiem for a heavyweight

In “Dallas’s” fifth-season episode “Acceptance,” Ray and Miss Ellie (Steve Kanaly, Barbara Bel Geddes) sit in the Southfork living room.

RAY: Some very peculiar things have been happening here at Southfork. I know Jock being gone has been on everybody’s mind. The whole family. Yet nobody seems to talk to you about him. And that’s not right.

ELLIE Ray, I don’t need to talk about Jock. And I’d rather not.

RAY: Miss Ellie, maybe you don’t need to talk about him, but I do. He’s been on my mind a lot lately. Almost all the time. I keep remembering things, like how I used to look up to him when I was a kid. How I idolized him. I goofed something up, though, and he’d chew me up one side and down the other. And I thought, how could somebody I idolized act like that? And now I know he was concerned about me. He was teaching me. He knew when to be firm and he knew when to be affectionate. He was all those things. Mostly, I guess I just thought he was almost perfect. And then I remember running into this guy in a bar, and he called Jock a land-grabbing crook.

ELLIE: If you’re trying to justify what Donna said, I don’t want to hear it.

RAY: Miss Ellie, I belted that guy right on the spot. As for Donna, I think you ought to know that she’s just about decided not to write her book.

ELLIE: Well, good.

RAY: The thing is, though, that guy in the bar, he may have had his reasons. I didn’t think so then. I thought of Jock as almost like a God. But he wasn’t. He was a man, just like anybody else. He had friends. He had lots of friends. But he had enemies, too. He was human, ambitious. He knew that the oil game was rough, hardball all the way. But he wanted what was best for his wife, and for his sons. And he did what he thought was right. He’d be the last man in the world who’d ever want us to put him on a pedestal. Miss Ellie, there’s never going to be another man like Jock. Not for me, not for you. He was my father, and your husband. But the truth is, until we start remembering him like he really was, we’re never going to be able to do justice to his memory.

Ellie rises and leaves.