Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  Standing on the sideline for the rest of the year, Aikman watched as freshman Jamelle Holieway—a swift wishbone maestro—led Oklahoma to an 11–1–0 record and the national title. Aikman was witness to the future of Oklahoma football, and it didn’t involve him.

  When the season ended Aikman told Switzer that he had decided to transfer. Though he assumed his coach would be angry, Switzer was emphatically supportive. “I hated it, but I looked at it more from a father’s standpoint, trying to do what’s right for the player,” Switzer says. “He told me the schools he was interested in [UCLA, Arizona State, Iowa, and Miami], and I called the coaches as soon as I could.” It wasn’t an easy sell.

  When Switzer spoke with UCLA coach Terry Donahue and detected the all-too-common reluctance to accept a transfer, he went on the offensive. “This kid is different,” Switzer said. “He will be a first-round draft choice, and he needs to be in your offense.”

  Aikman wound up enrolling at UCLA, where he sat out the required year before emerging as one of the nation’s most explosive quarterbacks. In his two seasons as a starter for the Bruins, Aikman compiled 41 touchdown passes and only 17 interceptions. Donahue insisted on short, precise, 10-to-15-yard outs, and Aikman delivered. As a senior he won the Davey O’Brien Award as the nation’s top quarterback, a first for UCLA. “His talent was otherworldly,” says Jerry Rhome, an offensive assistant with the Cowboys. “Tom Landry, Gil Brandt, and I worked him out at UCLA, and it was the greatest workout I’ve ever seen. He was as smooth as glass, and as strong as a bear. It was just, ‘Wow!’”

  Chapter 6

  WOULD THE MOTHER WHO LEFT HER 11 KIDS AT TEXAS STADIUM PLEASE COME AND GET THEM!

  Grown men crying.

  —Jerry Fowler, Cowboys assistant equipment manager, on his memory of the ’89 season

  THE OPTIMISM WAS palpable.

  The mood was euphoric.

  The Dallas Cowboys were back.

  Emphasize that—the Dallas Cowboys were BACK!

  Back from 3–13. Back from a tumultuous offseason. Back from the hell of discarding Tom Landry.

  Back.

  For the first time in years, there was a genuine belief the Cowboys could compete in the National Football League. Their new coach brought with him an attitude; a swagger; a need for victory. Fourteen new players appeared on the roster. Bitter has-beens were shown the door. Aikman and Walsh arrived with stellar pedigrees. Herschel Walker was one of the game’s best runners. Dallas had gone 3–1 in the preseason, highlighting speed and power in one convincing display after another. “With each exhibition win we started to think we were pretty strong,” says Walsh. “We’d defy expectations.”

  FOOTBALL IS REBORN IN BIG D! screamed the headline from Mike Rabun’s United Press International story.

  Pfft!

  On September 10, 1989, the Cowboys trumpeted their rebirth by traveling to New Orleans and getting beaten. No, scratch that. Not beaten—stomped. Squashed. Humiliated in every sense of the word.

  Saints 28. Cowboys 0.

  “And,” says Dave Campo, the Dallas assistant, “it should have been worse.”

  Much worse.

  Before 66,977 fans, the Saints became the first of many teams to pummel Aikman, who threw for 180 yards while being sacked three times, intercepted twice, and pressured incessantly. “I taught Troy an important lesson,” recalls Tom Rafferty, the Cowboys’ veteran center. “When someone on your team yells, ‘Look out!’ you’d darn well better duck.”

  Just how horrific was Dallas? The Cowboys set a franchise record for fewest rushing yards in a game (20), and possessed the ball for less than fifteen total minutes. Trailing 7–0 early in the second quarter, Johnson blew his team’s only real scoring opportunity by attempting a fake field goal on fourth-and-9 from New Orleans’s 30-yard line. Holder Mike Saxon, who was supposed to pick up the ball and run for the yardage, was bottled up by the Saints’ defenders. His 4-yard pass to kicker Roger Ruzek was both feeble and ugly. “It did not work,” a humiliated Johnson said afterward. “Obviously.”

  When the game mercifully came to an end, a shell-shocked Johnson and his equally shell-shocked coaches retreated to the visitors’ locker room and sat silently. Of the thirteen members of the staff, only four were holdovers from the Landry Era. Most of the others had come from the University of Miami, where ass-whuppings were administered, not received. “That might be when I first realized that I had been fooling myself during the preseason,” says Johnson. “Truthfully, the teams I coached at Miami would have beaten my Cowboys.” Inside the subdued quarters, Johnson snapped himself out of the malaise to remind his players that the season was a long one; that half the league’s teams would lose their first game. But only the arrival of Jerry Jones lightened the mood. The new owner went locker to locker, shaking hands and offering reassurances. “We’re building something special,” he told defensive lineman Jim Jeffcoat. “It might take time, but it’ll be worth the wait. Just be patient.”

  Here was a different side to the new Cowboys owner, who, after an awful introductory press conference, dug himself an even deeper hole by firing one holdover employee after another, then insisting that the team’s vaunted cheerleaders dress more skimpily and behave more provocatively (following a near revolt by fourteen of the women, Jones backtracked). Beyond the blunders and buffoonery, however, was a disarming man who lavished first-class treatment upon his players. The Cowboys led the league in team-hosted shindigs, in golf outings, in lavish presents like golf clubs and expensive liquor. Jones placed suggestion boxes around Valley Ranch and rarely took criticism personally. “If you could get any of his detractors to spend five minutes with Jerry, he would have zero detractors,” says Mike Fisher, who covered the team for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Nobody talks about this stuff, but early on there was a Valley Ranch janitor who died while visiting Mexico. His family couldn’t get his body back to the U.S., so Jerry contacted the Mexican government and worked it out. Who does that?

  “Unfortunately,” says Fisher, “back then generosity didn’t guarantee wins.”

  Indeed.

  The true bottoming-out for the Cowboys may have come in Week 3, when a capacity crowd of 63,200 fans packed Texas Stadium for the new regime’s home debut. Traveling to Texas were the archrival Washington Redskins, a once-mighty opponent which, like Dallas, was off to an 0–2 start (the Cowboys had fallen to Atlanta in Week 2). “Our rivalry is certainly as big as it ever was,” Washington coach Joe Gibbs said before the game. “The only difference now is that we are both trying to get a win.” In his ten years as a college head coach, Johnson had faced his fair share of humiliation. But nothing would ever compare with what came next.

  To kick off the afternoon, Jones escorted actress Elizabeth Taylor to the center of the field and asked referee Pat Haggerty if the cinematic diva might call the coin toss. With a straight face, Haggerty announced, “Captains of Dallas meet the captains from Washington! Captains from Washington meet Liz Taylor and Jerry Jones!”

  Dexter Manley, the Redskins’ star lineman, glanced at the weathered thespian as if she were a piece of rotted ham. “I didn’t want to shake their hands,” he said later. “This is football, man, not Hollywood.”

  Jones’s self-aggrandizing stunt infuriated Johnson. He watched with horror from the sideline, wondering aloud whether he was employed by a professional football team or a variety show. It was hardly the last time he would feel this way. Before long, the sideline would morph into a parade of celebrities and corporate bigwigs, ranging from Bill Cosby to Prince Bandar bin Sultan to Florida governor Lawton Chiles to country singer Charlie Pride to the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

  If the coin toss was a comedy, the game was a horror film.

  Washington 30, Dallas 7.

  The Cowboys compiled a mere ten first downs and were out-gained by 183 yards. Receiver Art Monk, a Redskin since 1980, pivoted toward a pack of reporters after the game and said dryly: “I was not covered four times out there today. That’s
pretty unbelievable in the NFL.”

  Aikman was terrible, but, once again, so was the offensive line, which allowed four sacks and unyielding pressure. Walsh was inserted to start the fourth quarter, and he too was pummeled. The team’s only score came in the first quarter, when defensive end Jim Jeffcoat returned a fumble for a touchdown. “For the next three hours,” wrote David Casstevens in the Morning News, “Cowboys fans sat in unhappy, disapproving silence, like grandparents at a Sex Pistols concert.” As spectators glumly filed out of the stadium, several found flyers beneath their windshield wipers that read: WOULD THE MOTHER WHO LEFT HER 11 KIDS AT TEXAS STADIUM PLEASE COME AND GET THEM!

  There were two patterns the Cowboys fell into throughout the 1989 season, both as predictable as the city’s 5 P.M. rush-hour gridlock:

  A. Every Sunday, they would lose.

  B. Every Monday there would be between five and twenty new faces auditioning for jobs.

  With each defeat, Johnson and his staffers grew increasingly aware of the gaping talent holes tearing the season apart. The Cowboys were thin at nearly all positions. They lacked depth across the offensive line, speed in the secondary, and power at linebacker. Their receivers were slow and unathletic, their tight ends barely relevant. Hence, the team was on the lookout for anyone with a modicum of gridiron experience and an ounce of talent to fly to Valley Ranch for an audition.

  “It was sick,” says Dave Wannstedt, the defensive coordinator. “We’d sign a half-dozen players on a Monday, give them a playbook on Tuesday and have them play the following Sunday. You couldn’t put in a junior high school playbook in three days, and we were asking these guys to execute an NFL offense and defense.”

  The Cowboys were last in the league in every measurable statistic, but first in Who-the-hell-is-that-guys. Among the men who suited up for Dallas in 1989 were immortals like:

  Scott Ankrom, wide receiver, Tulsa. Ten games, no catches.

  Onzy Elam, linebacker, Tennessee State. One game, no tackles.

  Kevin Scott, running back, Stanford. Three games, two carries,-4 yards.

  Curtis Stewart, running back, Auburn. Two games, zero carries.

  “Everybody—absolutely everybody—was worried they were going to be cut,” says Steve Henrickson, a linebacker who lasted one month. “It was uncomfortable, but I think Jimmy liked that. Even Troy Aikman seemed nervous. You just never knew when your time was up.”

  The most unusual sign-and-cut story of the season began on the Monday before the Redskins game, when the Cowboys agreed to terms with Kevin Lilly, an ornery defensive end who had recently been cut by San Francisco.

  Upon arriving in Dallas, Lilly checked into his hotel. The following morning he walked to the parking lot and found the windows of his Nissan 300Z shattered and his T-top stolen. During his first practice, he learned to despise Johnson. “He was in Too Tall Jones’s face, Tom Rafferty’s face—yelling at these guys who were the epitome of pro ball,” says Lilly. “He was running the show like a high school program.”

  Lilly signed his contract on a Tuesday.

  Lilly practiced on Wednesday and Thursday.

  Lilly posed for the team picture on Friday.

  Lilly played against the Redskins on Sunday.

  Lilly was released on Monday.

  Despite auditioning every humanoid this side of David Whitehurst, John Oates, and Kitty Dukakis, the Cowboys failed to improve. They fell hard to the Giants in Week 4, losing both the game (by a 30–13 score) and Aikman, who suffered a broken index finger in his non-passing hand and would miss five weeks.

  If Johnson had left camp believing his team might compete, he was now a realist. The Cowboys of Onzy Elam, Scott Ankrom, and an eclectic assortment of here-today-gone-tomorrow nobodies were not good enough for the NFL. They would win three games, perhaps four, and go down as the laughingstocks of an otherwise awesome NFC East.

  So, the head coach decided—What the hell? Why not try something crazy?

  In modern American history, few sports figures have possessed the mythological aura of young Herschel Walker. At Johnson County High School in Wrightsville, Georgia, in the late ’70s, he was a 6-foot-1, 215-pound halfback with 4.2 speed and thighs the size of fire hydrants. While most boys were busy chasing girls, Walker spent his free time tying one end of a 15-foot steel cable to a mud-grip truck tire and the other end around his waist. He would proceed to run dozens of windsprints—20 yards, 40 yards, 60 yards. “He used to drag me over to the track on Sunday afternoon, our one day off, and we’d pull the tire until I couldn’t pull it no more,” said Milt Moorman, a boyhood friend. “But Herschel, he’d be pulling on it till it got slap dark.”

  There was nothing Walker couldn’t do. He was a straight-A student who ranked first in a graduating class of 108. As a high school senior he rushed for 3,167 yards and 45 touchdowns. In track and field he won three individual events at the Class A state championships (the 100-and 220-meter dashes and the shot put) and anchored the mile relay team to victory. So enormous was young Herschel that his mother had to purchase extra swaths of fabric to make his three-piece suits fit. Walker’s upper body, wrote Sports Illustrated’s Terry Todd, looked “rather like a dark brown, triangularly shaped nylon sack filled with just the right number of 16-pound shots.”

  After being recruited by more than a hundred colleges, Walker attended the University of Georgia, where his legend went national. In 1980 Walker set the NCAA freshman rushing record with 1,616 yards, leading the Bulldogs to an undefeated season and a national championship. “Herschel Walker!” wrote Jim Minter, editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Thank God that magnificent young man is not cutting plywood in Johnson County. Thank God for [Chief Justice] Earl Warren.”

  Two years later Walker wrapped up his collegiate legacy, winning the Heisman Trophy as a junior and deciding—against the wishes of every football fan in the state of Georgia—to turn professional at age twenty. He joined the New Jersey Generals of the fledgling United States Football League, where a $1.5 million contract awaited. Walker spent three seasons as the league’s dominant presence, rushing for 2,411 yards, a professional football record, in 1985. But it was here, in an oft-amateurish spring football venture that died after three years, that the first needles were thrust into the Walker balloon.

  Yes, Herschel Walker was built like Lou Ferrigno, ran like The Flash, and put up huge numbers. But he wasn’t really that, ahem, good.

  “When it came to strength and power, Herschel was your man,” says Mark Walen, a Cowboy defensive tackle. “But being a great athlete is about much more than strength and power. Herschel couldn’t dribble a basketball. I mean, he literally couldn’t bounce the ball twice in a row.”

  The USFL folded following its 1985 season, and Walker was assigned to the Cowboys, who had selected him on a whim in the fifth round of the most recent draft. He was immediately pitted against Tony Dorsett, the legendary tailback in his tenth season with the organization. Dorsett resented Walker from the get-go, especially when the Cowboys signed the newcomer to a five-year, $5 million deal. “You had two ball carriers,” says Timmy Newsome, a longtime Dallas running back, “neither willing to block for the other.” Dorsett, who had moaned about being underpaid for years, finally seemed justified in his complaint. Despite 10,832 career rushing yards and two Super Bowl appearances, he was making “only” $450,000. On the day after Walker’s introductory press conference, Dorsett held his own to gripe about a lack of respect from the organization. “That’s how pissed off Tony was,” says Bob Ackles, the team’s director of player personnel. “Tony’s pride was bruised.”

  Though Walker played well for the Cowboys, gaining 3,142 rushing yards from 1986 through ’88 and prompting Dorsett’s trade to Denver in 1988, he never quite fit in. His long-term goal was not the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but becoming an FBI agent. His interests ranged from bobsledding to karate to ballet—Walker studied dance in college, and in 1988 performed with the Fort Worth Ballet’s Maria Terezia Balogh.* W
alker was strange. Quirky. A word search puzzle addict. “My problem is I have never let people get to know me,” Walker said. “I have never said I was Superman. I don’t brag. I just answer questions.”

  Todd Fowler, a Cowboys running back who played against Walker in the USFL and roomed with him for three training camps in Dallas, recalls a warm, soft-spoken man who “probably still has the first dollar bill he ever earned.”

  Says Fowler, “Herschel only ate one meal a day. At breakfast and lunch he’d drink juice and stuff. After we’d get out of meetings, he and I would go to Carl’s Jr. He’d get a double burger and fries. That’s all he’d eat the entire day. Plus, he only slept four hours per night. You’d get up to piss at two A.M. and Herschel would be in the living room reading his Bible or doing push-ups or sit-ups.”

  To Johnson, Walker was an overhyped enigma who, despite being just twenty-seven, was on the downside of his career. In the humiliating opening loss to the Saints, Johnson ran Walker a grand total of ten times for 13 yards. When the Pro Bowler complained aloud about the lack of opportunity, Johnson fired back to the press. “Last year Herschel rushed for over fifteen hundred yards,” he said, “and Dallas won only three games.” Though Walker’s activity level increased the next few Sundays, neither side was happy.