Most important, Irvin was a Hall of Fame hoochie magnet. “I was Mike’s right-hand man when it came to picking up the women,” says Anthony Montoya, a team employee who ran errands for Irvin and several other players. “We’d have a practice and then we’d go straight to the titty bar—the limo driver, Michael, and myself. Mike would pick out who he wanted and then tell me what time to come back and pick him up. Happened hundreds of times.” Though he was “happily” (in his words) married to Sandy, a former cosmetologist and Miami Dolphins cheerleader whom he had met on a McDonald’s line while at the University of Miami, Irvin never thought twice about slipping off the ol’ wedding band and hitting the clubs. It was who he was; what he did. “There was a lot of I, I, I, me, me, me,” Sandy said. “Because he was The Man. Just because of how easy it came—the women, the drugs—it was available wherever they turned.”
Irvin took great pleasure in removing his clothes, standing before a mirror, and saying “How can I allow only one woman to have a body this good?” or parading nude before rookies and lecturing, “This is the body you will aspire to have. This is the body you will aspire to achieve. You will not achieve it, but this is what you will strive to achieve.” Boasting a Magic Johnson smile and the uncanny ability to make anyone feel important, Irvin bedded all whom he coveted. “Man, Mike was something,” says one Cowboy teammate. “He was incredibly cocky. Before a game he’d have the people from Versace enter the locker room and measure him for a suit. He wanted to pick a feather from some exotic animal and put it in his derby hat. He wanted crocodile shoes with the tongue raised. Mostly, it was the women. Mike literally had a swarm of women at his beck and call in every NFL city. And I’m not talking about eights or nines. These girls were twelves.”
For younger Cowboys like Gant, Holmes, Harper, and Erik Williams, Irvin was a god. He would take them out, buy them dinner, point to a girl at the bar, and say, “I’m gonna give her to you.” Moments later Irvin would be whispering in her ear, one hand cupping his mouth, the other placed gently on her thigh. He’d eventually nod toward an awaiting teammate and—BAM!—game over. “Mike got more Cowboys laid than touchdown catches,” says one reporter who covered the team. “It was his present to teammates.”
“Truthfully, I never drank in high school or college, never even cursed in high school or college,” says Gant, who was raised in tiny Lakeland, Florida. “So when I got to Dallas and met guys like Mike it was ‘Whoooooooooosh! ’ Women? Drinking? Parties? Everything for free? I’ll take it all!”
Irvin would load young teammates up on shots and mixed drinks until they were throwing up in an alley. They’d report to practice the next morning with bloodshot eyes, dizzy minds, and a greenish tint to their skin. “What the fuck!” Irvin would yell so all could hear. “Pussy can’t handle a little water?”
Amazingly, even players like Troy Aikman and Jay Novacek, white country-and-western lovers with all the sparkle of Tulsa parking meters, considered Irvin an exemplary teammate. For one thing, he might have stayed out until 4 A.M., but come 8:30, Irvin was in the weight room, outlifting half the offensive line. “His drive and determination was second to none,” says Tim Daniel, a Dallas receiver. “Sometimes you see somebody and say, ‘That guy’s super-fast’ or ‘That guy’s super-strong,’ and it explains everything. But Mike wasn’t super-fast, and his strength came from working out. He was just the one who wanted it worse than anyone else in the league.”
These were the Cowboys of ’92—loose but intense, wild but dedicated, unproven but convinced the Vince Lombardi Trophy was theirs for the taking.
That confidence soared on Thursday, September 3, when—just four days before the Monday night opener against the Redskins—Irvin agreed to a two-year, $2.75 million contract to rejoin the Cowboys. When Stepnoski signed shortly thereafter, the Cowboys were whole again. But were they as good as advertised? One week earlier Sports Illustrated picked Dallas to win the Super Bowl. When Johnson saw the magazine, he neither smiled nor frowned. What had SI said that he didn’t already believe? Damn right the Cowboys would win the Super Bowl.
Despite reigning as defending Super Bowl champions, Washington came to Dallas in less-than-jovial spirits. They were furious that the NFL’s story du jour was not the possibility of a Redskin repeat, but rather the up-and-coming Cowboys. Having been burned repeatedly in his last matchup against Irvin, cornerback Darrell Green summed up his teammates’ agitations, guaranteeing that “somebody is going to pay.”
The Redskins paid dearly.
Six hours before game time, Emmitt Smith snuck into an empty Cowboys locker room, opened up his duffel bag, and placed $7,500 Rolexes in the locker of every offensive lineman. On the back of the jewelry was an inscription: THANKS FOR THE 1,563 RUSHING YARDS: NFL RUSHING TITLE. EMMITT SMITH. “Talk about a way to start the season,” says Alan Veingrad, an offensive tackle. “I won’t speak for the other guys, but I was pumped.”
On Washington’s opening offensive play, nine Cowboys stormed Redskin quarterback Mark Rypien, who pedaled backward before falling beneath the weight of linebacker Vinson Smith. Of the two thousand or so plays that take place in a typical NFL season, 98 percent are immediately forgotten. This one wasn’t. With a singular rampage through Washington’s vaunted offensive line, Johnson had issued an unambiguous statement to the rest of the league: Fear us—we’re coming.
As Vinson Smith rose from atop Rypien’s battered body, a new sound overtook Texas Stadium. During Landry’s best days, the place could get loud. But there was always a certain respect-thy-neighbor restraint. This was different. These Cowboy fans—now loyal to the Jones-Johnson way—were wild boars in search of prey. Their roars were of the throaty, blood-in-the-esophagus ilk.
The game was never close. On the second play, Redskins running back Earnest Byner was thrown for a 3-yard loss. On third down, Charles Haley charged past tackle Jim Lachey and forced Rypien into a rushed incompletion. On fourth down, Ike Holt blocked Kelly Goodburn’s punt for a safety.
The ensuing noise was deafening—a fleet of Amtraks meets Frampton Comes Alive! With Emmitt Smith rushing for 140 yards and Irvin catching 5 passes for 89 yards, the Cowboys rolled to a 23–10 triumph. Here was a landmark win for the new-era Cowboys, proof that they could stare down the antagonists from Washington and not flinch. As the season progressed, players would look back at this game as a turning point. No longer would the Cowboys be bullied. “I just remember Jimmy having this fire in his eyes,” says Clayton Holmes, the rookie defensive back. “He looked at me and I knew, ‘Whoa. We’re not losing.’”
Though he ended the game with a modest 216 passing yards, Aikman had officially arrived. With a ferocious Washington defensive line blitzing frequently, Dallas’s quarterback hung in the pocket until the last possible second while firing one pinpoint bullet after another. Having long boasted one of the league’s most powerful cannons, Aikman was now armed with something even more vital than physical gifts—his coach’s confidence. By season’s end he would rank near the top on the league’s leaderboards with 3,445 passing yards and 23 touchdowns.
“Troy,” said a giddy Johnson, “is coming of age.”
While the city of Dallas celebrated one of the biggest wins of the post–Landry Era, the two men who had facilitated the turnaround were beginning to drift apart.
Wait. Hold on. Perhaps this is overly dramatic. After all, some would say the wedge between owner and coach first came to be on February 25, 1989—the day Jerry Jones announced he had purchased the Dallas Cowboys. They were never as close as it seemed, of course, but there was a mutual need. Jerry Jones needed Jimmy Johnson to win football games. Jimmy Johnson needed Jerry Jones to purchase the chess pieces.
But until 1992—until success was not a hypothetical, but an inevitability—the egos of two men with grandeur in their horoscopes coexisted well. Yes, the coach was exasperated by the owner’s buffoonery—his desire to drag celebrities into the locker room after games; his tendency to name-drop and brag of a gridiro
n knowledge that, quite simply, didn’t exist. And yes, the owner wondered aloud why his coach was so guarded; so secretive; so damn stubborn. Why he refused to let the man paying the bills into his inner circle? Dammit, Jones thought, I own this team, not Jimmy. But again, before 1992 everything was under control.
And then, during the ’92 preseason, it started. The I Syndrome.
Where once there was “We” in the Cowboy-themed sentences of Jones and Johnson, now—suddenly—it was all “I.” When the Cowboys traded for Haley, Johnson intoned, “I thought Charles could bring a lot to the table.” When the Redskins were battered and bruised, Jones bragged, “The way I built this team…” The two not only noticed each other’s linguistic transformations, but raised the ante with comical regularity. There might be no I in T-E-A-M, but there was plenty of it in J-O-N-E-S and J-O-H-N-S-O-N.
Though Jones was often irritated by Johnson’s need for control, it was the coach who fumed—and rightfully so. Why was it that whenever the media wrote about Dallas’s rejuvenation, it was always HOW THE JJ TWINS TURNED AROUND THE COWBOYS (Newsday, July 14, 1991) and JONES, JOHNSON REVIVE COWBOYS FAST (Washington Times, September 6, 1991)? When it came to seeking out oil, Jones’s accomplishments could not be denied. When it came to football, however, Jones was a dolt. Sure, Jones could watch a Herman Moore and understand why the Detroit wide receiver was a star. But in terms of the nitty-gritty—in deciding whether a Division II nose tackle could transition to NFL linebacker or whether an opposing team was disguising its blitz package—he was no more insightful than the schlub at home in his Barcalounger.
When Bob Oates of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Jones “makes the calls in the Cowboys front office while Johnson replaces Landry on the practice field,” he was eating out of the owner’s hands. Because he played collegiately, and because he had paid $150 million to purchase a team, Jones considered himself Johnson’s football equal. He took credit for moves in which his sole contribution was an official sign-off. Jones bragged about the 1990 trading of Steve Walsh to New Orleans, even though Johnson had brokered the deal. He talked about how he ironed out the Haley blockbuster, when it was Johnson and the team’s advance scouts who did 99.9 percent of the grunt work. And for Christ’s sake, how many times did Johnson have to hear about Jones’s draft-day genius? Were it up to the coach, Jones would spend the two days of the NFL Draft relaxing on a beach in Bermuda or climbing Mt. Washington or…something. Don’t call us, Jerry. We’ll call you.
Instead, Jones had treated the most recent draft as if he were planning his own bar mitzvah. Having invited ESPN’s cameras into the team’s “war room,” Jones surrounded himself with friends, family members, and associates—all to make him appear presidential. Inside the room were Jones’s two sons, his business partner, his treasurer, his marketing director, and a gaggle of corporate sponsors.
“I can’t control that,” an exasperated Johnson told writer Skip Bayless. So, ever the brawler, Johnson invited his own entourage. While most teams had, oh, six or seven men in their draft bunkers, the Cowboys’ room contained nearly forty.
More than anything, Johnson blamed Jones—whom he considered to be excessively tightfisted—for unnecessary training camp holdouts. He found Jones’s rip-the-agent-to-the-press tactic during the Emmitt Smith negotiations of 1990 to be juvenile. This year was even worse. During Irvin’s holdout Jones refused to offer the receiver more than $700,000 per year—and it was baffling. Hadn’t Irvin just caught 93 passes for 1,523 yards? Hadn’t he emerged as the team’s leader and spark plug?
So, as the Cowboys prepared to travel to New York for a Week 2 meeting with the Giants, Johnson upped his efforts to shut Jones out. To players, Johnson complained their owner’s meddling was damaging morale. To the scouts and coaching staff, Johnson moaned that, because of the owner, they were all underpaid. “Jimmy kept his coaches and players as far away from Jerry as he possibly could,” says one team official. “It was sad, because Jerry meant well and wanted to help in any way he could. But in Jimmy’s mind it was his team, not Jerry’s.”
The most impressive attribute of the ’92 Cowboys? None of it mattered. Contract holdouts, coach-owner disputes, Haley’s penile Olympiads, late-night clubbing with Michael Irvin and twelve strippers—distractions came, distractions went. Dallas stormed into Giants Stadium and, before New York coach Ray Handley could blink, attacked the hosts with unrivaled ferocity. Dallas drove 72 yards on its first possession to build a 7–0 advantage, then followed with a blocked punt by linebacker Robert Jones. When Cowboy defensive back Robert Williams rovered the ball in the end zone, Dallas was up 14–0—and the rout was on. By the end of the second quarter the score was 20–0, and New York had yet to achieve a first down. At halftime the scoreboard read 27–0.
As they entered the locker room, Dallas players behaved as if they were planning a week at Club Med. Under Johnson’s hypercompetitive guidance, rarely was any lead big enough. But here they were, up big and already thinking of the week ahead.
Uh-oh.
When Aikman hit Irvin with a 27-yard touchdown pass early in the third quarter, the score was 34–0 and the stadium broke out into a chant of “Ray Must Go!” (Having replaced Bill Parcells, the charisma-deprived Handley was reviled in New York.) The Cowboys’ defense came out relaxed, and New York—unburdened by the expectations of victory—pounced. Quarterback Phil Simms led his team to consecutive touchdown drives of 80, 80, 62, and 55 yards, and a once-mute Giants Stadium crowd turned wild. In the history of the NFL, no team had ever overcome a 34–0 deficit. Now here were the Giants, down 34–28 late in the fourth quarter. Up in the coaches’ box, defensive coordinator Dave Wannstedt was losing his cool. At one point, with New York facing a second-and-7 at the Dallas 21-yard line, he looked at the field and screamed into his headset, “Who’s got the tight end?”
Again—“Who’s got the tight end?”
Nobody answered. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Wannstedt yelled. “Nobody’s got the tight end.”
Moments later, Simms found receiver Ed McCaffrey for a 19-yard gain.
In the end, Dallas held on—barely. With 3:42 left in the game, the Giants had the ball on their own 19-yard line. Simms coolly jogged onto the field, a wave of noise drowning out his play calls. Panic reigned along the Dallas sideline. What if we lose this game? How will we ever recover? On first down, Haley charged through the line, forcing Simms to toss an incomplete pass. On second down, Simms completed a pass for 1 yard. On third down, another completion, this one for no gain. New York punted. Wannstedt praised Jesus. Dallas hung on.
Afterward, Tony Wise, the offensive line coach, put the afternoon in perspective: “We’ve got a lot of young guys,” he said, “with shit stains on their underwear.”
Ghosts are unpredictable. According to mediums, they arrive when they want and haunt as they please. Throughout history there have been millions of sightings, at venues ranging from the White House to the Kremlin to a Toys “R” Us in Sunnyvale, California.
On October 5, 1992, a specter would appear before the most unlikely of places—the Dallas Cowboys defensive.
Unlike your clichéd, run-of-the-mill spirit, cloaked in either invisibility or a king-sized sheet, this specter wore a helmet, shoulder pads, and the white-and-green home uniform of the Philadelphia Eagles.
His name was Herschel Walker.
In the three years since Dallas had hoodwinked the Minnesota Vikings, Walker had become an NFL cautionary tale. He was Exhibit A in the no-single-player-is-worth-all-those-picks rule of thumb to franchise building. When a team talked about swinging a trade, someone inevitably would note, “We don’t want to end up with a Herschel.” Ha, ha, ha.
It was all fun and games for everyone but Walker, who had gone from the featured back on America’s Team to a joke. “He’s a con artist,” one NFC personnel director told Sports Illustrated. “Nobody has made more money and done less.” Following a 1991 season in which Walker ran for just 825 yards, the Vikings exhausted every effort t
o trade him. Only the Eagles showed any interest. They signed him as a free agent and found themselves with an angry, motivated thirty-year-old. “People have questioned my heart,” he said early in the season. “Go ahead and get in the ring with me. I’ll tear your head off.”
Walker spoke in general terms, but his target easily could have been the Cowboys. Following the victories over Washington and New York, Johnson’s team beat up on the Phoenix Cardinals, 31–20, to post its first 3–0 start in nine years. After a bye in Week 4, Dallas traveled to Philadelphia for a Monday night dance with the Eagles and their new tailback.
Though coach Buddy Ryan had been replaced by the mellow Rich Kotite, and All-Pro nose tackle Jerome Brown had died in a car accident, Philly appeared as physical as ever. Quarterback Randall Cunningham was healthy for the first time in months, and Walker was pounding opposing tacklers. In anticipation of the Cowboy game, the Philadelphia Daily News ran a twenty-page pullout section on the matchup. WIP sports radio began its pregame show fifteen hours before kickoff. Tickets were being scalped for $225 a pop. This was big.
An hour or so before the game, Jimmy Johnson strolled to the Eagles’ side of the field to seek out Walker. Though the Cowboys coach was never a fan of his former halfback, he’d always had respect for the man. Walker was, after all, a kind and decent soul, hard to root against in even the most heated of rivalries. “I’m glad to see you doing so well,” Johnson told Walker. “You deserve the success.”
If Johnson was trying to soften Walker up, it didn’t work. In what surely goes down as one of the most gratifying days of his life, the Eagles running back scored on second-half touchdown runs of 9 and 16 yards in a resounding 31–7 victory. Long ripped for possessing the dexterity of a boot, his first score—the 9-yard bolt out of the I-formation—was a thing of beauty. Walker took the handoff from Cunningham, broke Ken Norton’s tackle in the backfield, shifted from left foot to right, and followed a block into the end zone.
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