Game over.
Redskins: 20.
Cowboys: 17.
Jimmy Johnson: indignant.
As is ritual, after the game the Cowboys met for a few moments as a team, showered, spoke with the media, dressed, and bolted for the airport, where they boarded a chartered airplane for the return to Dallas.
Win or lose, the postgame flight is an opportunity for players and coaches to wind down, reflect, and begin the recovery process. After the requisite fifteen-minute keep-it-down-because-we’re-supposed-to-be-devastated silent time, men open up. They joke, laugh, play dominoes, play cards, talk smack, eat dinner.
Upon boarding, Johnson walked toward his seat near the front of the airplane and spotted the flight attendants preparing dinner. “Don’t give my guys anything to eat!” he roared. “I mean it! Nothing!” Johnson sat down and cracked open a Heineken. Then another Heineken. Then another. Unlike the teetotaling, God-fearing Tom Landry of Cowboy lore, Johnson’s off-the-field cravings encompassed the music of Barbra Streisand, violent movies, white shag carpet, and—most of all—cold beer.
When the plane reached cruising altitude, players quietly scattered about. Like most teams, the Cowboys sectioned their airplane. The front five rows belonged to the coaching staff and executives. Behind them sat a handful of broadcasters and media types. Finally, taking up the rest of the jet’s space were the Dallas players. Each row of the American Airlines jet had four seats. Every player claimed two seats to himself.
While gazing out the window, Robert Jones felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Charles Haley. “Do me a favor,” Haley said. “Let me sit here so I can play cards with these guys.” Haley nodded toward the nearby trio of Thomas Everett, Tony Tolbert, and Kevin Smith, the team’s regular Tonk players. “So I get up, and I’m just sort of leaning on my seat, watching the guys play,” says Jones. “What else did I have to do?”
Jones stood facing the rear, unaware as to why the airplane suddenly went silent. When he turned his head, he understood. There was Jimmy Johnson, eyes the color of maraschino cherries, breathing down his neck. “I didn’t think he was setting up to jump me, because I’m quiet, I’m not causing a scene—I’m just standing there looking,” says Jones. “So when I saw him, I stood straight up so he could get by. I figured he was going to the bathroom or walking the plane or something.” Jones pressed his body toward his seat to make room for Johnson to pass. He held the position for two seconds…three seconds…four seconds…five seconds. Nothing.
Johnson looked into Jones’s eyes and yelled, “Where’s your fucking seat?”
Quiet by nature, the linebacker stammered, “Uh, Charles had to use it because they were playing cards.”
“You know what?” said Johnson. “You’re the weakest fucking middle linebacker I’ve ever come across. You play an entire game at middle linebacker and you make one fucking tackle? Find your damn seat!”
Jones paused.
“Find your goddamned seat,” Johnson said, “before you don’t have a fuckin’ job.”
Gulp.
Jones stumbled around before falling into Haley’s lap. From three rows up, Frank Cornish, the backup center, laughed softly. Johnson’s head spun like an owl tracking a vole. “Stop smiling!” he hollered.
“Coach,” said Cornish, “I’m not smiling. Nothing’s funny.”
Johnson shuffled back to the front of the plane, slurring angrily. As the players whispered, “What an asshole” and “What’s up his ass?” he reappeared. Cornish, who had stood to use the bathroom, saw Johnson scowling at him again. “Coach,” he said, “we’re all disappointed that we lost. Nobody is taking it for granted.”
Johnson’s lower lip quivered. “Frank, are you challenging me?” he said. “No,” responded Cornish. “Not at all.”
The center quickly exited, stage left, into the bathroom.
A former sixth-round draft choice, Cornish was a solid, dependable, eminently disposable reserve. If Johnson felt the itch, he would cut him in a second. “I never liked that about Jimmy,” says Robert Jones. “Think about the guys I was with when he jumped on me—Charles Haley was a star, Thomas Everett was the starting safety, Kevin Smith was a shutdown corner, Tony Tolbert was a great defensive end. He chose me and he chose Frank because we were guys he could pick on and not worry about. He never messed with his bread-and-butter guys, because he was a bully. Bullies only pick on the guys they can mess with.”
In a final dose of brutality, Johnson—again retreating to the front—walked past fullback Tommie Agee, who was sitting on the armrest of his seat because Emmitt Smith was cramping and needed to stretch his legs. “Tommie,” he said, “what are you doing out of your seat?”
Agee tried to explain, but his coach didn’t want to hear it. “Sit down!” he said. “Sit the fuck down!”
And then Johnson left to drink another Heineken.
In the rear of the plane the players were outraged. Here were the Dallas Cowboys, 11–3 and manhandling the NFC East. They had the league’s best record, best running back, best quarterback, best possession receiver, and one of its best defenses. And their coach felt the need to treat them like four-year-olds. “Fuck this!” said Irvin. “I know we lost, but he shouldn’t have come back here like that.” Haley patted Jones on the shoulder. “Man, that was so wrong,” he said. “I took your seat and he didn’t say nothing to me.” Players were fed up with Johnson’s insensitivity.
The following day, the Cowboys were scheduled to gather at noon for a meeting at Valley Ranch. Horton was sitting alone outside the weight room when Johnson approached. “Ray,” he said, “how are the guys?”
An elder statesman who knew this would be his final season, Horton lacked the insecurity to sugarcoat an answer. “Coach,” he said, “they’re really pissed at you.”
Johnson failed to flinch. “That’s fine,” he said, “as long as they play for me.”
Moments later Johnson entered the team meeting, stood before the room, and made an announcement. Horton knew what was coming—Johnson would apologize and the organization would move on. Right?
“I know some guys are mad at me,” Johnson said, “but I just want to win.”
And that was that.
“Typical Jimmy,” says Horton. “He was single-minded and he was hard, and all he cared about—I mean, the only thing—was winning football games. It’s probably not the healthiest way to be, but it made him a successful coach.”
In the ensuing days, players bitched about Johnson to one another. They whined and moaned and questioned the decency of a man who would treat “family” (as Johnson often referred to his players) in such a disrespectful manner. But there was little they could do. He was the boss, they were the employees. Anyone who wanted to quit a team heading for the playoffs was more than welcome to do so.
On the following Sunday, the Cowboys traveled to Atlanta and trounced the Falcons, 41–17. Still fuming at their coach, players took it out on the overmatched Falcons. Aikman completed 18 of 21 passes for 239 yards and 3 TDs, and Emmitt Smith added 174 rushing yards and his NFL-high seventeenth and eighteenth touchdown runs. With the victory, Dallas clinched both the NFC East title and a first-round playoff bye. Shortly after the game, CPC/Environment, the company responsible for those cheesy commemorative coins recognizing everyone from JFK to MLK to the 1986 New York Mets, announced that it would be issuing “a limited edition of 5,000 pure silver commemorative medallions honoring the Cowboys!” (With each one-troy ounce pure silver medallion individually numbered!)
Were the Cowboys back on top? The coins sold out in less than a day.
Ever nervous of a letdown, Johnson deemed it vital to destroy any potential pre-playoff complacency. The Cowboy players averaged a league-low 25.3 years of age. They were pups among men, and the coach didn’t want a postseason berth to swell their heads.
What he needed was a scapegoat.
What he had was Curvin Richards.
Growing up in the Trinidadian town of Laventille Village, Richards hated r
unning. Hated it. As his friends spent their days playing soccer, darting up and down a grassy patch of earth, young Curvin sat back and watched. Or slept. Or stayed home. When he was nine, his father, Kevin, was hired as a welder in the United States, and the family relocated to Houston. It was here, at LaPorte High School, that Richards discovered his calling.
Though he might have found soccer to be dull, Richards was smitten with the pigskin. “There’s almost something magical about being on a football field,” he said. “Running with the ball.” Upon graduating from LaPorte with 1,159 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns as a senior, Richards enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. After three seasons he ranked only behind Cowboy great Tony Dorsett on the school’s all-time rushing list. When Richards declared early for the 1991 NFL Draft, the Cowboys gladly used their fourth-round pick on a 5-foot, 10-inch, 190-pound power back with untapped potential. “He’s a great, great tailback,” said Syracuse coach Dick MacPherson. “Curvin Richards is what everybody looks for when they need a running back.”
But Richards had one fatal flaw—mindlessness. Before the opening game of his first season with Dallas, veterans told the rookies that the team’s charter flight to Cleveland was departing from Dallas Love Field Airport, not Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. The lone plebe not to double-check, Richards missed the plane. Later in the year, a veteran Cowboy posted a sign in the locker room reading GO TO KROGER’S BEFORE NOV. 20 FOR YOUR FREE TURKEY! It was the oldest clubhouse trick in the book—and Richards eagerly darted to the supermarket. “Curvin was a fuckup,” says center Mark Stepnoski, his teammate both at Pitt and in Dallas. “If a guy is going to screw up repeatedly, why would you trust him to do anything?” Richards would arrive late to practices and forget little things like, oh, his helmet. In team meetings he refused to take notes, an inexplicable stubbornness that infuriated running backs coach Joe Brodsky.
What especially irked Johnson was Richards’s inability to hold on to the football. As a rookie he only received two carries, so fumbles were a nonissue. But during the 1992 season Richards was a disaster. He fumbled 3 times in 52 rushing attempts—compared with Emmitt Smith’s 2 fumbles in 432 chances. His slippery hands especially stood out in practice, where three days rarely passed without Richards coughing it up. Johnson could tolerate a bad week. He could tolerate occasional distractions. He could even tolerate failure (well, at least to some degree). He could not tolerate fumbling.
“It’s a shame, because physically Curvin was a carbon copy of Emmitt Smith,” says Tony Jordan, a running back who spent two years in the NFL and attended training camp with Dallas in 1992. “But culturally Curvin was a little different. He had a laid-back approach that didn’t lend itself to the intensity of pro football.”
To eradicate the fumbleitis, Johnson would insert Richards into rushing drills and implore defenders to imagine themselves as pigeons and Richards the world’s last bread crumb. “We’d do this drill where nobody was there to block the safeties,” says safety Darren Woodson. “It was the toughest drill on the running backs, because a hole would open up and the safeties would just kill whoever was coming through. We knew it was a running drill, and they would put Curvin Richards in and Jimmy would say to us, ‘Come down hard and smack the shit out of him.’ Then he’d turn to Curvin and say, ‘Make sure you hold on to the ball.’” Sometimes Richards held on. Oftentimes he didn’t. “When that happened,” says Woodson, “you are talking about the wrath of God coming down. ‘Goddammit! Motherfucker! What the hell! ’”
Dallas’s final game of the season was a home contest against the lowly Chicago Bears. With 10:59 remaining in the fourth quarter, Dallas held a 27–0 lead that had the 63,101 fans dancing in the aisles. Needing 109 yards to surpass Pittsburgh’s Barry Foster for the league rushing lead, Emmitt Smith clinched the crown with a 31-yard touchdown scamper early in the third quarter. Defensive tackle Russell Maryland scored his first career touchdown when he snagged a bobbled pitchout, rumbled 26 yards into the end zone, and celebrated with a belly flop. It was a good day. A great day. A celebratory day.
Until Curvin Richards entered the game.
In 13 carries, Richards fumbled twice. His first was returned 42 yards by Chicago lineman Chris Zorich. “Man, Jimmy was mad,” says wide receiver Tim Daniel. “I was standing right there when he turned to Curvin and said, point blank, ‘If you fumble again, your ass is cut and you’ll never carry the ball for the Dallas Cowboys again.’” Then Richards fumbled again. Johnson yanked him. As he jogged toward the sideline, Richards surely expected to be browbeaten by Johnson. Instead, the coach said the worst thing possible: absolutely nothing.
The Cowboys held on to win, 27–14, and entered the locker room with a franchise-best 13–3 record; an NFC East title; a bye week—and a coach again on the brink of a meltdown. Two weeks after the airplane incident, Johnson was even angrier. In his postgame press conference, he struggled to look directly at the assembled reporters, muttering, “The team is to be congratulated on winning thirteen games. [But] I was not happy with the sloppy play.” Johnson furiously chewed out his players, pinpointing each miscue as if it had occurred in the final minutes of a deadlocked Super Bowl.
“This is crazy,” Tony Wise, the offensive line coach, said. “Whether anybody around here believes it or not, we beat a pretty good football team today.” Aikman was equally disturbed. “What really concerned me is that he didn’t congratulate us at all,” he said. “That was really hard on a lot of guys. There was a lot of bitterness.”
After addressing (and undressing) the team, Johnson headed straight for Jerry Jones’s suite to let his owner have it. With a quarter remaining in the game, Jones had escorted Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, onto the sideline. When Johnson spotted the smiling owner and prince (as well as Bandar’s six bodyguards), he flipped. “What the fuck are these guys doing here?” he yelled at Jones. “In the middle of a game that we’re blowing?”
After Johnson calmed down, he told Jones that Richards had to be cut. The owner insisted they sleep on it, but the following morning the coach’s mind was unchanged. In the history of the NFL postseason, teams won scoring a lot and scoring a little. They won with good defense and adequate defense. They won with clutch kickers and nervous kickers. They never won turning over the football.
When the Cowboys informed the league of the transaction, Joel Bussert, the NFL’s senior director of player personnel, was shocked. “Jimmy,” he said, “I just want to make sure you know that you’ll have to pay this guy full playoff money and that you can’t replace him now on the postseason roster.”
“Fine,” said Johnson. “I just want Richards away from us.”
Upon learning of his fate from Johnson, the low-key Richards nodded his head, cleaned out his locker, and quietly departed Valley Ranch. His teammates were saddened, but hardly surprised. “Jimmy gave Curvin plenty of warnings,” says James Washington. “What else was he supposed to do?”
The Cowboys were heading to the playoffs—one man down.
Chapter 12
HOW ’BOUT THEM COWBOYS!
Someone sent Mark Tuinei palm leaves back from his home in Hawaii. Before the game against the 49ers, Mark looked at me and said, “I wanna give you a Hail Mary with these leaves.” I said, “Brother, I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
—Tony Casillas, Cowboys defensive lineman
WHEN FANS LOOK back at the Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s, they tend to think of the glamour boys—Aikman, Emmitt, Irvin, Haley. Even Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones.
Truth be told, one of the most important—and overlooked—Cowboys also happened to be the only real Cowboy.
That’s right. Along with emerging from relative obscurity to become Aikman’s most reliable target, Jay Novacek was a true, honest-to-goodness cowboy. During offseasons he lived in a brick cabin on 3,500 acres in Gothenburg, Nebraska. The closest paved road was seven miles away. To reach the nearest city (Omaha) took three and a half hour
s by car. Among his closest friends, Novacek counted the 150 head of cattle roaming across his property. He wore a hat that read, simply, REDNECK.
“All he wanted,” says Lin Elliott, the Cowboys’ kicker, “was to go dove hunting.”
Raised in a cornucopia of midwestern towns, young Jay watched and learned from his father, Pat, who coached high school football in such outposts as Martin, South Dakota, and Wyoming, Iowa. Pat was a quiet man who abhorred flashiness and stressed the virtues of hard work and precision. If Pat Novacek’s receiver ran a 15-yard route, it damn well better have been exactly 15 yards. The father also taught the son about self-sufficiency. As the Novaceks sat down for dinner each night, they knew that the meat on their plates had been shot, killed, and skinned by dear ol’ dad.
When Jay was in seventh grade, his family settled into Gothenburg and he settled into becoming an elite youth basketball and football player. Though he was an all-state signal caller at Gothenburg High, Jay was ignored by his dream college, the University of Oklahoma. Instead he signed with the University of Wyoming. When Nebraska coach Tom Osborne called the following day, Jay easily could have snubbed his prior commitment in favor of the mighty Cornhuskers. But that wouldn’t have been the Novacek way. “He had given Wyoming his word,” said Pat.
In four years of college, Novacek rose from obscurity to stardom. As a senior all-American he averaged 22.5 yards on 33 receptions. In track and field, he won the 1984 Western Athletic Conference decathlon title and was invited to the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Convinced they had stumbled upon a raw Kellen Winslow prototype, the St. Louis Cardinals used a sixth-round pick in the 1985 draft to select Novacek, turned him into a wide receiver/tight end hybrid—then barely used him. In five seasons, Novacek never exceeded 38 receptions or 4 touchdowns. “It was stupidity,” says Cliff Stoudt, a former Cardinals quarterback. “Gene Stallings was our coach, and I used to think, ‘If this guy’s such a brilliant leader, how can he keep our best player off the field?’”
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