Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  For the first time since the team’s arrival in Los Angeles, that night not one player violated curfew or hit the town for a few beers or invited three strippers onto the premises. Instead, the Cowboys congregated in their hotel rooms and played cards, watched movies, ordered room service, and talked shop. “That was something special about that night,” says Kenny Gant. “I was Alvin Harper’s roommate, and we just sat there with Clayton Holmes and Derrick Gainer, unable to sleep, planning for the biggest game of our lives. Just talking.”

  Aikman, who had spent most of the week holed up with his new Mac Apple PowerBook 160, hung out with John Gesek, Jay Novacek, and long snapper Dale Hellestrae and watched Unforgiven, the Academy Award–winning Clint Eastwood film. In one of the more memorable scenes, the characters portrayed by Eastwood and Gene Hackman fight beneath a driving rainstorm.

  “Is that lightning coming from outside?” Aikman said, turning toward Gesek.

  “Nope,” Gesek said. “It’s the movie.”

  “No…no,” said Novacek, peeking out the window. “The rain’s coming down in buckets.”

  Aikman’s face went blank.

  “Shit,” he said. “I can’t throw a wet ball.”

  He stood up and left the room.

  The most important kickoff of Aikman’s life was less than twelve hours away.

  The weather would clear.

  His nerves? Well, that remained to be seen.

  “What the fuck?”

  Dave Wannstedt repeated himself. “What the fuck?”

  Here he was, sitting in the press box above the Rose Bowl, looking down upon a splendid stadium packed with 98,374 fans (the largest crowd to ever see a Cowboys game), and everything was off. A man wed to routine, the Cowboys defensive coordinator had a minute-by-minute approach to football preparation. There was an exact time to leave the locker room, an exact time to take the elevator up to the box, an exact time to double-check his equipment.

  But this Super Bowl…this damned Super Bowl…

  “I get up there and go through my final checklist,” he says. “And someone yells out, ‘Fifteen minutes until kickoff!’ I was livid.” Actually, Wannstedt was anxious. Anxious to start the game. Anxious to win. Anxious to move on.

  Unlike the other Cowboy assistants, eight of whom would return to the team in 1993, a new gig awaited Wannstedt. Twelve days earlier the Chicago Bears had hired him to replace Mike Ditka as head coach. It was a noteworthy accomplishment for a blue-collar kid from Pittsburgh who scrapped his way up the coaching ladder. Wannstedt was professional, hard-nosed, and disciplined, and his players felt a unique loyalty. “The respect Dave earned was forged out of his honesty,” says linebacker Vinson Smith. “If Dave told you something, you knew it was true. In the NFL that’s pretty rare.”

  In the aftermath of the Bears’ announcement, friction formed between Johnson and his defensive coordinator. As they prepared for Buffalo, coaches speculated about who would follow Wannstedt to the Windy City. On a Wednesday afternoon Johnson walked into a coaches’ meeting and overheard his assistants debating whether to flee for Chicago. “Fuck all of you!” he snapped. “Why don’t you just all get the fuck to Chicago!” Though Johnson was respected by his staff as a quick mind and unrivaled delegator, his moodiness could wear thin. Johnson demanded the same of his assistants as he did of himself—100 percent commitment to the game of football. While Wannstedt was equally intense, he possessed an empathy Johnson lacked. One evening Johnson and his coaches would be gorging on nachos and beer at On The Border, the Dallas restaurant where they congregated every Friday night, and the next he would be cold and dismissive. “Jimmy was not always easy to grasp,” says Hubbard Alexander, the receivers coach. “He had some mystery to him.” On the flight to Los Angeles, Johnson and Wannstedt—the closest of pals—did not sit next to each other. It was a first in their four years in Dallas.

  So as he sat atop the stadium, looking down at his Cowboys for the final time, Wannstedt desperately wanted the game to begin. Instead, there was hoopla. The famed Rockettes performed a tribute to Hollywood, music, and the movies. O. J. Simpson flipped the opening coin. Garth Brooks sang the national anthem. As he wrapped up the song, a soft rumbling filled the stadium. Whoooooosh! Five F-15 fighter jets soared above. The players felt the energy. Nervous energy. Excited energy. A record 133.4 million viewers watched on televisions around the world. “I just couldn’t believe I was standing there, playing in the Super Bowl,” says Robert Jones. “One year ago I was watching the dang thing on TV from my dorm room. Now here I was.” Gesek stood alongside Chad Hennings, the former Air Force pilot, who gazed longingly at the jets. “Man,” Hennings yelped, “those are sure fun to fly!” Irvin walked along the sideline, encouraging…motivating…directing. “This is what it’s all about!” he said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for! Let’s do it! Let’s do it! Let’s do it!” James Washington and Ken Norton, pals dating back to their days at UCLA, uttered the same prayer they’d recited for years—“Lord, don’t move a mountain, but give us the strength to climb it.” Growing up in the rough Watts section of L.A., Washington would watch his hero, Raiders cornerback Lester Hayes, and think, “If Lester can get to the Super Bowl, one day I will, too.” Now he was trembling with emotion.

  Backup tight end Derek Tennell, another UCLA grad, gazed into the stands and couldn’t believe his good fortune. Less than one month earlier he’d been unemployed and considering law school. Then, because of a knee injury to Alfredo Roberts, the Cowboys signed Tennell. Despite never fully learning the playbook, he’d appeared in two games with Dallas, and now he was sixty minutes removed from a Super Bowl ring. Five seasons earlier, Tennell had been a replacement player with the Cleveland Browns, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of most NFL veterans. But the Cowboys took Tennell in and embraced him. “All I’d ever wanted was to win the Super Bowl,” Tennell says. “It was right there in front of me.” Immediately before the game Haley—being Haley—walked up to Tennell and started ripping into him about not belonging with Dallas. “You’re a nobody!” Haley said. “You’re…” Haley was messing with the wrong guy. “Charles,” said Tennell, “I don’t care who you are or how much money you make—I will break your nose and your jaw if you keep talking.”

  Haley slinked away.

  With sweaty palms and pounding hearts and racing minds, the Cowboys’ kickoff team jogged onto the field for the start of a game they expected to own. Johnson’s earlier words echoed in their ears: “Buffalo is not a physical team, they’re a finesse team. They put the ball in the air, so punish them every time a wide receiver or running back touches the ball. Rip the ball away. Hit them repeatedly. I recruited Thurman Thomas at Oklahoma State, and he will put the ball on the ground. Swarm him. Don’t give him a crack.”

  “We knew we were better,” says Kevin Gogan, the offensive lineman. “We had no doubts about winning that game.”

  It did not begin well. After limiting the Bills to five plays on their opening possession, Dallas received the ball, picked up a mere 1 yard, then lined up in punt formation on fourth-and-9 from its own 16-yard line. Because of an injury to linebacker Dixon Edwards, Robert Jones was forced to play special teams, something he had not done all season. When the ball was snapped, Steve Tasker, Buffalo’s special teams wizard, snaked inside of Jones, soared through the air, and smothered Mike Saxon’s punt. As the Cowboys jogged off the field, the action was replayed on the stadium JumboTron. Johnson watched, tracked down Jones, grabbed him by the uniform collar, and ripped him to pieces. “Rightfully so,” says Jones. “I blew it.” When, five plays later, Thomas ran for a 2-yard touchdown, the Bills sideline was euphoric. “That was a huge play,” says Steve Christie, the Bills kicker. “We were sure the momentum was about to swing our way. This was our game. Ours.”

  The Cowboys’ offense struggled for most of the first quarter, failing to pick up Buffalo’s blitzing linebackers and allowing the Bills’ mediocre cornerbacks to sag in and take away corner routes from Irvin a
nd Harper.

  Then, in a flash, everything changed. With five minutes remaining in the quarter, Buffalo had a first-and-10 at midfield when safety Kenny Gant charged untouched through the middle of the offensive line, forcing Kelly to uncork a throw toward tight end Pete Metzelaars. In stepped Washington, who picked off the ball at the Dallas 40-yard line. Six plays later Aikman dropped back three steps, looked straight down the field, and hit Novacek with a 23-yard touchdown pass to tie the game and steal the momentum. “The problem with having a history like we had is doubt creeps in quickly,” says Rob Awalt, the Bills’ tight end. “We didn’t handle adversity particularly well.”

  As a former Cowboy, Awalt knew all too well that if Aikman got on a roll, the Bills were roadkill. “So many weapons on that team,” Awalt says. “We had to control the ball to win. The problem is that we weren’t disciplined. Jimmy told his guys that, and he was right. We made too many mistakes at too many inopportune times.”

  On Buffalo’s next series, Haley swooped around tackle Howard Ballard and clobbered Kelly. As the ball popped loose at the 2-yard line, defensive tackle Jimmie Jones plucked it from midair and stepped in for the score: 14–7, Dallas. This was exactly what Wannstedt had imagined throughout the previous two weeks, when he prepared obsessively for the rapidity of the Bills’ vaunted no-huddle attack. The Cowboy defense practiced consecutively against its first-team and scout-team offenses. One offensive unit would run a play, then the other offensive unit would dash onto the field and run a play. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! “We were ready for it,” says Wannstedt. “I assumed we would be.” Whereas most teams that faced Buffalo tried to sneak linemen in and out between snaps, the Cowboys—blessed with eight top-flight players at the position—simply kept their troops on the field until there was a prolonged stoppage. The Bills thrived on wearing out opposing defenses until they were forced to rely on scrub backups. The Cowboys had no scrub backups.

  Early in the second quarter the Bills faced a first-and-goal from the Dallas 4-yard line and failed to score. On their next series, Kelly dropped back and was nailed in the right knee by Norton. Kelly screamed in agony—both from the pain and the instant recognition that his Super Bowl was kaput. “Have somebody grab a baseball bat and hit you in the leg for a good amount of time,” says Kelly. “That’s what I felt.”

  Though Kelly was too erratic to be considered the NFL’s best signal caller, he was the soul of the Bills. In his place came backup Frank Reich, a soft-spoken Maryland product who eight years earlier had rallied the Terrapins from a 31-point hole to shock Johnson’s Miami Hurricanes. The return from the dead was Reich’s specialty—in the Bills’ wild-card playoff game against Houston, Reich relieved an injured Kelly and erased a 32-point deficit for an NFL comeback-record 41–38 triumph. But these Cowboys were neither the Hurricanes nor the Oilers. In the second quarter Reich led the Bills to a field goal, cutting the Dallas advantage to 14–10. Then he sat back and watched a Super Bowl rout noteworthy for its stark lopsidedness. On the ensuing possession Aikman capped a five-play drive with a 19-yard touchdown pass to Irvin. Thomas, bothered by ankle and shoulder maladies, fumbled two plays later, and Dallas recovered and scored again, this time on an 18-yard Aikman-Irvin hookup. The Cowboys held a 28–10 halftime advantage, and the crowd—covered in blue and white and decidedly pro-Dallas—roared with glee.

  As he jogged off the field Emmitt Smith turned to Leo Armbrust, the team’s guest chaplain, and casually said, “Father, I’d give anything to watch the halftime performance.” Alas, Smith missed out on Michael Jackson. But the Cowboys were the real show. They led 31–17 at the end of three periods and, thanks to a Super Bowl–record nine turnovers by Buffalo, cakewalked to a 52–17 triumph. “We just beat them up,” says Tony Casillas. “I didn’t know we’d throttle them that badly, but once we took out Kelly the game was over.”

  Before Dallas could officially claim its first Vince Lombardi Trophy in fifteen years, something was needed to make an eminently forgettable blowout Super Bowl at least moderately memorable. Yes, Aikman would win the MVP with 273 passing yards and 4 touchdowns. And yes, Emmitt Smith ran for 108 yards on 22 carries. And yes, both Irvin and Harper caught touchdown passes. But what this game required was personal humiliation.

  What it required was Leon Lett.

  A second-year defensive lineman out of Fair Hope, Alabama, and tiny Emporia State (enrollment: 6,194), Lett was slightly less country than a plate of chicken fried steak with a side of okra. Lett’s father, Leon, Sr., had worked at a local printing company and believed strongly in the disciplinary effects of a good belt whipping. As a result Leon would grow into a timid 6-foot-6-inch, 297-pound giant. “The first away trip he ever took with the team, he missed the pregame meal because his nose was bleeding and he was afraid to show up and be laughed at,” says Johnson. “His coaches at Emporia State ripped him because he wouldn’t go to class. The reason he didn’t go to class was because he was embarrassed that he didn’t know the material.” Teammates still recall Lett’s fear of the media, and the reservoirs of sweat that formed beneath his armpits during interviews. “The Big Cat just didn’t want the limelight,” says Hennings. “He was really soft-spoken, and the last thing he needed was a big moment on the biggest stage.”

  With the Cowboys leading 52–17 late in the game, Lett picked a fumble off the ground and rambled 64 yards toward glory. In the era of mounting me-me-me attitudes, Lett was the last guy to showboat. Yet as he approached the end zone, Lett stuck the football in his right hand and held it down low, as if he were carrying an attaché case weighted with bricks. From nowhere (well, from 90 yards behind) emerged Bills receiver Don Beebe, who swatted the ball milliseconds before Lett crossed the goal line. Touchback, Bills.

  Had the game been tight, Lett surely would have found himself yanked, cut, and working at any one of the Greater Dallas/Fort Worth area’s five thousand Olive Gardens. Instead, Cowboy players laughed until they cried. The only moderately irked member of the team was kicker Lin Elliott, who was one extra point away from setting a Super Bowl record. “Oh, well,” says Elliott. “Leon was a good guy. No harm.”

  “He made a mistake, that’s all,” says Beebe. “We met up a few months after the Super Bowl, and I asked how his life had changed. He told me people were very hard on him. For God’s sake, they won the dang game.”

  Indeed, the Cowboys were world champions. As the final seconds ticked off the clock and Johnson’s hair was de-crusted by the requisite Gatorade bath, euphoria set in. Irvin walked up and down the sideline, hugging everyone in sight. Ike Holt and Tommie Agee rolled along the ground like puppies, screaming, “We won the Super Bowl! We won the Super Bowl!” Emmitt Smith had tears flowing down his cheeks—the goal of becoming a world champion could be checked off his list. Jerry Jones paced back and forth, muttering, “Dallas Cowboys, world champions.” Aikman was about to make the world’s easiest $50,000 for reciting nine words—“I’m going to Disney World!” and “I’m going to Disneyland!” He was the MVP, and nobody could argue. Inside the locker room, players were shocked to find—of all people—Jesse Jackson shaking hands and posing for pictures. “I was like, ‘What the hell is Jesse doing here? What kind of affirmative action is he looking for in the Cowboys locker room?’” says Newton. “‘Why aren’t you in the locker room with Buffalo trying to soothe their ache?’”

  Yet of the cornucopia of images, the one that lingers is the visible emotion of a man who didn’t even play. Safety Bill Bates had joined the Cowboys as an undrafted free agent in 1983, and through the darkest of days during the Tom Landry Era he maintained a belief that the Super Bowl was in his future. Sadly, in the fifth game of the ’92 season Bates tore his ACL. Though he took in the action from the Rose Bowl sideline, Bates felt distant, almost as if he were a ballboy.

  When the final whistle blew, however, he was overcome with emotion. He entered the Dallas locker room, curled up on the floor, and wept. “That’s when I realized how much winning the Super Bowl meant,” says Darr
en Woodson. “Here was Bill, a veteran who’d been through it all, crying like a baby. He was finally a champion, and he couldn’t believe it.”

  Knowing the hell he had been through, Jerry Jones pulled Bates from the locker room and asked if he’d like to ride back to the team hotel. Moments later, Bates found himself soaring above Los Angeles in the owner’s private helicopter. “We just circled the city,” Bates says, “looking down on the thousands of lights. It was spectacular.”

  Three years after finishing 1–15, the Dallas Cowboys were atop the world.

  Chapter 14

  NUT-HUGGERS

  My first road game with Dallas, we walk into the hotel lobby and there are four hundred people waiting—grown men, beautiful women, kids. It’s a circus and a rock concert rolled into one. My first road game with the Rams, the only people waiting are the bellhops.

  —Jim Price, Cowboys tight end

  WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a team wins a Super Bowl?

  Lunacy.

  Absolute lunacy.

  Prior to the thrashing of Buffalo, most members of the Dallas Cowboys were mere football players—admired to some degree, but far from household names (outside of Troy, Emmitt, Michael…and maybe Nate Newton—he of the 360-pound Shamu physique). But would anyone have recognized, say, Jay Novacek or Tommie Agee or Alvin Harper or Tony Casillas were they strolling down Emerald Lane on a sunny weekend afternoon? The NFL is not the NBA, where players are the brand—endorsed, publicized, and plastered atop billboards. No, in professional football anonymity reigns supreme.

  In the aftermath of Super Bowl XXVII, however, the Cowboys became the most omnipresent group of athletes the country had seen since 1987, when the New York Giants beat Denver for the title and promptly had five players release autobiographies (one has not lived until he reads Simms to McConkey: Blood, Sweat, and Gatorade).