Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  Any humility gleaned during the 0–2 start was now overtaken by a familiar swagger. The Cowboys were rock stars—Kiss, Aerosmith, and the Stones rolled into one. When they hit the town, they hit the town in a pack—twenty, twenty-five Cowboys sitting at a table in the hottest gentleman’s club, slinging $100 bills and screwing dancers and ducking into back rooms for pulls on bongs and snorts of cocaine. “It was bananas,” says one Cowboy rookie from the ’93 season. “I was a complete nobody on that team, and I’d get back to my hotel room after a game and have two or three gorgeous women leaving me messages on my machine. I hooked up with girls in the stands, I hooked up with girls waiting outside the locker room. In college you might hook up with a couple of eights and nines. With the Cowboys they were all tens and even some elevens. It wasn’t like taking candy from a baby, because a baby might put up a fight. It was too easy.”

  Dallas was riding high, with its biggest test to come. On October 17 San Francisco arrived at Texas Stadium intent on exacting revenge for the prior season’s crushing loss in the NFC title game. In the days before the contest, 49er star Ricky Watters told the San Francisco Chronicle that he—not Smith—was the league’s best running back. “I heard what he said,” responded Ken Norton, Jr., the feisty Dallas linebacker. “He’ll pay for it on Sunday.”

  The Cowboys walloped the 49ers, 26–17, inspiring the Dallas Morning News headline, THE REMATCH IS NO MATCH. Smith gained 92 yards, Watters a paltry 32. More noteworthy was that Michael Irvin seemed to be making a run at Jerry Rice’s longtime reign as the NFL’s top receiver. At the same time Irvin was catching 12 balls for 168 yards and a touchdown, Rice was held to a couple of catches in the first half and 7 for the game. The striking difference, however, was not statistics, but attitude. With increased fame, Rice had become a whiner and moper. Win or lose, if Steve Young was not throwing the ball his way with sufficient frequency, Rice would pout, brood, and vanish from the game. Though he, too, demanded the football, Irvin’s priority was winning. “I once counted that I played with eighty-eight Pro Bowlers in my career,” says Hugh Millen, a Cowboys backup quarterback. “Michael was easily the most driven, most victory-oriented player I’d ever seen. That’s what separated him from his peers—the desire to win Super Bowls above all else.”

  Although the hard-playing Cowboys were clearly relishing their status as defending-champs-on-a-roll, Jimmy Johnson was not. In his first four years as Dallas’s head coach, Johnson viewed the Super Bowl as some sort of Holy Grail: Reach it, and a wondrous world of riches and happiness awaits.

  What Johnson discovered, however, was that there was no Grail; no magic. In the immediate aftermath of the romp over Buffalo, Johnson held the Super Bowl trophy aloft, basked in its luminous glow, felt the rush that comes with achieving a lifelong dream.

  Then, after a few days off, he returned to the grind.

  The Johnson who came back to the Cowboys for the ’93 season was more fierce and biting than ever. Instead of embracing the title of “Champion,” he was burdened by the stress to repeat. After the team lost to the Vikings in an exhibition game, Johnson held the toughest practice of the summer, then had the players remain for an extra hour of drills that Millen, the reserve quarterback, calls “suicidal.” Johnson was screaming like a general in the midst of battle, spittle splattering from his lips. “Guys are doubled over, throwing up,” says Millen. “And Jimmy was running up and down the field, angry as any coach has ever been. I still don’t understand why.” What irked Johnson was how, immediately after the Super Bowl, the most-asked question was not “How does it feel?” or “What was your greatest moment?” but “Can you do it again?” Can I do it again? Are you friggin’ kidding me?

  Johnson was unhappy, and he let those around him know it. He would snap viciously at the nearest lingerer, be it a player, an assistant coach, or even Jones. Whereas in past years he would at least attempt to handle personnel moves with a certain tact and decency, now it was all business. During training camp Michael Payton, a rookie free agent quarterback from Marshall, played well for a month before walking into the training room one day and collapsing to the floor. He was diagnosed with compartmental syndrome, a condition in which increased pressure in a confined anatomical space affects circulation and—in Payton’s case—results in severe numbing of the legs. Payton returned to his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to be operated on. For the ensuing three weeks Payton worked voraciously, running and lifting weights until his doctor cleared him to return to football.

  “My first day back I had a meeting with Jimmy,” says Payton. “He released me.” As Payton headed toward the practice field to bid adieu to teammates, Aikman gave him a heads-up that a quarterbacks meeting would begin in ten minutes.

  “Not for me,” said Payton. “I’ve been cut.”

  Aikman’s jaw dropped. “That,” he said, “is cold.”

  Not nearly as cold as when Johnson cut linebacker John Roper a day after the 49er victory. A former second-round draft pick by Chicago, Roper had arrived in Dallas as part of a five-person preseason trade with the Bears. At his best, Roper was a deft pass rusher who compiled 8 sacks in 1991. At his worst, he had the reputation for being moody and indifferent. “John was very talented, and he could really get after the quarterback,” says Kelly Blackwell, a Cowboys tight end who came to Dallas with Roper. “But he was a me guy, not a team guy.” Roper’s talent was such that, heading into the 49ers matchup, Butch Davis, the new defensive coordinator, planned to highlight him in several specially designed schemes. Two days before the game, however, Roper violated one of Johnson’s etched-in-stone commandments: Thou shall not fall asleep at a team meeting and expect to keep thy job.

  With the lights dimmed in a Valley Ranch conference room, Joe Avezzano, the special teams coach, was briefing his players on the ins and outs of San Francisco’s kickoff return patterns. As Avezzano was speaking, in walked Johnson. The head coach grabbed a chair and sat directly in front of Kenny Gant, the defensive back. “I was a little late to the meeting because I went to McDonald’s,” says Tim Daniel, the second-year wide receiver. “I was about to walk into the room with my Big Mac and fries when I saw our equipment manager, Buck Buchanan. Buck said, ‘Tim, you do not want to go in there. Jimmy is not in a good mood.’”

  Inside the room, the coaches were showing a tape of the 49ers’ recent victory over the Vikings. Players sat in their chairs and feigned interest. “A bunch of us had gone out hard the night before, so I was exhausted,” says Gant. “I had alcohol on my breath; my eyes were opening and closing, opening and closing.” Johnson spun around in his chair, turned away, spun around again, turned away, then spun around a final time. Oh, shit, thought Gant. He’s looking at me. He wasn’t. Sitting eight or nine rows behind Gant was Roper, head nestled against his elbow, a light snore emanating from his lips. “Turn the lights on! Turn the lights on!” screamed Johnson. Ninety-nine percent of the players in the room snapped to attention. Roper did not. “John Roper!” screamed Johnson. Roper failed to wake. “John Roper!” he screamed again. This time, Roper opened his eyes and propped himself up in his chair. “John Roper!” said Johnson. “You can go on and sleep through Sunday’s game! Now pick up your shit and get the fuck out of here!” Roper sat still, stunned. “Did you hear what I said?” Johnson said. “Get the fuck out of this meeting!”

  The 6-foot-1, 232-pound linebacker left the room. Three days later he was cut.

  What Johnson did not know was that Roper’s need for shut-eye had nothing to do with partying or laziness and everything to do with the sleep deprivation that accompanies early parenthood: Roper and his wife had an infant daughter. “That baby had been keeping John up all night long,” says Kevin Smith, Roper’s friend and former Texas A&M teammate. “He was getting three hours of sleep per night. Dude was just exhausted.”

  Roper tried explaining to his coach that he loved being a Cowboy, but Johnson would not hear it. Roper’s Cowboy days were over. “If that were Emmitt, there’s no way he
would have been cut,” says Daniel. “But John Roper was the perfect guy to make an example out of. Was it cool? No. But it was vintage Jimmy Johnson.”

  The Dallas Cowboys were just fine without John Roper. After beating the 49ers on October 17, Johnson’s ball club ran off consecutive wins over the Eagles, Giants, and Cardinals—all NFC East rivals, all convincingly outclassed. For Jerry Jones, the most meaningful of the triumphs came on the afternoon of November 7, when Dallas slammed the Giants 31–9 and finally inducted Tom Landry into the sacred Ring of Honor.

  While most professional sports franchises recognize past legends by dangling their numbers from a wall or rafter, the Cowboys—always eager to separate themselves from the pack—have the Ring of Honor. The tradition began on November 23, 1975, when the team hosted Bob Lilly Day and unveiled a sign featuring the former defensive lineman’s name and uniform number beneath the press box. In the fourteen ensuing years the names and numbers of six more players were added, forming—for lack of a better phrase—a Ring of Honor inside Texas Stadium.

  In the four years since his firing, Landry had avoided returning to Texas Stadium, and any mention of Jones or the Ring was met with a quiet-yet-pointed dismissal. Landry and his wife, Alicia, were proud people who never accepted the way Jones had handled the axing. “I felt worse for the folks around me than I did for myself,” Landry said. “My family was really upset. Then you see something like Tex’s [Tex Schramm’s] situation. He had so much to do with building the Cowboys, but that night on TV after he introduced Jerry as the new owner, Tex had to stand back in the corner. There wasn’t even a chair for him on the podium. That bothered me.”

  Jones initially told Landry he would like to induct him into the Ring in 1989, but the bitterness was too raw. Gradually, the ice thawed. By 1993 the two men had worked out their differences, and Tom Landry was ready to be a part of the Dallas Cowboys once again.

  As he walked through the Texas Stadium tunnel toward the field, a CBS camera flashed the haunting silhouette of Landry and his famed fedora. Once he reached the 50-yard line, the old coach was cheered like Neil Armstrong returning from the moon. Surrounding him were past Ring inductees—Lilly, Don Meredith, Don Perkins, Chuck Howley, Roger Staubach, Mel Renfro, and Lee Roy Jordan. Booed at the start of the ceremony, Jones turned toward Landry and spoke from the heart. “Thirteen playoffs, twenty straight winning seasons, five NFC championships, five Super Bowl appearances, and two Super Bowl wins,” he said. “We honor you here today. Our Ring of Honor stands for the men who built this franchise and had it called ‘America’s Team.’ This would not be the Ring of Honor without you, Coach Landry.”

  “The forgiveness began for Coach Landry right there,” says Staubach. “It was very meaningful for him.”

  As he walked off the field, Landry looked to the stands and smiled. A man who was revered for his sense of righteousness had, in the end, done the right thing.

  Of America’s major professional team sports, none offers the unpredictability of football. While baseball’s pennant race is exciting and the NBA presents unmatched flair, the NFL is the lone entity where today’s Super Bowl favorite can be tomorrow’s cellar dweller.

  For this, there is a single reason: injuries.

  From the garden-variety sprains and bruises that happen twenty or twenty-five times per game to the torn rotator cuffs and snapped femurs that wipe out entire seasons, the NFL team that finds itself unprepared for maladies is the NFL team that has a season doomed to be flushed down the toilet.

  In 1993, the Dallas Cowboys seemed doomed.

  With nine minutes, thirty seconds remaining in the third quarter of the November 7 Giants game, Aikman was being chased by defensive end Keith Hamilton when his left shoe stuck to the artificial turf. With a scream, Aikman collapsed and grabbed for his left leg. “We’re treating it with ice,” Robert Vandermeer, the team’s physician, said afterward. “We hope it’s not too bad.”

  In the following days Aikman could be seen limping around the locker room, an armful of ice packs strapped to what was diagnosed as a strained left hamstring. He was out for the upcoming game against Phoenix, and perhaps for several more weeks as well.

  If Jones and Johnson had learned anything from their early failures, it was the value of a top-notch backup quarterback. With the laughable Babe Laufenberg at the helm for the final two games of 1990, the Cowboys flopped. With Steve Beuerlein filling in for Aikman the following year, Dallas went 6–0 and beat Chicago in the playoffs. Unfortunately for Johnson, Beuerlein had signed a lucrative free agent deal with the Cardinals after the ’92 season. In his place Dallas traded for Millen, a seventh-year veteran who had spent much of the past two seasons starting for New England. Millen was a laid-back Seattle native who arrived in Dallas with a higher annual contract than Aikman’s. When Jones called him into the Valley Ranch offices and told him, “You’re making more money than Troy, and we can’t reconcile that,” Millen smiled and cracked, “Well, I have no problem with Troy getting a raise.” Millen’s salary was promptly slashed to backup level, and he spent the preseason playing bargain-basement football. “I wasn’t happy with how I performed, and neither were they,” Millen says. “I struggled.”

  Hence, when Aikman went down against the Giants Johnson decided Dallas’s new starter would be a freckle-faced redhead whose résumé was highlighted by unexceptional stints with the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League and the San Antonio Riders of the World League. Jason Garrett didn’t even have much in the way of a college background—he played at Princeton, where he was named the 1988 Ivy League Player of the Year. When he walked through the locker room at Valley Ranch, teammates often serenaded Garrett with chants of “Roo-dee! Roo-dee!”

  To make matters more confounding, five days before the Cardinals game Dallas signed Bernie Kosar, the former University of Miami quarterback who had been released by Cleveland earlier in the week. Though only twenty-nine years old, Kosar seemed to have aged overnight. His passes lacked zip, and his mobility was nonexistent. Despite such concerns, Jones agreed to pay Kosar $1 million for the remainder of the year. “They talk around here about how they don’t have the money,” snapped an agitated Emmitt Smith, still licking the wounds of his contract war. “But they get a new quarterback and they give him big money. I don’t understand it.”

  Smith quickly came to understand it when Garrett took the field at Texas Stadium on November 14, strolled into the huddle, and showed the poise and moxie of a six-year-old. Garrett’s eyeballs were the size of silver dollars. Across the line of scrimmage, Phoenix’s defensive linemen took pleasure in filling his head with the vilest of threats. They were going to break Garrett’s legs and tear off his head. “When you looked at Jason, it was obvious he wasn’t an amazingly gifted athlete,” says Rich Bartlewski, a Dallas tight end. “He relied on intelligence and doing things right at the right times.”

  On this day, Garrett was all wrong. He attempted six passes in three offensive series, completing 2 for 25 yards. By late in the first quarter Johnson had seen enough. The gawky Kosar trotted into the game and connected on 13 of 21 passes for 199 yards and a touchdown. He was methodical in approach and Aikman-esque in demeanor, and Dallas beat the lowly Cards, 20–15. Following the 0–2 start, the team had won seven straight.

  “We’re hoping Troy will be back with us,” Johnson said afterward. “If not, we’ll be a much-improved team next week with Bernie Kosar.”

  As it turned out, the Cowboys were not a much-improved team with Bernie Kosar the following week. They weren’t even a good team, falling to the Falcons, 27–14, at Atlanta. But while the loss was disconcerting to Johnson and Co., in Dallas it ranked a distant second to the biggest news since the Kennedy assassination.

  Troy Aikman was in love.

  In a city that cherished its heartthrobs, Aikman was the biggest to come along in decades. To start with, he was the star quarterback of the Cowboys—a 6-foot, 4-inch, 220-pound custom-made classic with a crooked smile an
d freckled skin that reddened in the sun. Aikman was everything white Dallas looked for in its leading men. He eschewed sneakers for cowboy boots and sweatpants for tight Wranglers. His car of choice was a pickup truck and his favorite band Shenandoah. In an era where a wad of chewing tobacco was no longer the status quo, Aikman pulled it off with aplomb. He made spitting sexy.

  Not that Aikman went out of his way to endorse the image. Following the ’91 season he was asked to appear on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show celebrating fantasy dates. “When you walk onto the stage, come out in jeans and boots,” a producer told him. “It’ll be great.” Aikman did as he was instructed, only to find the other men decked out in snazzy suits and ties. “I think they wanted me to look like a hick,” he said. “I may have grown up in the country, but to simply describe me as a country boy is rather narrow-minded. I’d like to think there’s more to me than that.”

  Aikman was intelligent and contemplative. Though raised in all-white environs that bred a certain degree of prejudice, he maintained open-mindedness toward teammates of different races and ethnicities. While his best friend on the Cowboys was fullback Daryl Johnston, his brother—the man he’d have taken a bullet for—was Irvin. “Troy valued loyalty more than any other quality,” says Brad Sham, the Cowboy announcer. “He’ll always have loyalty toward Michael, because Michael is loyal toward him.”

  What Aikman lacked, but craved, was that sort of bond with a member of the opposite sex. Although he’d dated a steady stream of women during his first four years in Dallas, nothing stuck. Like many athletes, he was suspicious of those interested in spending time with him. Did they want his money? His fame? An experience to brag about to their friends and coworkers? He once returned to his house to find a couple of strange women eating pizza on his patio (they had scaled the fence). Another time a woman licked Aikman’s face as he bent down to help her pick up a napkin. “Troy had to fax his grocery list to Tom Thumb Market because when he shopped there it’d cause a near-riot,” says Rob Awalt, the former Cowboys tight end. “He was the Elvis of Dallas.” Aikman even had a code—“Eight ball”—that translated to friends and companions as, “Let’s get the hell out of here. It’s too crazy.”