Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  For his part, Jones was sick and tired of his so-called best friend. Johnson warned his players not to change with success…but what about him? When was the last time Johnson had given credit to anyone but himself? Jones was especially upset by the way Johnson browbeat his coaching staff—a collection of twelve good men who worked long hours for moderate salaries. He’d heard reports that, with the regular season winding down, Johnson had strolled into a coaching meeting, looked over his assistants, and barked, “You fuckers get it together or not a one of you will be around next year.”

  Who was this man? And why was he such a jerk? And, most important, why didn’t he afford Jones the respect he deserved? For that matter, any respect at all?

  “I bought the team and took all the risks,” Jones said. “And then I came in here and gave Jimmy all the security in the world. I personally guaranteed him a ten-year contract. If he had never coached another game, if he got hit by a truck and got disabled, or if he never won another football game, he was still going to make six or seven million dollars. The reason for the ten-year contract was I wanted more of a proprietary feeling. I don’t want to make the decisions in a vacuum that make me basically the sole keeper of the shop for the future around here. I want somebody else also standing right there, thinking about the future of the team. I didn’t want somebody around here helping me make decisions who just had a short-term attitude. I didn’t want a lame-duck coach.”

  Now, it seemed, he had one.

  After an invaluable bye week that helped (soon-to-be-named) league MVP Emmitt Smith heal his shoulder and Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones cool their heels, the Cowboys learned their first playoff opponent, on January 16 at Texas Stadium, would be the Green Bay Packers.

  Coming off a wild-card win over Detroit, the 10–7 Packers hardly inspired fear in the hearts of Dallas’s players. In the week leading up to the game Dale Hellestrae, the Cowboys’ long snapper (and offensive lineman), spent portions of his practices trying to snap footballs into moving cars. A bunch of offensive linemen dressed a candy machine in Cowboys garb and placed it in front of Erik Williams’s locker. “You see,” Haley told the media, “you kick Erik in the ass and candy falls out.”

  To few people’s surprise, it was a nightmarish afternoon for the Packers. The Cowboys’ 27–17 victory was relatively effortless. With a still-hobbled Smith held to 60 yards on 13 carries, Aikman took over, completing 28 of 37 passes for 302 yards and 3 touchdowns. Early in the game he zoomed in on tight end Jay Novacek, an expert at locating holes in the defense. As his quarterback continued to settle for dunks and dinks, Irvin walked toward the Packers sideline and demanded coach Mike Holmgren cover Novacek more intently. “That was typical Michael,” laughs Novacek. “He wasn’t saying it so they’d really cover me tighter. He was saying it out of respect—‘No matter what you do, Jay will get open.’ I was on the field laughing my head off.”

  He had good reason to—the Packers were out of their league.

  Three days before the Cowboys and 49ers were to meet yet again in the NFC Championship Game, Johnson and his girlfriend, Rhonda, were driving to Campisi’s restaurant. The radio dial was turned to WBAP, where Morning News columnist Randy Galloway was hosting his Sports at Six show with special guest Dan Reeves, coach of the New York Giants. For several minutes, Galloway and Reeves debated the upcoming Cowboys-49ers clash, comparing the histories and roster makeups of the two franchises. Finally, Johnson had heard enough. He called the show, itching to lay down the law for all listeners. “We are going to beat their rear ends,” Johnson said. “We will win [the ball game]. And you can print that in three-inch headlines.

  “In my opinion—and I am a biased person—I think we’re going to go out Sunday and that crowd is going to be going absolutely wild. I think we’re going to have a very, very tight game for about three quarters. Then before it’s over I think we’re going to wear them out. We’re going to beat their rear ends, and then we’re going to the Super Bowl. That’s my personal opinion.”

  Looking closely at the two teams, the boast was, from a pure football vantage point, logical. Playing in the subpar NFC West, San Francisco struggled to finish with a 10–6 record, wrapping up the regular season with embarrassing losses to Houston and Philadelphia. Though they still featured superstars like quarterback Steve Young and receiver Jerry Rice, the 49ers were thin in the secondary and offensive line. In the year since the teams had last played for the conference title, there was a profound separation. This time Dallas, which would host the game at Texas Stadium, was the more prepared, more confident, more talented operation. With a Super Bowl defense comes a swagger. And the Cowboys had plenty of it.

  Somewhat surprisingly, Johnson’s words did not go over well with his team. For veteran Cowboys, Johnson’s shtick had worn thin. His tough-love, I won’t-treat-all-of-y’all-the-same mojo worked wonders with young, naïve players just entering the league. But as the Cowboys grew together, they came to tune out Johnson’s chest-thumping rhetoric. “I majored in physical education, not psychology,” Newton told the Boston Globe, “so all I know is he put our asses in the frying pan now.”

  “Jimmy really depended on the dangling carrot principle,” says Kevin Smith. “Let me just give them enough to be happy, and dangle a little more. Because if you give a player too much he’s not going to work out as much, he’s not going to do the offseason things he needed to do, he’s not going to do what he must. You don’t get it as a kid. But the more stable you are financially, the less you’re going to just follow along.”

  While the 49ers came to Dallas carrying a grudge from the previous season’s setback, they also found themselves caught up in an unhelpful sideshow. That’s because Jerry Rice had neither forgiven Kevin Smith nor forgotten the unyielding trash talk spewed at him in the January 17, 1993, game. Rice was normally impenetrable, yet something in Smith brought out his inner Biff Tannen.

  Hence, three days before the game Kevin Smith was more than happy to answer reporters’ questions about his rift with Rice. “It’s all Jerry,” Smith said slyly. “I was just playing him tough last year, and he comes along at the end of the game and flashes me the middle finger. I don’t know why, but he did.” The quotation was an instant goat getter. Upon spotting Rice before the start of the game, Smith approached and reached out his hand. “Good luck,” he said. “Let’s have a good game.”

  Rice muttered a slur, again flashed the finger, and jogged past. “Truthfully, I was just messing with the man,” says Smith. “I knew he probably wouldn’t shake my hand. But I thought I’d try and make a home in his head again.”

  There was a scuffle between the teams. At the coin toss, San Francisco’s captains refused to acknowledge Dallas’s players.

  The game was on.

  (Pause)

  And then it was done.

  In what had been hyped as the “Game of the Year,” the Cowboys trounced San Francisco, 38–21. The biggest—rather, most noteworthy—play of the game came on the first series, when Kevin Smith clipped Rice’s leg during an out route, and the receiver responded by throwing a punch and shouting, “Fuck you, bitch!” Penalty, unsportsmanlike conduct—15 yards. That the legendary receiver was held to 6 catches for 83 yards only added to Smith’s glee. “Ah,” he says. “To get under the skin of an opponent, then see it work. Nothing’s better.”

  Unlike the previous year’s contest, Dallas made certain there would be no dramatic ending. The Cowboys scored four touchdowns in their first five possessions, roaring to a 28–7 halftime lead. When Aikman left the game with a concussion early in the second half (asked to name the site of the upcoming Super Bowl, a woozy Aikman responded, “Henryetta, Oklahoma”), Bernie Kosar stepped in and zipped a 42-yard touchdown pass to Alvin Harper.

  “We have not often been this humiliated,” 49er coach George Seifert said afterward. “It hurts.”

  Once again, Dallas was going to the Super Bowl.

  Once again, Dallas would face Buffalo.

  But a
cakewalk, this would not be.

  Chapter 17

  SUPER BOWL XXVIII (AKA: WE WANT THE BALL! WE WANT THE BALL! WE WANT THE BALL!)

  Super Bowls act as a big headache pill for the city of Dallas. No matter how we behaved, no matter how many things we did wrong, the people would forgive us. Why? Because we gave them Super Bowls.

  —Kevin Smith, Cowboys cornerback

  BILL BATES WAS garbage.

  How else to describe a rookie free agent who possessed everything required to play safety in the National Football League—save for speed, athleticism, and pedigree? As a senior at the University of Tennessee in 1983, Bates was named second-team All-Southeastern Conference, but his claim to fame came in a game two years earlier, when he was brutally run over by Georgia tailback Herschel Walker. That was the lasting impression Bates left on NFL scouts: solid collegiate player; can’t stick with the big boys.

  When the 1983 NFL Draft began and ended with nary a sniff in his direction, Bates wondered whether he had a future in the game he loved. On the following day Dallas scout Bob Ford contacted Bates and invited him to try out, telling him, “If there were thirteen rounds in the draft instead of twelve, you’d be the thirteenth pick of the Dallas Cowboys.”

  Bates was ecstatic. Me! Really? “Ever since I was a boy my dream was to play for Dallas,” says Bates. “And when you’re given the chance to pursue a dream, I believe you have to go for it.”

  What Bates didn’t realize at the time was that the Cowboys were telling literally every semi-talented undrafted collegiate player that he would have been the team’s thirteenth-round selection. When he arrived at camp in Thousand Oaks, California, Bates was surrounded by dozens upon dozens of thirteenth-round picks.

  The one-legged nose tackle? Thirteenth-rounder!

  The legally blind kicker? Thirteenth-rounder!

  The pack-a-day smoker from Anne Arundel Community College? Thirteenth-rounder!

  But it didn’t take long for Tom Landry to see that, in the unathletic rookie with the southern twang and Grover nose, he had something. Bates was the type of player who annoyed the hell out of complacent veterans, most of whom cringed at the gosh-golly-gee rookie pouring his heart and soul into every play. Bates was a square peg in the Cowboys’ round hole of a locker room—squeaky clean, authentically Christian, loyal to his wife, Denise, and 100 percent intense even in the waning seconds of a blowout. Before long teammates mockingly nicknamed him “Master,” prompting the rigid Landry to tell reporters earnestly, “Wow, those guys must really respect Bill.” (Writer’s tip: Place Bates’s nickname before his last name and say it aloud.)

  With the 1989 upheaval, Bates—who thrived as a safety and special teams standout for six years under Landry—assumed that his days in Dallas were numbered. He barely survived Johnson’s first season, and in 1990 was relegated primarily to special teams. As other thirty-something contemporaries gradually vanished from the NFL, however, Bates excelled. He was, in many ways, reborn. On kickoffs and punts, Bates would dart down the field like a bull after a red cloth, charging through blockers, battering over bigger players, single-minded in his determination to destroy the ball carrier. “I remember coming to the sideline once,” says Kenny Gant. “Bill had broken his wrist and the trainers told him, ‘Game’s over.’ Bill said, ‘No, tape it up.’ As a young guy coming in, I never saw a player who cared less about his body.”

  Having survived the depressing late-Landry years, Bates was elated when, in 1992, the Cowboys played like Super Bowl contenders. Sadly, in the fifth game of the season Bates tore his ACL trying to make a play on special teams. He planned to stand along the Rose Bowl sideline for Super Bowl XXVII, but the idea of watching his team play without him on the world’s largest stage was too much to bear. As soon as all his healthy teammates left the locker room, Bates turned to a trainer and pleaded, “There’s a lot of tape left here. You can still tape me!”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the trainer replied. Bates sighed—the sideline it was.

  Thanks to the rigid rehabilitation regimen of Cowboys strength coach Mike Woicik, Bates returned bigger, stronger, and faster in 1993, leading the club with 25 special team tackles. Having previously topped out at 4.6 seconds in the 40, Bates now ran a 4.58. The improvement was unheard of, especially for a thirty-two-year-old. “Three weeks ago I would have given you ten-to-one odds that Bill Bates wouldn’t have a chance to make the team,” Johnson said during training camp. “But it really is incredible what he’s done.”

  When the Cowboys beat San Francisco to advance to Super Bowl XXVIII, nobody was more gleeful than Bates. “That was very, very meaningful to me,” says Bates. “I felt like everything I’d worked for and overcame over the years was finally paying off.”

  Equally elated for another shot at glory was James Washington, like Bates a veteran safety who appreciated what it meant to play in such a big game. With the emergence of second-year safety Darren Woodson during the ’93 season, Washington had been reduced to a nickel back. He was twenty-nine years old and certain his time in Dallas was nearing an end. “In the first Super Bowl I was driven by winning that ring,” says Washington. “But I understood in the second that this was my opportunity to put my name on the market and scream, ‘This guy can still play!’” On the Wednesday before the game, Johnson pulled Washington aside and told him he was going to start. First off, the coach liked his veteran poise. But more important, Johnson needed to utilize his three safeties—Washington, Woodson, and Thomas Everett—to stop the Bills’ no-huddle, multireceiver offensive sets. If Woodson was the young up-and-comer and Everett the savvy professor, it fell on Washington to do what he did best: smack the daylight out of people. “I’m not trying to kill nobody, but I’m trying to limit my threats,” says Washington. “When I’m saying I want to tear up your vertebrae, I literally want to jeopardize you at that point in time. I attack you like you stole my mama’s purse.”

  Unlike past Super Bowls, the NFL decided, this year’s game, to be held in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, would be played just one week after the conference championships. As a result, neither the Cowboys nor the Bills would party with the same vigor as they had in the lead-up to Super Bowl XXVII. Sure, there were shindigs and ladies and large doses of fruity alcohol. But the nightlife in Atlanta was relatively tame. For the Cowboys, who were accustomed to living like rock stars, the subdued atmosphere was a bit unusual. For the Bills, who in 1992 held a clinic entitled “The Super Bowl: How Not to Approach One,” it was a blessing. “They were much more prepared for what we had to offer the second time,” says Woodson. “We thought we’d walk all over them, but then it was sort of like, ‘Uh-oh.’”

  Unlike the previous year, when the Rose Bowl served as a classic Hollywood setting, the whole Georgia Dome scene was just, well, off. Super Bowls are not meant to be played indoors on artificial turf beneath bright lights in a relatively nondescript southern city. Even with 72,813 fans in attendance (most of whom once again supported the Cowboys), the joint lacked buzz…spark…greatness. It felt like a big game, not THE big game.

  To Bates, however, this mattered little.

  In the moments before kickoff, the captains of the Bills and Cowboys met at midfield, where legendary quarterback Joe Namath was on hand to conduct the coin toss. Standing alongside Michael Irvin, Kevin Gogan, Ken Norton, Jim Jeffcoat, and Eddie Murray, Bates watched the silver dollar rise from Namath’s palm and disappear in the Georgia Dome lights. “Tails!” he shouted—a call Bates had debated for hours with his wife. When the coin indeed landed on its tail, Bates was giddy. “We want the ball!” he squealed for all to hear. “We want the ball! We want the ball!”

  “That was really embarrassing,” he says now. “But that was everything pent up—missing the previous game, coming from nothing, joy, energy, excitement.”

  Yet while certain veterans like Bates and Washington were anxious to make the day memorable, the Cowboys seemed to approach the game with a casualness befitting the venue.
Having battered the Bills so decisively in Pasadena the year before, Dallas’s players assumed they would do so again. “There were no ifs, ands, or buts about the Super Bowl. I knew we would win,” says Kevin Smith. “We all did.” So did the prognosticators, 95 percent of whom predicted the Cowboys—favored by a whopping 101/2 points—in a blowout. Even Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman, who had picked the Bills to win the three previous Super Bowls, changed his tune.

  Such outlooks infuriated the Bills, who with each Super Bowl letdown grew increasingly defensive. On Media Day, Buffalo linebacker Cornelius Bennett was asked by a reporter whether he thought his team could win. “What kind of fucking question is that?” Bennett railed. “No, we’re going to fucking lose. Excuse my language, but don’t ask me that kind of question. Hell yeah, I think we’re going to win. You think we came here just to lose the thing? You think we came to the previous three Super Bowls to lose? No, OK, so don’t ask me that damn question. That’s fucking stupid. I’m pissed off about you asking me that, all right? So print that. I didn’t fucking come here to lose, I never come to the Super Bowl to lose, I don’t fucking play this game to lose.”

  Like their star linebacker, the Bills were fired up. The Cowboys, on the other hand, were bad. Really bad. Still feeling the effects of his concussion, Aikman looked Ken O’Brien–like in his inability to leave the pocket or throw the ball away. He misfired low to Jay Novacek on an early 4-yard dump-off, and two plays later missed a wide-open Kevin Williams crossing the middle. Because the Cowboys had done their best to conceal the severity of his injury, the 134.8 million viewers watching the Super Bowl assumed Aikman was off his game. What they didn’t know was that he was still suffering from headaches, nausea, dizziness, and disconcerting memory lapses. “It was scary,” said Leigh Steinberg, Aikman’s agent, who spent the night of the concussion in the hospital with his client. “We sat there, he and I alone in the dark, and his head was kind of in a cloud. He kept asking me the same questions over and over.”