Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 29, with Switzer’s official hiring still a well-kept secret, Johnson and Jones held an awkward, bizarre, surreal joint press conference at Valley Ranch, announcing their divorce. With contorted faces and pursed lips, the two men sat side by side. It was like watching an old episode of Moonlighting, knowing damn well that when the cameras stopped rolling, Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd couldn’t stomach each other. Randy Galloway of the Morning News accurately termed the scene a “lickfest.”

  “You will never witness anything more fraudulent in all of sports,” Galloway told KERA radio. “Not even in a Don King press conference.”

  He was right.

  Jones’s words: “This is so ironic, because it was just five years ago that a lot of us were here in this room and certainly a lot of us here in Dallas, when basically I said that I thought that Jimmy Johnson would prove to be worth five Heisman Trophies, or worth five number one draft picks, or all of it combined. There’s no question that that’s what has proven to be. Jimmy has done everything in his power and has done it successfully for you, as fans, to be a part of something that really had not been done before, if you really look at where it came from.”

  Jones’s thoughts: Thank God I fired this asshole.

  Johnson’s words: “Over the last five years, Jerry Jones and myself have been able to do some things that a lot of people would have said couldn’t be done. Because of our relationship and how we were able to do things in a quick, decisive way, we were able to take a team that was the worst in the NFL to winning two Super Bowls. We’ve had probably the most candid discussions the last couple of days that we have ever had and I can sincerely tell you that I feel better about Jerry Jones, as a friend, for understanding me today than I ever have in our entire relationship.”

  Johnson’s thoughts: Thank God I quit this asshole (and snagged a $2 million buyout to boot).

  As the aftershocks worked their way through the hallways of Valley Ranch, Jones exited the facility and went about his business. Though he had feigned sadness during the press conference, the Cowboy owner felt about as sentimental as a tote bag. Johnson was gone—praise Jesus.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 30, the Dallas Cowboys officially introduced Switzer as the team’s coach. Nearly 150 media representatives attended the Valley Ranch press conference—an ode to both the aura of America’s Team and the lunacy of the move. “Nothing is going to change,” Switzer told the assembled journalists. “Get ready to watch the Dallas Cowboys be the best in the NFL.

  “I give Jerry my commitment of loyalty,” Switzer said. “I promise you I don’t have an ego that allows me to put myself in a position to damage the relationship. I’m not attacking Jimmy here, but when it comes to getting credit, what the hell difference does it make?” Jones was beaming from ear to ear. Switzer was, too.

  Did he have a message for the fans? someone asked.

  “Yeah,” Switzer said. “We’ve got a job to do and we gonna do it, baby!”

  Uh…

  “Barry Switzer, head coach of the Dallas Cowboys?” wrote C. W. Nevius in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Kind of has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Like Regis Philbin, ambassador to China. Somewhere Tom Landry has just decided that he will skip dinner and is going to lie down for a while.”

  In the wide swath between scumbag and saint, there’s a place for Barry Lane Switzer. Depending on who you ask, the third head coach of the Dallas Cowboys is either a brave leader or a brazen cheater; a proponent of opportunity or a proponent of opportunism. “Barry,” says Larry Lacewell, his longtime friend and coworker, “is everything to everybody and nothing to nobody.”

  To those who supported his hiring in Dallas, Switzer was the genius behind an Oklahoma program that had dominated the collegiate landscape for much of his sixteen seasons. More than just a coach, Switzer excelled at loyalty. If you played for Switzer, you almost certainly came to love him. “He’s a great, great man,” says Dean Blevins, Switzer’s former quarterback at Oklahoma. “When Barry was recruiting me out of high school he found out that I played golf every afternoon. So he’d drive out there, strap my bag on his shoulder, and be my caddy. To this day, I’d do anything for him.”

  Yet to the masses who bemoaned his hiring by the Cowboys, Switzer was the worst kind of heathen. Sure, he’d won national championships in 1974, ’75, and ’85. But what good is victory void of integrity? In the early ’80s Switzer was charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although the case was dismissed for insufficient evidence, he and two partners were asked to repay $1.5 million in loans. In 1984 he was arrested for driving while drunk. Four years later, the Sooners were placed on three years’ probation for “major violations,” including offers of cash and cars to recruits and airline tickets to players.

  Those who believed it could get no worse only had to wait until early 1989, when, within a two-month span, Sooners defensive back Jerry Parks shot and wounded a teammate, three players were charged with rape in the athletic dorm, and star quarterback Charles Thompson was charged with selling cocaine. Switzer had allegedly alerted Thompson to the fact that he was under investigation, forcing the FBI to call off a larger probe and move against Thompson before it intended. “Barry’s biggest problem throughout his career was he didn’t have any interest in nuts-and-bolts discipline,” says Brad Sham, the longtime Cowboys announcer. “That doesn’t work as a father, it doesn’t work as a boss—and it certainly doesn’t work as a football coach.”

  Unlike the majority of his coaching peers, whose stories of lifelong gridiron glories read like dime-a-dozen Inside Sports profiles, Switzer’s background spoke of a man saved by the game; a man who easily could have been dead or in jail or selling used cars.

  Born in tiny Crossett, Arkansas, on October 5, 1937, Switzer grew up in a shack without electricity or running water. He was raised in a “shotgun house,” so named because, he once said, “you could shoot a blast through one end and out the other without hitting a thing.”

  “We didn’t have a telephone until I was in college,” Switzer said. “I went through junior high studying under coal-oil lamps and listening to battery radios because we didn’t have electricity. We had the old privy out back, the three-holer with the Sears, Roebuck catalog and the lime sacks in the corner. At night I used to take my grandmother and mother to the privy carrying a coal-oil lamp and a .22 pistol to shoot the copperheads. My granddaddy planted tomatoes behind that very same privy, and I’ll tell you something else—they were the best darned tomatoes in the country.” To take baths, Barry and his younger brother Donnie would use barrels to catch rainwater. To keep the mosquitoes away in the summer, Barry would fog his bedroom with toxic Real Kill spray.

  With that inextinguishable smile, Switzer can make his youth sound downright Opie Taylor–esque. Yet not only were Frank and Mary Louise Switzer dirt-poor, both were alcoholics. As Mary Louise stayed home to raise Barry and Donnie, Frank failed at one business venture after another before turning to bootlegging. If there was a bright spot to an otherwise down-in-the-dirt childhood, it was that, unlike most other white children growing up in America in the 1940s and ’50s, the Switzer boys came to ignore skin color. In his career as a bootlegger, the majority of Frank’s customers were poor and black, and their children served as young Barry’s closest confidants. Wrote Switzer in his 1990 autobiography, Bootlegger’s Boy: “[One] particular black settlement was a dozen or more shanty houses. The people who lived there raised cotton and sugarcane and had an old sorghum mill, and an old black mechanic named Sam Patton had a garage of sorts. In the fourth grade I used to pick cotton for a black man, and I’d go swim in the creek with the black kids. They had a barrel stay we used for a basketball hoop. Other than my big collie dog, Major, black kids were my best friends.” Later on, as rival coaches scratched their heads over Switzer’s ability to recruit minorities, it became clear that his advantage was empathy. Switzer wasn’t black, but he knew what it was to
feel black.

  He also knew what it was to feel pain. Though Barry worshipped his father in the way boys naturally do their paternal role models, Frank Switzer brazenly cheated on his wife, with little regard for her emotional stability. When she wasn’t minding her boys, Mary Louise spent her days reading novels and sinking into a depression fueled by her husband’s infidelities and nonstop drinking. There was no joy in Mary Louise’s life; no momentary sparks. She was sad, poor, listless, and married to a man who broke the law to line his pockets and violated the vows of matrimony to sow his wild oats. She took barbiturates by prescription and, according to her oldest son, “would kind of glide through the day with a glaze around her.”

  Barry’s escape from a tortured home life came via sports. He entered Crossett High School in 1951 and soothed feelings of inadequacy with athletic brilliance. He played football, swam freestyle, and excelled in the shot put, setting a regional record with a 53-foot, 4-inch toss. For a boy who had always seen himself through the prism of his parents’ shortcomings, the fields and pools of his youth allowed for mental and physical liberation. During Barry’s senior year, the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission came to the Switzer household and arrested Frank. As his father was being cuffed, Barry watched one of the agents smash Frank in the mouth with a gun butt. “You sons of bitches!” Frank yelled. “You broke my teeth!” He was sent to the Arkansas State Penitentiary. His wife and sons were ashamed, but visited every other Sunday.

  The opportunity for a different life came to Barry Switzer in the form of a football scholarship from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, which he attended from 1956 to 1960 and where he excelled as an offensive lineman and linebacker. For Barry, college wasn’t about football so much as it was about personal development, confidence, and a sense of self. As a boy, Barry could not escape his father’s shadow, and often feared that he was doomed to follow his path. “[At college] I learned to express myself well in public,” he wrote in Bootlegger’s Boy. “I learned to be a leader and get along with people at the same time. My social experiences and maturing meant as much to me as my degree.”

  But if there is a defining moment that explains Barry Switzer, it occurred on the night of August 26, 1959, when he was twenty-three years old. Lying in bed, an electric fan blowing the mosquitoes off his face, Barry was approached by his mother, who was loaded up with alcohol and prescription drugs. “Mother,” he said, “I would rather not ever see you again, and know you are safe and well taken care of, than to see you like this all the time.” Beaten down by a life short on love and high on abuse, Mary Louise bent to kiss her son’s cheek. He turned his head away. Barry was mad, frustrated, distraught—disgusted. Mary Louise rose from the bed, removed a pistol from the closet, walked to the back porch, and shot herself. Barry dashed down the hallway and found her lifeless body. He carried her into the house and placed her atop her bed. The sheriff soon arrived and confirmed what the son had known: Mary Louise Switzer was dead.

  “I felt like I was the one who had caused her to pull the trigger,” Switzer wrote. “All she wanted was my love and I turned my face away. I have carried this guilt with me the rest of my life.”

  Upon graduating from Arkansas in 1960, Switzer enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves for six months before being asked by Razorbacks coach Frank Broyles whether he would return as an assistant.

  Broyles was initially drawn to Switzer’s intelligence and work ethic, but what he uncovered was the best recruiter he’d ever seen. Borrowing the gift of schmooze his father used in peddling booze, Barry could walk into a home and immediately grasp the needs of the player and—more important—his mother. Barry was a fast talker, but not an offensively slick one. He was young enough to relate to high school seniors and wise enough to speak of educational needs. When Arkansas ran off twenty-two straight wins in 1964 and ’65, much credit went to the players Switzer had helped bring in. Two of the Razorbacks’ linemen were, in fact, Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson. “Nobody had anything but respect for Barry back then,” says Jones. “It was easy to see he had a future.”

  When Jim Mackenzie was hired to coach Oklahoma in 1966, he tabbed Switzer as his offensive line coach. Upon Mackenzie’s death from a heart attack on April 28, 1967, Oklahoma named Chuck Fairbanks the new coach. Not only did Fairbanks retain Switzer—he promoted the twenty-nine-year-old to offensive coordinator and had him dump Oklahoma’s two-back offense and replace it with the wishbone. By season’s end the Sooners were college football’s No. 1–ranked team.

  Fairbanks departed for the New England Patriots after the 1972 season, and the Oklahoma Board of Regents agreed to hand the job over to the thirty-five-year-old Switzer. He arrived in Norman as an obscure assistant hoping to maybe, just maybe, make a career out of this coaching thing. He left sixteen years later as one of the most legendary, polarizing figures in the ninety-four-year history of OU football. Though nobody accused Switzer of being an ineffective football coach, a state known for its church-per-block convictions finally tired of the man. In his 1988 autobiography, The Boz, former Sooners linebacker Brian Bosworth said Switzer “turns his back” on his players’ off-the-field transgressions. According to Bosworth, such behavior included extensive freebasing of cocaine and the acceptance of lavish gifts from team boosters. When Oklahoma’s 1949 national championship team said it would cancel its fortieth reunion if Switzer was retained, the university had no choice. Switzer resigned under pressure, damned to an eternity of seeing his name alongside the words “outlaw” and “scoundrel.”

  Then Jerry Jones came calling.

  The Cowboys owner had always possessed a soft spot for Switzer; for his vulnerabilities and pain as much as his compassion and football knowledge. Jones saw Switzer for who he was—the type of guy who would give a stranger the shirt off his back and wash, iron, and fold it, too. So what if Texans despised Oklahoma as college football’s anti-Christ? Jones believed they would learn to love Switzer the way he did. “So many people in this business have a big ego,” says Lacewell. “Well, Barry Switzer has about as little ego coaching as anybody I’ve ever known. He wanted good players and he was willing to spread the credit around.”

  Now Jones was giving the world’s most unlikely coaching reclamation project a second chance. He was betting a five-year, $5 million contract that it would work. “Jerry wanted somebody to be loyal to him,” says Switzer. “Someone who he would be comfortable with in his own house. He didn’t have that with Jimmy, what with all the undercurrents and the inability of his coach to share success. But Jimmy is an insecure person. I’m not.”

  Switzer, Jones believed, would ably coach the Cowboys, and without Johnson’s attitude. So what if Switzer was inclined to make the occasional moronic statement about strippers or boosters or helping players out with a little bit of pocket change? So what if Switzer’s ethics lapsed from time to time? So what if Switzer would soon be diagnosed with ADD (hardly a shock to those familiar with his here-one-minute-gone-the-next mannerisms)? “The day after I signed Jerry insisted, ‘Tear up the contract. I’m going to redo it,’” says Switzer. “I said, ‘Why?’ Jerry said, ‘Because I got up this morning, I looked at myself in the mirror, and I liked myself.’”

  Best of all, now Jones would serve as his own general manager. On March 31, 1994, the Cowboys released tight end Alfredo Roberts, a trusty reserve who had played for Johnson at the University of Miami. The next day Switzer was asked what he didn’t like about Roberts. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I heard it on the radio a few minutes ago while I was out looking at some houses. I guess the general manager made a decision to release him and didn’t consult the coach. Hell, it’s OK with me.”

  Chapter 20

  WALKING INTO A BUZZ SAW

  I don’t care what anyone says—Barry Switzer was the exact right guy to take over the Cowboys. A coach who pushes and punches only lasts so long. Barry soothed and coddled. It’s weird, but we needed that.

  —Dale Hellestrae, Cowboys offens
ive lineman

  THE ASSUMPTION AROUND Dallas was that Barry Switzer was doomed to walk into a buzz saw; that the players who had followed Jimmy Johnson to two straight Super Bowl titles were stubborn loyalists who would never give their hearts, minds, and bodies to this renegade from Oklahoma.

  The assumption was wrong.

  To kick off the first meeting with his new players, Switzer, standing at the front of a conference room at Valley Ranch on April 4, 1994, glanced from man to man and asked, “Dammit, where’s Charles Haley? Where the hell is Charles Haley?”

  Haley, squatting in the back, stood and raised his hand.

  “I’m mad at you!” Switzer yelled. “I heard you flicked your dick at everybody, and you didn’t do it to me! What am I, chopped liver?”

  The room broke out in laughter. This was no Jimmy Johnson.

  Oh, there were ominous signs of rebellion here and there. When he learned of Switzer’s hiring, Michael Irvin, Johnson’s most vocal supporter, said he could not play for the new coach and threw a garbage can toward television reporters. Then, at the conclusion of the initial twenty-minute meeting, Irvin stormed out with smoke billowing from his ears. What enraged Irvin was not Switzer, the man, but the words emerging from his lips. “I’ve known Jerry Jones for a long time,” Switzer told his new players, “and I think we all owe him for what he’s built here. Without Jerry, the Cowboys—”