“I was the odd man out when I was with the Cowboys, so Coach Switzer called me into his office and told me straight-up, ‘Son, I’m going to have to release you,’” says linebacker Reggie Barnes. “And he turns around and the man has a tear in his eye.”
“I’ve never met a more honest, decent football coach,” says Darren Studstill, a rookie defensive back. “You could disagree with some of his decisions, but not who he was as a person.”
Lost amidst a training camp gone crazy was that the Cowboys looked pretty good. Though the club went only 2–3, the first-team offense performed well, and a defense that had ranked second in the NFL in points allowed in ’93 seemed ready for the regular season. “I like everything I see,” Switzer raved before the September 4 opener at Pittsburgh. “I believe this team is Super Bowl–worthy.”
In hindsight, if there was one disappointment it was that the media missed the feel-good story of training camp. In October 1993, a ten-year-old Dallas boy named J. P. O’Neill was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare form of childhood cancer that results in large tumors in the facial or abdominal regions. Like many kids his age, J. P. was a sports fanatic. His room was covered with posters of baseball, hockey, and football players, as well as one featuring the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. “He loved climbing trees,” says Kim O’Neill, J. P.’s father. “He would climb a tree in my parents’ backyard and just sit up there and stare into the woods.”
By the summer of 1994, J. P.’s health had deteriorated. The tumor in his stomach refused to go away, and the boy weakened daily. When a Channel 5 sportscaster named Scott Murray learned of J. P.’s plight, he arranged for the O’Neills to attend the Cowboys’ training camp. Throughout the day, J. P. was treated like a king. He met players, collected autographs, basked in the glow. “They were all so nice to him,” says Kim. “Made him feel incredibly special.”
Of all the Cowboys, Aikman stood out. He chatted with the frail boy for several minutes before posing for pictures. This type of generosity was a side to the reclusive quarterback far too few people had witnessed. (When the wife of offensive lineman Dale Hellestrae was pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Aikman was the only Cowboy—heck, the only male—to attend the baby shower. When an equipment manager named Al Walker had trouble with his battered truck, Aikman bought him a new one. “No one else went out on a limb for Al,” says Kevin Smith. “Aikman drove the truck up there to Valley Ranch, gave Al the keys, said, ‘This is your truck, Al. Just go get insurance.’ He did stuff like that all the time that nobody knew about.”) So now, as the quarterback prepared to walk away from J. P., Kim reached for the star’s shoulder and said, “I know this is a lot, but J. P. was wondering if you’d throw a touchdown pass for him.” Aikman looked at J. P., sitting in his wheelchair beneath a blue-and-white Cowboys cap, and said, “I’ll do you one better. I’ll score a touchdown for you and send you the ball.” When J. P. was out of earshot, Aikman whispered to Kim, “I know your son doesn’t have long. If I don’t do it this week [in a matchup with the Vikings], I promise I’ll score for him against the Raiders in next Sunday’s exhibition.”
On the night of August 7, J. P. O’Neill sat in front of his TV and watched the Cowboys fall to Los Angeles, 27–19. He didn’t care about the final score. He didn’t care about the standout performance of Raiders center Don Mosebar. No, all he cared about was the Cowboys’ opening series, when Aikman did what no quarterback is supposed to do in a meaningless preseason game: He scrambled half a dozen yards into the end zone.
“We knew the touchdown was just for him,” says Colleen O’Neill, J. P.’s older sister. “He had to tell everyone who would listen that the touchdown was his. It meant everything to my brother.”
Nineteen days later, J. P. O’Neill died. He was buried at Rest-land Cemetery in Dallas, holding the football that Troy Aikman had sent him.
Chapter 21
ANARCHY ON (AND OFF) THE GRIDIRON
You mean to tell me there are places where women get naked? And they serve food there, too?
—Kenny Gant, Cowboys safety
FOR ONE WEEK, everything seemed right.
The Dallas Cowboys opened the Barry Switzer Era by traveling to Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium on September 4, 1994. Before his team took the field, Switzer offered up an emotional, heart-tugging speech on his life as a bootlegger’s boy; of watching his mother kill herself; of having to hustle for every opportunity. The room went silent as the new coach spoke. This wasn’t about winning. It was about life. “You men have a chance today to continue a path of greatness,” he said, his voice trembling with nervous energy. “Don’t let that pass you by.”
Before a black-and-gold-clad crowd of 60,156 and dozens of national media outlets, the Cowboy defense battered Steelers quarterback Neil O’Donnell, sacking him 9 times (4 by Charles Haley, 3 by Jim Jeffcoat) in a one-sided 26–9 romp. “[O’Donnell] was holding the ball because he didn’t have anybody to throw to,” said James Washington, the Dallas safety. “But then he was scared he was going to get the crap kicked out of him.”
No one was more euphoric than Jones, who afterward roamed the Cowboys locker room and looked toward the assembled media with a Y’all-can-bite-me grin the size of the Smithfield Street Bridge. “We dismissed a lot of the potential naysayers [who said] that this team had really hurt itself by the changing coaches,” Jones said. “I feel very strongly that our best chance to win in ’94 were with the changes we made.”
It was a great moment for the new Dallas Cowboys. Great, but illusory.
In a far corner of the locker room, Irvin was quietly complaining to Bill Nichols of the Morning News that, despite the lopsided score, the Cowboys had performed woefully. “We did not look sharp,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do.” Though the comments were pooh-poohed by most teammates, Irvin knew whereof he spoke. A closer look at the game tape showed blown coverages, sloppy routes, and less-than-maximum intensity. “In the NFL, talent can prevail for a while,” says Darren Woodson, “but not for long without something extra.”
The Cowboys won their home opener the following week, squeaking past the Houston Oilers, 20-17, then lost to Detroit on Monday Night Football, again by a 20–17 margin. Though the game was memorable for a spectacular 140-yard performance from Lions running back Barry Sanders, what stands out in hindsight is Switzer’s violation of expected NFL coaching behavior. On the Saturday night before the game Switzer skipped meetings to fly to Little Rock, Arkansas, on Jones’s private jet to watch his son Doug quarterback the Missouri Southern football team. Although the trip immediately qualified Switzer for Dallas Parent of the Year, it was unheard-of behavior for an NFL coach (and a far cry from Johnson, who struggled to remember he had children). While his players and assistants planned for the following day’s battle, Switzer was watching the big Missouri Southern–Missouri Western clash, standing along the sideline with a hot dog and a Dixie cup of Coke. His absence was deemed all the more galling the next day when, in a critical short-yardage situation on fourth down against the Lions, Switzer was at a loss for a play call. “It was sometimes hard to take Barry seriously,” says Woodson. “You wondered where his priority was.” Even as the team proceeded to perform well, Switzer’s behavior screamed an unnerving message: Accountability no longer matters.
Over the course of his twenty-nine years guiding the Dallas Cowboys, Tom Landry was as deft an image manipulator as he was a football maestro. With one playoff berth after another, Landry was somehow able to peddle the idea that the Cowboys were as wholesome as a backyard barbecue on the Fourth of July.
Behind the image was a darker reality. Throughout much of the 1970s and ’80s, the Cowboys’ locker room held more than its fair share of steroid abusers, pot smokers, and cocaine addicts. The most renowned was Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, the All-Pro outside linebacker who famously snorted coke on the sideline during Super Bowl XIII. Numerous Cowboys lived the high life, protected by the stardom that comes with performing in Tex
as Stadium and the reputation of a flawless head coach. It is no coincidence that such behavior took place in Big D, a city that has long fancied itself as a fast-moving, high-rolling mecca of excitement. To the rich and famous, Dallas meant long-legged blondes, high-stakes poker, and two lines of coke before an all-night free-for-all.
Under the reign of Jimmy Johnson, members of the Cowboys partied plenty hard, but were mindful that their head coach wouldn’t hesitate to cut someone who seemed more interested in Q rating than TD ratio. When push came to shove, the Cowboys were all business.
With Switzer’s arrival, everything changed. Not only was the new coach indifferent to whether his players stayed out late—he was often out late too, drinking hard, sitting front and center for lap dances at the Men’s Club of Dallas (Switzer once even endorsed the Men’s Club on his radio show, a first for NFL coaches). Upon his being hired by the Cowboys, many wondered how he would coexist with Larry Lacewell, the team’s director of college and pro scouting. Why? Because after the 1977 season, following two decades of friendship dating back to their youths in southern Arkansas, Lacewell learned that Switzer had been sleeping with his wife, Criss. (In a delicious bit of irony, Lacewell’s best man at his wedding had been none other than Jimmy Johnson.) Switzer paid Lacewell $25,000 to ensure that word of the affair never reached the press. “Barry likes to let his hair down and have a good time,” says Lacewell, who remained married and again counts Switzer among his pals. “I was determined not to carry that animosity toward Barry my entire life, because what good is anger? Barry is who he is.”
The same went for Jerry Jones, who felt socially liberated by Switzer’s arrival. The Dallas owner longed for a running buddy, something he had hoped to find in Johnson (but didn’t). Like Switzer, Jones considered himself a family man, deeply in love with his wife, Gene, and their three children. Like Switzer, Jones talked of compassion and times at home in front of the fireplace. Like Switzer, Jones walked the wild side.
During Jones’s first few years in charge of the Cowboys, team staffers quietly wondered whether Gene knew of her husband’s reputation as an unabashed skirt chaser. He maintained a well-known affair with Susan Skaggs, a long-legged thirty-something employee of the Texas Stadium Corporation, and did little to hide it. According to Todd Cawthorn, the pilot of Jones’s private jet, the owner and Skaggs utilized the plane as their own mile-high Love Shack. “A Lear 35A is not exceptionally large,” wrote Cawthorn in his biography on life with Jones. “We could feel the airplane moving and shaking. It didn’t move and shake that long.”
Jones was the type of man who looked at breasts first, rear second, breasts third, legs fourth, breasts fifth and sixth. When, in 1991, his son Stephen was engaged to be married, Jerry threw one of the raunchiest bachelor parties Las Vegas had ever seen, highlighted by a buffet of gorgeous women with Hustler and Penthouse résumés hired to dance naked. Wrote Cawthorn, an attendee: “The best part was that each and every one of the goddesses would be ‘available’ later in the upstairs suites—guaranteed to provide all the loving we could handle, and then some.”
At an Austin bar named the Copper Tank, Jones was scheduled to sit down with Kristi Hoss, a Houston-based radio reporter, for a ’94 training camp interview. “He was already three sheets to the wind when I got there,” recalled Hoss, who said Jones made multiple passes at her. “He reeked of tequila. He tried to grab me around the waist. I’d start to get up and he’d pull me back down, or he’d pull me onto his lap. He kept saying, ‘Darlin’, you are just way too beautiful to be on the radio. You are the epitome of the Texas beauty queen. You have the most beautiful legs I’ve ever seen. Why don’t you come on and be a Cowboys cheerleader.’”
Rob Geiger, a former reporter for KRLD in Dallas, still laughs over the time he and a particularly fetching female friend named Cici went out to dinner and ran into Jones. “He invited us to his table with thirty or forty other people,” says Geiger. “As we were leaving I saw him whisper something into Cici’s ear and her eyes popping wide open.” What, Geiger wondered, had Jones said?
“Two things,” Cici stated. “First, he asked me if I had any panties under my skirt.”
And then?
“And then he told me, ‘Give me five minutes with you and I’ll take you to heaven.’
If the coach and owner of the Cowboys was allowed to exercise such public audacity, what was to stop the players? Hence, as never before, Dallas’s football heroes descended upon the city. The starting point was usually the Cowboys Sports Café, a seemingly unremarkable bar located in a strip mall five minutes from the Valley Ranch practice facility. Owned by a gaggle of former Cowboy players, including legendary running back Tony Dorsett and All-Pro linebacker Eugene Lockhart, the Café was initially a laid-back watering hole to visit after a long day of practice. There were some TVs, a pool table, Thursday night karaoke, double-dip chicken wings (the brainchild of Irvin, who once complained the wings were not sufficiently crispy), and a bottomless tap of cold beer.
Yet with the team’s success, the Café went from quiet, around-the-corner comfort zone to groupie-stalker central. Anyone who wanted a piece of the Super Bowl champions knew where to find them. Women in tight pants and bikini tops waited by the bar. Celebrities like Steve Perry, Paula Abdul, and O. J. Simpson stopped in on their way through town. Members of the team upheld a strict rule that no one dared violate: Spouses could eat lunch at the Café, but they were not permitted to enter the premises after sundown. “I literally would have been thrown out,” says Lisa Holmes, the former wife of cornerback Clayton Holmes. “It was pathetic. The only person on that team I had respect for was Emmitt Smith, because he wasn’t married and if he wanted to be a playa it was his right. But the married guys—ninety percent of them were spending all their time at the Café and the strip clubs, thinking they were so important.”
“The girls were the worst,” says a former Cowboys Café waitress. “They would do absolutely anything just to say, ‘I was sitting at a table with…whoever.’ It was disgusting. And there were also the die-hard fans who’d bug players for autographs even if they were eating. It became too much.”
Under Johnson, the Cowboys Café could often serve as the beginning and the end of an outing. Under Switzer, night after night the sky was the limit. Players would meet up at the Café, then plot an evening of strip club hopping and groupie banging. Most alarming was the reckless approach a small number of players took toward cocaine, which had snuck its way into the team’s subculture. That members of the Cowboys smoked marijuana came as no surprise to Jones or the coaching staff—football was a painful sport, and a joint or two eased the trauma. Coke, however, was a different monster—addictive, harmful, engulfing. “You get caught up in the lifestyle and it sort of takes over,” says Cory Fleming. “At least I did.”
A rookie out of the University of Tennessee, Fleming was a rugged wide receiver who impressed Switzer with his size and instincts. Though he certainly knew how to enjoy a good party while in college, Fleming had never touched drugs until a line of coke was presented to him during a shindig in training camp in 1994. Intimidated by the idea of saying no, Fleming leaned over a coffee table, picked up a small straw, and snorted away. Damn, he thought. That’s not bad. As the ’94 season progressed and Fleming found himself on the bench (he appeared in only two games), his off-the-field activities increased. When someone said, “Fleming, we’re going out!” Fleming went out. When someone said, “Fleming, we’re doing shots!” Fleming did shots. When someone said, “Fleming, snort that line!” Fleming snorted that line. “It’s not like I was leaving the games and there’d be someone in a car pointing a gun at my head and saying, ‘If you don’t snort cocaine and sleep with hookers, I’ll shoot you,’” says Fleming, who was later suspended by the league for failing a drug test. “No, every mistake I made was a conscious, ill-advised decision. I was a twenty-two-year-old football player who drank and did cocaine, and I couldn’t stop.”
“We had a lot of guys,
” says a team employee, “who just couldn’t resist.”
When Clayton Holmes was selected by the Cowboys in the third round of the 1992 draft, he was sitting in his father’s house in Florence, South Carolina, desperate to escape the childhood he describes as “one long nightmare.” Holmes was raised in a trailer, the son of a stern, belt-whipping father and a stern, extension cord–whipping mother who delivered four sons from four different men. His parents never married, and struggled to put food on the table. Holmes was painfully shy and athletically unimpressive—hardly the prototype to grow up to be a Dallas Cowboy. “My life changed when I was twelve years old,” he says. “I was the kid with the dirty clothes and the snotty nose who never had enough food to eat. I was picked last in everything, and I sucked. I was playing Little League baseball, but I never swung because I was afraid of looking stupid.” One day, Holmes’s team, Trinity Baptist Church, was trailing late in the game and the count was 3 balls, 2 strikes. “I wasn’t swinging once again,” says Holmes. “And my coach yells, ‘Clayton, just swing the bat!’” The next pitch was a fastball over the heart of the plate. Holmes swung and tipped the ball foul. His teammates cheered wildly. “Then I swung again and hit a triple,” he says. “Something just went through me right then and there. I could play!”
From that point, Holmes’s confidence soared. He starred in baseball, football, tennis, and track through high school, setting a state record in the long jump with a 24-foot, 93/4-inch leap. He didn’t merely love the success that came with sports—he needed it. The games took him far away from Florence; from the pain of being poor and beaten and “always hungry”; from the embarrassment of tattered dungarees and hole-pocked shirts; and, most tragically, from the terror of being sexually abused. As a young boy Holmes was repeatedly molested by his older brother Bam, who at night would slide into Clayton’s bed and fondle him from behind. “When he would touch me, it changed who I was…what I felt,” Holmes says. “It brought a lot of anger out of me. Look, I was a kid who was supposed to be having fun, going to school, playing sports. Instead, I had a mother and father who beat me and a brother who molested me.” Though the abuse ended once he reached high school, Holmes carried the guilt for most of his life. Overwhelmed by the mental burden, he eventually attempted suicide, swallowing eight trazodones and closing his eyes. As he started to drift off, Holmes came to his senses and dialed 911. “Does anyone who hasn’t been molested know what it’s like?” says Holmes. “It’s humiliating, it’s terrifying. You feel like you did something wrong. If you want to truly fuck up a child, sexually assault him and watch what happens.”
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