Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  As was the case two years earlier, California had been hammered by rain throughout the preceding week, turning thirty-four of its counties into federal disaster areas. Dallas had beaten San Francisco in the muck and mud two years earlier, but this was a different 49ers team. In a nod to the new world of expressive football players unafraid to display all their feathers, the Niners had replaced stoicism with flamboyance, inward confidence with outward cockiness. In the minutes before kickoff, Sanders, fullback William Floyd, and halfback Ricky Watters danced in the end zone, pumping their fists and loudly rapping the 69 Boyz’s “Tootsee Roll.” Bill Walsh, the legendary 49er coach, would have cringed. George Seifert, his replacement, begrudgingly accepted it.

  “Just looking at those guys and looking at the enthusiasm they had for the game, it made you laugh,” Brent Jones, San Francisco’s tight end, said. “And that kind of takes the pressure off.”

  For the Cowboys, it was (yawn) a chance to return to (yawn) another (yawn) Super Bowl. Most of the team’s players stood and watched San Francisco’s Dance Fever antics with bemused indifference.

  “Truthfully, San Francisco was loaded and hungrier than we were,” says Woodson. “That happens when you lose for a couple of years and you want to get back. But even going into that game, I personally had the feeling of, ‘We’re gonna kick your ass. You can do whatever you want to do and it’s not going to work.’ I just wanted the game to start.”

  It started.

  “Then,” says Woodson, “I immediately just wanted the game to end.”

  On the first Cowboy possession of the afternoon, 49er cornerback Eric Davis intercepted a pass and returned it 44 yards for a touchdown. 7–0, San Francisco.

  “The second I let it go,” said Aikman, “I knew I was in trouble.”

  On the second Cowboy possession of the afternoon, Irvin caught the ball and fumbled it away in Dallas territory. Shortly thereafter the 49ers scored on a 29-yard swing pass from Young to Watters. 14–0, San Francisco.

  “We were digging ourselves a pretty big hole,” says Gant. “Against a team like that, it ain’t easy to dig out.”

  On the third Cowboy possession of the afternoon, Kevin Williams fumbled the kickoff and the 49ers again recovered. Floyd capped a 7-play, 35-yard drive with a 1-yard run. 21–0, San Francisco.

  Exactly seven minutes and twenty-seven seconds had passed.

  “That was a horror movie,” says Switzer. “If they had listened to me they wouldn’t have turned the damn ball over and we wouldn’t have been down by 21 five minutes into the game. But a coach can only do so much.”

  Actually, a coach can do a great deal. He can inspire. He can instill discipline. He can make sure his men are prepared for the biggest game of the season. He can recognize mistakes and make adjustments. Switzer, however, was overmatched and overwhelmed—the wrong man to develop an on-the-fly game plan against the relentless 49ers.

  Sitting above the stadium in the Fox broadcast booth, Jimmy Johnson could not help but grin. Yes, the Cowboys still wore stars on their helmets. But these were not his collected, well-oiled Cowboys. No, these were Barry Switzer’s Cowboys. And they were embarrassing themselves.

  Dallas committed five turnovers, missed a short field goal, botched a punt, and decided on one baffling play call after another. Yet whereas some teams would have accepted fate, Dallas valiantly refused to die. “Guys, you know what’s great about being down 21–0 after seven minutes?” Switzer asked his players along the sideline. “We’ve got fifty-three minutes to get back in this SOB. Now do something about it.”

  Slowly, methodically, the Cowboys clawed their way out of the hole. They trailed 24–14 late in the first half and should have headed into the locker room with an infusion of positive energy. Instead, Switzer—to cite defensive back Joe Fishback—“did his thing.” With the ball at their own 16-yard line and 1:02 remaining, the Cowboys called three straight failed pass plays, then watched punter John Jett shank a 23-yarder off the side of his foot.

  With eight seconds on the clock, Young spotted Rice bolting down the left corner of the end zone and hit him with a breathtaking 28-yard touchdown pass. That the magnificent Rice was covered one-on-one by the mediocre Larry Brown was yet another glaring coaching gaffe. “Larry is a great guy and a decent NFL corner,” says Jim Schwantz, the Cowboys linebacker. “But every Tuesday we’d practice the two-minute passing drill late in the day, and every single time Larry would cover Michael Irvin and Mike would just kill him with a double move. Jerry did pretty much the same thing.”

  Dallas trailed 31–14 at the half to a team that was hungrier, feistier, and better coached. “I don’t think we were ready,” says Gant. “In the course of that game I started thinking, ‘Is this going to be my last year with the Cowboys?’ and ‘Where should I go on vacation after we lose?’ I know I wasn’t the only guy with that stuff in his mind.”

  Not all of Dallas’s players were distracted. Although his interceptions accounted for 3 of the team’s 5 turnovers, Aikman was courageous under fire, completing 30 of 53 passes for 380 yards while being sacked 4 times and knocked down 19 more. He was taking one of the worst beatings of his life. “Troy was talented and poised, but more than anything he had guts,” says Peete, the backup quarterback. “Great signal callers aren’t afraid to take a hit or two. Troy was never afraid.”

  A fitting capper to a rotten afternoon came midway through the fourth quarter, when—with his team trailing, 38–28—Aikman launched a pass to Irvin near the 49er goal line. As Irvin ran down the field, Sanders intentionally (and blatantly) interfered by tangling up the receiver. When no penalty flag was thrown, Switzer charged head linesman Sid Semon and thrust his hip into the official. Semon flagged the coach for a 15-yard penalty. Instead of a third-and-10 at the San Francisco 43, the Cowboys faced a third-and-25 from their own 42.

  “I lost control,” says Switzer, whose repeated refusal to take responsibility for the loss still infuriates Cowboy players. “But I didn’t lose the game. Our sloppiness lost it; our poor play lost it.”

  The final score was San Francisco 38, Dallas 28. As the last seconds ticked off the clock, Candlestick Park vibrated like an old lawn mower; 69,125 fans celebrating a new reign. On the Cowboys sideline, Irvin and Emmitt Smith embraced until the scoreboard clock read 0:00. Irvin had caught 12 passes for 192 yards. Smith ran for 74 yards on 20 carries before leaving the game with a right hamstring pull. Neither had an ounce of energy remaining.

  “I don’t even know how to tell you how disappointed I am,” Irvin said later. “I can’t sit here and cut open my chest and show you my heart. But I’m eaten up by this.” Aikman would call it both the worst setback and the proudest moment of his career. “All people had ever really seen of us was Dallas enjoying great success,” he said. “It was the first they’d seen us struggle. But that game illustrated the type of team we were, how we continued to fight.”

  Afterward, rookie kicker Chris Boniol boarded the team bus, sagged into his seat, and looked as if he were about to cry. He had missed a 27-yard field goal. “Hey, kid, you can’t let it bother you,” said Nate Newton, patting Boniol atop the head. “Shit happens. You’ll get ’em next year.”

  Two weeks later, the 49ers won their fifth Super Bowl, routing the San Diego Chargers, 49–26, at Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium. As Woodson, Irvin, Smith, Switzer, and the other Cowboys watched the game from various spots across the country, a singe thought crossed their minds:

  That should have been us.

  “I’ll say what a lot of guys probably think,” says Woodson. “If Jimmy Johnson is still our coach in 1994 we win the Super Bowl. We lacked Jimmy’s swagger and confidence and belief that we would always find a way to win. We weren’t as structured or motivated. We didn’t play with any fear. That doesn’t mean Barry was a bad coach, because he wasn’t.

  “But,” says Woodson, “we were never quite the same.”

  Chapter 22

  PRIME TIME

  Deion Sanders was a gr
eat football player. But the perception was that we needed him to win the Super Bowl. That just wasn’t true.

  —Larry Brown, Cowboys cornerback

  FOR THE FIRST time in three years, the Dallas Cowboys would enter the offseason as merely another team. There would be no parade; no ring ceremony. Just as fans lavish affection upon champions, they are equally willing to ignore losers. Especially losers whom they expected to win.

  Such was the status of Jerry Jones’s franchise in the aftermath of the San Francisco defeat: a strange, Twilight Zone-esque merging of disappointment, confusion, disbelief, and disarray. To the young player who knows only victory, the assumption is that the good times will last forever. Yet the dwindling number of veterans who had been with the Cowboys since 1989 were forced to come to terms with the stark reality that a window was quickly closing. This was no longer a franchise of naïve pups trying to make names for themselves. Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin would be turning twenty-nine in 1995. Five offensive linemen were in their thirties. Charles Haley, who retired after the 49er game, then unretired, was thirty-one. That’s how it works in professional sports, where phenom turns has-been in the blink of an eye.

  In the winters following the two Super Bowl titles, the Cowboys somehow kept their roster largely intact. Now, however, there were mass defections. Defensive end Jim Jeffcoat signed with the Bills and center Mark Stepnoski with Houston. Redskins coach Norv Turner added three of his former players in safety James Washington and linebackers Darrick Brownlow and Matt Vanderbeek. The most shocking blow came via the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who wooed Kenny Gant, the Cowboys’ special teams ace, as well as wide receiver Alvin Harper.

  Yes, Freaky Harp.

  To Cowboy fans, the defection of Harper was tough to bear. Though he caught only 124 passes in his four seasons in Dallas, 18 of those had resulted in touchdowns. The image of Harper gliding toward pay dirt, football triumphantly raised in the air, was a vivid and familiar one. In a city that craved big things, Harper was a big-play guy. Yet he was also an emperor without clothes. Harper’s speed was only slightly above average and his route-running ability atrocious. “He was long-legged and he could stride over the top,” says Gerald Alphin, a former Cowboys receiver. “But other than that, Harp had very little to offer.” Though he did, indeed, wind up on many a highlight film, his glory was often the result of opposing teams focusing on Irvin. With Deion Sanders covering him one-on-one in the ’94 NFC title game, Harper managed a single reception.

  What irked teammates most was that Harper’s excessive cockiness came packaged with a mediocre work ethic. While Irvin begged for extra reps and weight room time, Harper was the last to arrive and the first to leave. He loved the perks that came with fame—the mounds of naked women, the mounds of marijuana, the mounds of naked women smoking marijuana—but not the effort required to achieve it. “He had a lot of bad habits,” says Gant. “You’d see him smiling and think, ‘What’s Harp up to?’” During a practice midway through the ’94 season, Washington spotted Harper crossing the middle of the field and decked him with an illegal blow to the head that nearly knocked the receiver cold. “He deserved it,” says Washington. “Alvin Harper was more talented than Mike, but he went about his business differently. He burned the candle at both ends harder than anyone else, and it showed. There’s a reason Michael Irvin is in the Hall of Fame and Alvin Harper is just another guy.”

  When the Buccaneers made Harper the league’s fifth-highest-paid receiver with a four-year, $10.6 million deal, Jones shrugged and moved on. The Cowboys, he assumed, would easily find someone to replace him, just as they had replaced other defectors in the past. But with Jimmy Johnson a distant memory, Dallas was now relying on its owner to guide personnel decisions. It was a joke.

  “The Cowboys are Jerry’s team and he can do what he wants,” says Larry Brown, the veteran cornerback. “But if you want to chart where things began to go wrong, look at the point when he started making the moves.”

  In April 1994, Jones kicked off his debut draft without Johnson by using the team’s first-round pick on a 6-foot-5, 253-pound defensive end from Arizona State named Shante Carver. Neither overwhelmingly fast, quick, strong, nor driven, Carver arrived at training camp and, within a week, established himself as a waste of space. “If you had drafted Shante Carver in the fourth, fifth, sixth rounds people would have said, ‘Hey, that’s not a terrible pick,’” says Nate Newton. “But you can’t take a guy like that in the first round. When you draft guys in the first round you’re saying, ‘In a year this guy is going to be something.’ When did anybody say that with Shante?”

  “You could see Shante was far from first-round material,” says Alfie Burch, an undrafted free agent safety from Michigan. “[Linebacker] Darrin Smith and I were roommates, and we’d watch Shante and be like, ‘Uh, that’s weird.’”

  Though Jones’s first draft yielded Larry Allen, an offensive guard out of Sonoma State who would go on to a Hall of Fame–worthy career, none of the six other players selected in 1994 lasted more than four seasons in Dallas.

  The following year was even more disastrous. With the Cowboys in dire need of up-and-coming studs to replace the fleeing veterans, Jones studied the boards, listened to his scouts, swung powerfully—and whiffed. “Jimmy and his guys made the draft look easy,” says Dick Mansperger, the team’s director of college scouting from 1989 to 1992. “Jerry thought, ‘Well, that’s not hard.’ What he failed to understand was the importance of what happened the three hundred sixty-four days and nights before the draft.”

  Jones’s first pick, University of Alabama running back Sherman Williams, played four undistinguished years with Dallas, smoked enormous amounts of pot, and, following his conviction in 2000 on charges of conspiracy to distribute marijuana, is now inmate No. 07520–003 in the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. “Sherman didn’t have the work ethic you needed to excel at that level,” says Gregory Samms, his former agent. “I was constantly telling him, ‘Look at Emmitt, look at Michael. See how hard they work.’ He didn’t listen.”

  Jones’s second pick, tight end Kendell Watkins of Mississippi State, caught a single pass in 1995 and was never heard from again. His third pick, offensive guard Shane Hannah of Michigan State, signed a $1.1 million contract, injured his right knee in training camp, and quit one year later. Jones wasted a fourth-round selection on a defensive back, Alundis Brice, who had been shot in the chest shortly before the draft, and a fifth-round pick on Edward Hervey, a lightning-fast receiver with brick hands. The best of the bunch was tight end Eric Bjornson, a steady performer who caught 48 passes in 1996. “Man, the drafts under Jerry were terrible, just terrible,” says Darren Woodson. “Jerry would draft a player and he would come out to minicamp and I just couldn’t believe it. I’d say, ‘This is our first-round pick?’”

  Making the matter worse was Switzer’s inability to squeeze water from a rock. Though Johnson was hardly an Xs and Os wizard, he was masterful at pressing the right buttons and placing his players in winnable situations. Under Johnson, Jay Novacek went from a misfit tight end/receiver hybrid to Pro Bowler; Nate Newton went from overweight outcast to Pro Bowler; Emmitt Smith went from undersized question mark to Pro Bowler. “Jimmy was magical,” says Woodson. “A great example is Shante Carver. I love Shante as a person, but he was not especially driven. Jimmy would have said, ‘You either get your shit together or I’m going to cut you. So figure it out.’ But under Barry we lacked that. There were times Shante was late for meetings, and you just didn’t see players do that during Jimmy’s time. Everyone understood the rules under Jimmy, and we got sloppy after he left.”

  Indeed, while Switzer’s laissez-faire approach was initially lauded by Cowboy players, it was increasingly apparent that America’s Team required some semblance of structure. On April 13, 1995, Erik Williams—already on two-year probation for DUI—was arrested in Dallas for allegedly sexually assaulting Angela Russell, a seventeen-year-old topless dancer, (“Actually,” says Charles
Caperton, Russell’s attorney, “she was sixteen.”)

  “I met [Russell] in a strip bar,” said Williams. “We were doing drugs one night. We were doing alcohol…There was a setup in the making, but I couldn’t see it because I was out there partying. That’s what I think happened, because nothing wrong was done to her. She was paid. Nobody was rough. Nothing like [rape] happened.”

  Two months later a handful of Cowboys reported to the team’s annual quarterback school woefully out of shape. The worst transgressor was Newton. Once an obscure USFL journeyman, Newton signed with the Cowboys in 1986 and developed into an above-average offensive lineman and one of the team’s most beloved figures. Yet Newton was no innocent. An Olympic imbiber, he was pulled over on multiple occasions for drunken driving, and in 1991 was one of eighteen people arrested at a dogfight near Liberty City in East Texas. Long before the Michael Vick saga, Newton owned a fleet of fourteen pit bulls, going so far as to brag about “raising American Pit Bull Terriers” in the 1992 edition of the Dallas Cowboys Wives’ Cookbook.

  Of all his difficulties, the one that brought Newton the most fame—and grief—was weight. Upon arriving at an offseason session, Newton tipped the scales at 368 pounds—more than 40 pounds overweight. Not that it came as a surprise. Early in Newton’s career Tex Schramm loaded his contract with a tasty incentive: Report under 310 pounds and earn an extra $80,000. Newton failed. “I know, I’m a fool,” he says. “But if someone offers you eighty thousand dollars to be unhappy, you shouldn’t take it. So fuck eighty thousand dollars. I’d rather eat.” (Says former Cowboys lineman John Gesek: “Quite frankly, the reason I think Nate went to six Pro Bowls was because his weight was such a joke it got him attention.”) Once, during a game, Newton was blocking an opposing pass rusher when a Snickers bar popped out of his uniform. “I was like, ‘Did a damn candy bar just fly from Nate’s body or am I imagining things?’” says Larry Brown. Two or three nights per week during training camp Newton would make a rookie walk down the street and return with a sixty-piece box of Popeyes fried chicken, biscuits, french fries, and a case of Budweiser. “Whoever was hungry would take some pieces,” recalls Stepnoski of the ritual. “Then Nate would eat the last fifteen or twenty pieces himself.”