Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  Now playing: “Must Be the Money”

  Album: Prime Time

  Year of Release: 1994

  Label: Bust-It Records

  Artist: Deion Sanders

  Genre: Ear Melting

  From a pair of 100-watt speakers on a table in the center of the room, Sanders began to sing/speak/croak:

  Well all right

  Yeah

  You know ever since I turned pro in 1989

  When I signed the dotted line

  It was strange!

  ’Cause things change

  For the better and for the worse

  So I called my mama and she said “Baby,”

  Must be the money…

  Sanders could not stop chuckling. The Cowboy locker room felt like home.

  “That was so funny,” says Cory Fleming, the Cowboy wide receiver. “It was important Deion could laugh at himself, because Nate played that song every friggin’ day for a month.” Plastered throughout Sanders’s new locker were forty color Xerox copies of him interfering with Irvin in the ’94 NFC Championship Game—the play that, had a flag been thrown, could have changed the outcome. “In big red letters Mike wrote INTERFERENCE on each one,” says Jim Schwantz, the linebacker. “Just hilarious.”

  On one of his early days with the team, Sanders ran into Alundis Brice, who just so happened to wear uniform No. 21, Sanders’s digits of choice, at a Dallas-based BMW dealer. The rookie defensive back had long wanted to own a BMW 325i, and he was here to make it a reality. “Brice, what are you doing?” asked Sanders.

  “I’m gonna buy this car tomorrow,” he said. “But I first have to call my agent and set it up.”

  “It’s your first sports car?” asked Sanders.

  “Yup.”

  “Are you gonna pay cash for it?” Sanders asked.

  “Yup.”

  Sanders nodded and drove off.

  The next morning, Brice reported to Valley Ranch and was dismayed to spot his dream car—a brand-new metallic blue 325i with all the trimmings—parked in the players’ lot. “I can’t believe this,” he thought. “Somebody bought my car.”

  When he approached his locker, Brice noticed the keys on his stool alongside a note from Sanders. It read: NOW GIVE ME MY DAMN JERSEY!

  “I wore numbers 22 and 38 in college [at the University of Mississippi], but they gave me 21 with the Cowboys,” Brice says. “I had no emotional attachment to it. So when I read that note, I took my jersey down, hung it in his locker, and got a new number. I’ll never forget him doing that.”

  With such acts of grace and kindness, it took Sanders little time to develop a following in the Cowboys clubhouse. Like any American office space, Dallas had its cliques, usually divided along lines of race and age. White veterans like Aikman, Daryl Johnston, and Jay Novacek could be found in one pocket. The black defensive linemen, headed by Haley, were in another. Now Sanders was fronting a new group—the younger defensive players who envied both his game and his lifestyle.

  This is where the problems began.

  For all his Jim Thorpe-esque skills, Sanders was sleeping-dog lazy. In practices, he went all out every third or fourth play and refused to wear shoulder pads because, he would say, “I’m not gonna tackle anyone anyway.” In meeting rooms, he was known to doodle and doze off. Told early on that Cowboys who refused to participate in the team’s weight training regimen would be fined, Sanders dramatically whipped out his checkbook and jotted down a five-digit figure.

  When Mike Woicik, the team’s gruff strength and conditioning coach, complained about Sanders’s indifference, Switzer sided with his new star. “We’re talking about Deion Sanders here,” Switzer told Woicik. “If he doesn’t want to do something, he doesn’t have to.”

  Woicik was speechless. Credited by many players as a key to the back-to-back Super Bowls, Woicik was a no-nonsense taskmaster who demanded maximum effort. “For Mike, anything short of a funeral was an unacceptable excuse to miss a session,” says Kevin Smith. “Mike had the personality of a lamp, but if you had to bench-press he knew exactly how many you were supposed to do. When you came in and you didn’t do it, he’d say, ‘You were out fuckin’ around last night. You must’ve been drinking last night. You must’ve been drinking two nights ago.’ He’d be pissed. He wouldn’t speak to you for a week. If you tested on the bench and you didn’t make it, he wouldn’t say a word to you for a whole week until you came in and did it. That’s how he was. Your goals were his goals.”

  Throughout the locker room, Woicik was as respected as any Cowboy coach or official. And Deion Sanders had the nerve to treat him…like this?

  Who were the Dallas Cowboys becoming?

  “I still remember Deion’s first team meeting,” says Clayton Holmes, the veteran cornerback. “We were so fundamental about film. The way we studied it was critical. Well, Deion comes in, puts his feet up on a table, and doesn’t even watch.” When Dave Campo, the Cowboys’ new defensive coordinator, asked the $35 million man to break down a play, Sanders let out a sly laugh. “Hey, Coach,” he said, pointing toward the screen, “I got that dude right there. Wherever he goes I go. All that Cover Two stuff you’re talking about—y’all work that out.”

  Seeing that the Cowboys’ defensive back meetings lasted significantly longer than they had in Atlanta or San Francisco, Sanders took a page out of the Barry Bonds Playbook by investing in a black leather executive’s chair and rolling it into the conference room. As his peers sat in standard metal folding chairs, Sanders lounged in comfort. “Guys thought that was kind of funny,” says Schwantz. “Maybe not right—but funny.”

  Although most veterans accepted Sanders’s ego and indifference in exchange for the promise of otherworldly play, Aikman—who had offered to defer part of his salary to help Dallas afford the defensive back—was disgusted. It was bad enough Switzer approached discipline as if he were the proprietor of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. Now here was “Neon Deion,” teaching via example that image is everything and practice is overrated. From across the locker room, the quarterback would watch Sanders’s postgame dressing ritual and cringe. As Jeff Rude of the Dallas Morning News described it: “Most people slip on a shirt when they get dressed. Deion puts on a jewelry store.” Around his neck, Sanders placed two thick gold chains with dangling diamond-studded 21s. He wore a diamond-studded Rolex watch, two gold diamond bracelets, and matching diamond horseshoe earrings.

  “There was a division between Deion and Troy that began to bubble over,” says Kevin Smith. “We called it ‘Double Doors’ at Valley Ranch. Once we walked through those double doors it was football. We could laugh and joke, but it was all about football. To Aikman, that was sacred.

  “When Deion came in, something changed for the worse. Guys who should have been studying football on a Wednesday at twelve o’clock were focused on other things. Deion was such a freaky athlete that he could shake one leg and be ready to cover anyone. But the guys following his lead weren’t nearly as talented. You know what they say about dogs that chase cars—they don’t live long.”

  One of Sanders’s most devoted disciples was Sherman Williams, the rookie running back with noteworthy talent but zero work ethic. “Deion had Sherman’s ear a hundred percent,” says Kevin Smith. “He would show up around ten o’clock, eleven o’clock in the morning, smelling like weed and rolling with a posse. Guys like Sherman needed to be reminded of the importance of hard work. That did not come from Deion.”

  “You led by example,” adds Dale Hellestrae, the offensive lineman. “And Deion’s example wasn’t very good.”

  Sanders made his debut on October 29, when the Cowboys thumped the Falcons, 28–13, in Atlanta. The stars of the game were (ho-hum) Emmitt Smith (26 carries, 167 yards), Irvin (10 receptions, 135 yards), and Aikman (19 of 25, 198 yards, 2 touchdowns), yet the spotlight belonged to Prime Time. It was his moment in the sun. His day. In forty-four defensive sets, Falcons quarterback Jeff George threw his way twice. The first time, receiver Bert Emanuel beat Sa
nders for an 11-yard gain. The second, Sanders batted down the ball.

  Though he talked as if he were the Muhammad Ali of the gridiron, Sanders’s play in 1995 was merely OK. In nine games as a defensive back, Sanders intercepted 2 passes and contributed a paltry 22 tackles (that’s a robust $318,182 per tackle). “Personally,” says one Cowboy, “I thought Kevin Smith was a better player.” Whereas the other primary cornerbacks—Smith, Larry Brown, and Clayton Holmes—embraced contact, Sanders was a feather duster. When he tackled, it was with the gusto of a ninety-year-old woman. “One time a running back ran a sweep toward him, and Deion dove halfhearted into the turf,” says Case. “We’re watching film the next day, razzing him pretty good. As serious as could be, he said, ‘I saw that dude coming and I had to make a business decision.’”

  Amid one of the most drama-packed seasons in team history, it was easy to forget that Dallas was the class of the NFL. Switzer’s team improved to 7–1 with the Atlanta victory, prompting some columnists to predict a seamless return to the Super Bowl. Through eight games Emmitt Smith led the NFL in rushing with 979 yards, Irvin had caught 58 passes, and, with 9 touchdown passes and only 2 interceptions, Aikman was as potent as ever.

  Then, on Monday, October 30, the Dallas Morning News broke yet another Cowboy-related bombshell: Leon Lett and Clayton Holmes had violated the league’s substance-abuse policy and would be suspended for four games. For both men it was the second failed test.

  “That was the point where people started to see that the Cowboys had a drug problem,” says Jean-Jacques Taylor, the Morning News football writer. “There were a lot of guys using, but it’s not always easy to tell. I had an uncle who used to smoke crack on weekends, no problem. But he had a really nice-looking girlfriend who was a beautician. He turned her on to it one weekend and she was working the corner a month later.

  “The Cowboys were sort of like that. Some guys could do drugs and handle it. But guys like Clayton and Leon couldn’t. Leon’s problem was he was stupid. Leon would go to a party, have a good time, the joint would come around the circle, and he’d take a hit. He knew a drug test was coming up, but he didn’t think he’d test positive. Just plain stupid.”

  In past decades, Cowboys who wanted to smoke pot or snort cocaine would begin their nights at Holmes’s home, then head out to the Cowboys Sports Café or a strip club. During the Switzer Era, however, a handful of players came up with a new, easier-than-ever way to do what they desired without running the risk of being caught by spouses or the media. In the beginning, it was merely known as “The House”—a handsome two-story brick home with a faux Georgian façade on a suburban cul-de-sac next to the Valley Ranch facility. As word of the Cowboys Sports Café had gotten out, players had grown tired of wading through an ocean of celebrity seekers. “So to keep the BS down, a couple of guys got together and got a house,” says Newton. “The White House.”

  Located at 115 Dorsett Drive, the abode was initially rented in 1994 under the name of one Alvin Craig Harper. Any hope of keeping things hush-hush was obliterated when residents of the exclusively white, low-key community noticed their new 6-foot-4, 300-pound African-American neighbors escorting an endless conveyor belt of large-breasted, blond-haired women in Pez-sized miniskirts. Newton insists the White House was a haven for neither prostitution (“What did we need prostitutes for? Women laid down for us”) nor drugs (“Never saw ’em”), yet his take is disputed by many. “I’m not going to lie—I went there several times,” says Brice, the rookie cornerback. “But I was afraid to try any of the drugs. Because I knew myself, and I liked to have fun. Anything potentially addictive scared me.”

  “It was a frat house,” says Mike Fisher, the team’s beat writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “But most frat houses don’t specialize in hookers and cocaine.”

  To visualize the White House, picture a relatively nice suburban home with a swimming pool in the back and a driveway packed with Jaguars, Bentleys, BMWs, and Ferraris. Then walk through the front door (no need to knock—it was always unlocked) and check out the enormous televisions, the pool table, the wet bar, and the prostitutes (often wearing nothing but the gold chains supplied by the residents). Oh, don’t forget the handful of video cameras hidden throughout the various bedrooms, allegedly installed by Dennis Pedini, one of Irvin’s close friends. “Everything that happened in the White House I’m assuming Pedini had on camera,” says Kevin Smith. “He didn’t tell the guys they were being filmed at the time, but—surprise!—they were.”

  To players like Newton, Harper, Irvin, Fleming, Haley, and Lett (among others), the White House was an oasis. To the White House cleaning ladies, it was the worst gig in the neighborhood. For $75 a week, the two women hired to straighten up were subjected to a cornucopia of used condoms, discarded bras, sex toys, and crusty carpet stains. “They used to find all kinds of crazy, crazy shit,” says a friend of one of the women. “You can’t even imagine…”

  If Newton, Harper, and Irvin were the mayors, the governor was Haley, who considered the White House a home away from home. Players would escort women through the front door, direct them toward the rear bedroom, then—wham, bam—enjoy and discard them with a sort of automated efficiency. Supposedly happily married to Karen, whom he met while both were undergrads at James Madison University, Haley regularly brought his various flings to the House and fired away. “Charles was banging this girl who lived in the apartment under me,” says Joe Fishback, a defensive back in 1993 and ’94. “You could literally hear them doing it.”

  The first member of the media to write of the White House was the Miami Herald’s Dan Le Batard, who merely mentioned it in passing in a larger piece about partying in the NFL. “The reality is that many teams throughout the league had places like the White House,” says Le Batard. “But the Cowboys were the biggest, baddest, best, and anything they did was vastly more magnetized.” Upon reading Le Batard’s story, the Dallas media went to work. In truth, many were well aware of the White House and its going-ons, but chose to ignore the story in the name of player-press relations. “Everyone knew about it, but what are you going to do, run a story about the guys cheating on their wives with hookers?” says Rob Geiger, a reporter for KRLD radio in Dallas. “The writers understood not to write about it, the radio and TV guys understood not to talk about it, because we’d be vilified by the fans and locked out by the team.”

  It was a gargantuan lapse in news judgment. The White House had everything one craves in a story—sex, drugs, fame, football.

  When word of the White House finally broke, Jones and Switzer confessed to being shocked (shocked!) that a place of such ill repute existed. The Cowboys, after all, were a wholesome operation, made up of loyal, family-oriented men like, um, Jones and, uh, Switzer who would, eh, never, ah, dream of…cheating, uh, on, eh, a female. “Jerry Jones was chasing and fucking the same women Michael Irvin was,” says Anthony Montoya, the gofer for Cowboy players. “He was out there just as bad as anyone else. I have no beef with that, because if you can get the pussy at that age, more power to you; I’m happy for you. But Jerry saying he didn’t know about the White House is a fucking lie. A big fucking lie. I’d get calls from the team saying, ‘Can you get X player. We hear he’s out at the White House.’

  “And usually,” says Montoya, “they were right.”

  More than ever, the Cowboys missed Jimmy Johnson. Perhaps not his on-field coaching abilities so much as his discipline. His knowledge. His common sense. His authoritativeness.

  Had the Cowboys partied under their former coach? Sure. Had they drank and drugged and chased women? Sure. “But you always knew you had to answer to Jimmy,” says Darren Woodson. “Under Barry it was pretty much do whatever the hell felt good.”

  In the aftermath of the Lett-Holmes bombshell, the Cowboys began to show cracks. Though they defeated the Eagles 34–12 on November 6 to improve to 8–1, they followed the victory by getting demolished by the 49ers, 38–20, at Texas Stadium. Leading up to the game, Sand
ers devoted his time to incessant locker room yapping, claiming he was wronged by the 49ers and would seek revenge. In a team meeting he stood up and said, “Just line me up on Jerry Rice and y’all play zone or whatever you wanna do.”

  Oops. Despite being 131/2-point favorites at home, the Cowboys were embarrassed. San Francisco scored 17 points in the first five minutes. Two plays into the game, the 49ers led 7–0 on an 81-yard catch-and-run by Jerry Rice (Rice finished with 5 catches for 161 yards, laughing at Sanders all the way). A couple of plays later San Francisco was up 14–0 after a fumble recovery and 38-yard touchdown return by defensive back Merton Hanks. On the Dallas sideline, eyes stared downward. On the 49ers sideline, chins were held high. Irvin was limited to a season-low 4 catches for 37 yards. Aikman was forced from the game with a bruised knee following a brutal sack by Dana Stubblefield. Switzer looked, as always, confused. “San Francisco beat us like we stole something,” says safety Greg Briggs. “I mean, it was ugly.”

  At 8–2, the Cowboys were the worst best team in football. They won in spite of themselves; in spite of the off-the-field distractions that mounted like a LEGO tower. “We weren’t very good,” says Woodson, “but we somehow kept winning.” Following the 49ers debacle, Dallas defeated Oakland and Kansas City, then lost to the lowly Redskins, 24–17, at Texas Stadium on December 3 to fall to 10–3.

  Yet within the intricacies of a relatively meaningless setback (at 3–9, Washington was no longer a threat to capture the NFC East) came a defining, disturbing moment. During the game’s third quarter, in what spectators viewed as an otherwise insignificant sequence of events, wide receiver Kevin Williams sprinted 8 yards, turned left, and caught…nothing. For what had to have been the twentieth time that season, Williams ran the wrong route. Aikman—usually cool, calm, reserved—was tired of it. He was having an erratic day (29 of 48, 285 yards, one late touchdown), and Williams’s absentmindedness wasn’t helping. “Kevin, get this fucking right!” the quarterback barked. “It’s not that hard!”