Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  For 99 percent of the Cowboys, the exchange was no big deal. Quarterbacks yell at receivers—it’s part of the job description. “Signal callers are supposed to have balls,” says Newton. “Troy had big ones.” Yet for one Cowboy assistant coach, the incident reeked of wrongheadedness. Of arrogance. Of…racism.

  Not that John “Boo” Blake should have had much say on Aikman’s relations with African-Americans or, for that matter, anything. The team’s thirty-four-year-old defensive line coach, Blake, who is black, was known to be neither wise nor particularly useful. He did, however, have the ear of Switzer, who had recruited Blake to Oklahoma as a nose tackle out of Tulsa’s Charles Page High School, then brought him back as a graduate assistant. While working under Switzer at OU, Blake was mockingly nicknamed “Back ’Em Up Boo,” in that his primary task seemed to be scooting players off the sideline during games. Blake was actually hired by the Cowboys in 1993, when Johnson was in need of an assistant, but he gained true power under Switzer. “John wanted to be one of the guys more than he wanted to be a coach,” says Tony Casillas, who knew Blake dating back to his collegiate days at Oklahoma. “He talked out of both sides of his mouth, and you can’t do that and expect to have players trust you. Instead of just doing his job, he had an agenda.”

  As the other coaches would congregate among themselves, Blake sat with the black athletes, talking shop and taking mental notes to relay to his boss. Like several of the team’s veterans, Blake had his own small crew—Sanders and Kevin Williams chief among them. Though Williams took Aikman’s tongue-lashing during the Redskins game in stride, Sanders did not. “Why is it that Troy only screams at the brothers?” Sanders asked Blake. “I never see him yell at a white guy.”

  Following the game Blake told Switzer that the Cowboys’ African-Americans were tired of Aikman’s redneck ways. It was a charge Blake had made before, but never so vociferously. So what if Aikman had blown his top at Mark Stepnoski, Kevin Gogan, Dale Hellestrae—white offensive linemen—in the past? So what if Aikman considered Irvin to be a brother? (“I am as black as anybody you could ever see,” Irvin had said. “I am a black man with a black scarf on and I’m wearing black shades. I am as black as they come. And I know [Aikman] loves me.”)

  “You have to remember that ninety percent of the team is black,” Haley said. “If he’s going to yell at someone for making a mistake, it’s probably going to be a black guy who made the mistake.”

  Two days after the game Switzer summoned Aikman to his office for a meeting. By this point, the coach-quarterback dialogue had reached a new low. In Aikman’s mind, Switzer was an unadulterated, overmatched buffoon. From Erik Williams’s car accident to Lett and Holmes to the White House to undisciplined practices to sloppy game plans, what was going right? In Switzer’s mind, Aikman was an arrogant player doing his all to undermine the team.

  “Troy,” Switzer said, “it’s been brought to my attention that some of the black players don’t think you’re being fair. They think you’re taking a lot out on them, but that you never yell at the white guys.”

  Aikman was dumbfounded.

  “I just think you might be wise to apologize to Kevin for yelling at him,” Switzer said. “Why not go do it? It’ll help your cause a good deal.”

  His cause? Aikman’s cause was winning football games, not resolving inane conflicts with inept wide receivers and do-nothing, big-mouthed assistant coaches.

  When word spread through the locker room of what had transpired, most players—black and white—were appalled. “That was just stupid,” says Woodson, the African-American safety. “Troy was not racist. He didn’t care if you were black, purple, yellow, orange, or green. He wanted to win football games, and he would yell at you whether you were Nate Newton [black] or Mark Stepnoski [white]. There were certain players who confided in John Blake and listened to what he had to say. I was not one of them.”

  “It was bullshit,” says Kevin Smith, another African-American defensive back. “When you hear that Troy was disliked, that comes straight from Blake and Deion.”

  Though Aikman begrudgingly spoke privately to Kevin Williams, the damage was done. He stormed out of the facility and called Dale Hansen, the Cowboy announcer. “Boy, was he furious,” says Hansen. “Beyond furious.” Thanks to Sanders, Blake, and Switzer, a once-harmonious locker room was coming undone. A black-white divide had formed among certain players. From this point on, Aikman’s relationship with Switzer was over. Throughout the year, he had been convinced that Switzer was bad-mouthing him to Blake and Skip Bayless, the local columnist who, after the season, would publish Hell-Bent, a scathing Cowboy biography.

  “Troy was able to overlook a lot of things,” says Hansen. “But when the Kevin Williams incident took place, Troy pulled me aside and said, ‘I’ll never trust that sonofabitch Switzer again.’”

  Surely, the season could turn no stranger. By early December, Dallas was the drunk-driving, drug-using, hooker-seeking, White House-frequenting, racism-accusing leader of the NFC East; a 10–3 Super Bowl favorite with a magnetism for turmoil reminiscent of the ’77 New York Yankees.

  On December 10, they traveled to Philadelphia to play the 8–5 Eagles, a mediocre team that had just lost to the lowly Seattle Seahawks.

  This was a game the Cowboys should have won.

  This was a game the Cowboys blew.

  Well, not the Cowboys, per se, but Switzer. The contest encapsulated not merely Dallas’s season, but—in the eyes of many—Switzer’s NFL career. “Boneheaded coaching,” says Hansen, “by a boneheaded coach.”

  Dallas jumped out to a commanding 17–6 lead, but the league’s twelfth-ranked defense allowed Philadelphia to battle back. Behind quarterback Rodney Peete, Aikman’s former backup, the Eagles cut the deficit to 17–14. With eleven minutes, fourteen seconds remaining and Dallas on the Eagles’ 2-yard line, Emmitt Smith took the handoff from Aikman and charged toward the game-sealing score. Instead of playing hero yet again, however, Smith had the ball knocked from his left arm by linebacker Kurt Gouveia—Smith’s seventh fumble in fourteen games. Philadelphia recovered, and a couple of possessions later Gary Anderson’s field goal tied the contest. “I still thought we were going to win,” says Woodson. “It was the confidence that came with being a Cowboy.”

  On their next drive, Dallas faced a fourth-and-short from its own 29-yard line, the teams still deadlocked at 17. In the world of PlayStation, it’s a no-brainer: You ram the ball down the Eagles’ throats. In the NFL, however, you punt. You don’t think about punting. You don’t debate punting. “You punt the ball,” says Randy Galloway, the famed columnist. “Every single time.”

  Switzer did not punt. With a stiff wind blowing in the Eagles’ favor, offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese called “Load Left.” As 66,198 fans screamed through the frigid wind, Smith took the handoff, stepped left, and—BAM! He was stopped for no gain by Gouveia. The stadium erupted. The Cowboys offense began to move off the field. The Eagles pumped their fists. The…

  Wait.

  Upon further review the referees determined that the two-minute time-out had been reached before the snap. The play didn’t count. Dallas would have another chance to punt. Surely, John Jett could at least knock the Eagles out of field goal range with, say, a solid 30-yard boot. “Once you don’t make it that first time,” says Galloway, “you change tactics.”

  Undeterred, Switzer not only again went for the first down, but called for another Smith run. “You’re just hoping Troy is gonna say, ‘This isn’t right,’” said Daryl Johnston, the fullback. “Call a time-out. Explain your point. ‘Hey, we’ll do this but give us a different play.’” But Aikman and Switzer did not have a relationship. Smith again grabbed the ball from Aikman’s right hand, headed toward the line, and—BAM! BAM!—was met by linebacker Bill Romanowski and lineman Daniel Stubbs, who stopped him for no gain.

  Four plays later, Anderson kicked a 42-yard field goal.

  Eagles: 20

  Cowboys: 17

&
nbsp; Switzer: Humiliated.

  “If it was fourth-and-one I would have punted,” Switzer maintains to this day. “But it was fourth-and–three inches. I believed in my guys—period.”

  In Fox’s New York studio, Jimmy Johnson was stunned. “I don’t care if it’s high school football, college football, or what have you,” he said. “In a tie game, you punt the football.” Switzer defended himself by saying, “If we punt they’re going to get a shot at a field goal anyway,” which only exacerbated Johnson. “Obviously, people will say the decision to go for it on fourth down was dumb,” he said. “But his explanation for not punting the football was dumber.”

  Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, now working for NBC, called the sequence “the sequel to Dumb and Dumber.” Galloway penned a Morning News piece titled GET BARRY OUT OF HERE IMMEDIATELY. In the Kansas City Star, Jason Whitlock fired away: “It may go down as the dumbest decision in recent American history—dumber than Chris Darden’s glove demonstration, more stupid than Clarence Thomas’ Coke-can pickup line, more ignorant than Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate and more foolish than major-league baseball’s work stoppage. Only the Bootlegger’s Boy could blow the easiest yes-no question in football—twice in less than a minute.” (“Who are my critics?” counters Switzer. “The guys who sat out of PE class and never dressed in the eighth grade because they didn’t want to play.”)

  On the Wednesday following the loss, Sanders ranted against anyone who dared rip his coach. “We just had fourth down and a pinky to go,” he told the press. “We should have gone for it. We’re still cool on this team. We’re upset by the loss, but there is no great concern, no great panic in motion. But you [the media] have got to be fair…we’re human beings also. There are no problems on this team even though we’ve had a few stumbles. Go ask thirty other teams if they would like to be 10–4.

  “Around here, if you win it’s not good enough and if you lose you are damned. I guess if you win the Super Bowl they [the media] would say you should have won by forty.”

  Though Sanders’s on-field impact had been minimal (Dallas was 4–3 in games he played), his words lit a fire. The players were tired—damn tired—of a press corps that wouldn’t rest until the Cowboys were portrayed as fools and losers and hapless morons. “Everyone loves a success story,” says Newton. “And once you succeed, everyone loves tearing you down.”

  Against all odds, a club that had just experienced one of the most humiliating defeats of the decade bounced back. On December 17 it squeaked past the Giants 21–20 on a last-second field goal, then the following Sunday flew to Arizona for a final week of Monday Night Football. Two hours into the trip a stewardess announced that the Falcons had shocked San Francisco, 28–27. With a win against the Cardinals, Dallas would clinch home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. “It was like a switch had gone off and all of a sudden the whole plane was excited,” said Aikman. “Now we were going to Arizona for a reason.”

  Newly inspired, the Cowboys crushed the Cardinals, 37–13, as Emmitt Smith scored his NFL-record twenty-fifth touchdown of the season.

  Yet in the ups and downs of a trying year, everything returned to Aikman and Switzer, two men who, in the end, did not like, respect, or appreciate one another. Shortly before the Cowboys would open the playoffs, Aikman carefully, cautiously revealed his feelings toward Switzer in a scathing interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Having spent the entire year seething, the quarterback could no longer keep it all inside. He needed to vent. “What I’ve always believed is that we all need to be committed to reaching our potential,” Aikman said, “and if we’re ever doing less than that, I don’t want to be a part of it.” It wasn’t difficult to figure to whom Aikman was referring. “For sixty minutes,” he continued, “I get to do what I enjoy. But this has not been an enjoyable year for me, in regard to things outside the football field. I know it’s totally a business. I do still get the spirit of competition, the camaraderie with the guys, the emotions. But beyond that, everything that’s happened has taken a lot out of me. At some point, there will be a physical reason to retire. Or there will be the fact that it’s just no fun.”

  Switzer responded by noting that Aikman was a bright man listening to the wrong people—namely Brad Sham and Dale Hansen, the team’s radio announcers. “Troy gets squeezed all the time by people who have their opinions of me,” he said. “People who pretend to be his friend are trying to create a separation.”

  Upon hearing Switzer’s response, Aikman lost it. Create a separation? All the quarterback desired was a coach who understood what it took to win in the NFL; who worked hard, required some semblance of discipline, and didn’t skip meetings to watch his son play small-time college football. “Troy is a low-maintenance guy,” says Rob Awalt, his former teammate. “He just wants loyalty. From pals, from teammates, from coaches. He wants to know you’ve got his back.”

  Switzer didn’t have his back. But at least there was some good news. On December 31, the University of Oklahoma concluded an arduous search by naming its new head coach—a thirty-four-year-old alumnus with a passion for all things Sooners and the football IQ of a Girl Scout.

  John Blake would go 12–22 in three seasons with the Sooners before being fired. He is regarded as the worst head coach in school history. But for Aikman, his hiring was a blessing.

  Blake was leaving Dallas.

  As the Cowboys spent their bye week waiting to learn whom they would face in the playoffs, Philadelphia was busy thrashing the Detroit Lions, 58–37. It was one of the most dominant performances in Eagles history, and turned what should have been a modest, hoping-for-the-upset football team into a swaggering, trash-talking, bravado machine.

  Instead of returning to Philadelphia to prepare for the Cowboys, whom they would face on January 7, 1996, Eagles coach Ray Rhodes led his team to Vero Beach, Florida, where it would train in seclusion at Dodgertown, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ spring training facility. Rhodes compared the Eagles to a military battalion. “We didn’t get to the playoffs just to be there,” Rhodes said. “We’re fighting to get a win. I want to turn this into an army-camp atmosphere.”

  Quarterback Rodney Peete followed his coach’s lead, telling the media that Dallas was overrated and beatable.

  Then the Eagles got thumped. Or, more accurately, Neoned.

  With the game tied 3–3 five minutes into the second quarter, Cowboys offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese called Fake Tailback Jab Right Z Reverse Left. As soon as he heard the play leave Aikman’s lips, Sanders looked around the huddle, smiled, and said, “Touchdown, baby!”

  Aikman took the snap, faked a handoff to Emmitt Smith, and gave the ball to Sanders, who came dashing by from behind…

  Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh!

  Sanders’s 21-yard score wasn’t a run, per se. It was a rocket launch. He took the ball, headed left, then—bottled by defenders—spun and turned right. Sanders exploded toward the end zone, past flailing defenders and through the crisp 26-degree air. “He’s got no moves,” said an awestruck Emmitt Smith, “but he’s as fast as I don’t know what.”

  At long last, a Sunday afternoon in Dallas belonged to Sanders. Upon reaching pay dirt, Sanders did his first jig of the season, a semi-stylish, New Kids on the Block–meets–the San Diego Chicken number that reminded teammates that football can still be, well, fun. “Deion’s my boy,” said Irvin. “I ride with him to the airport and all I ever hear is, ‘Man, I’ve got to get into the end zone.’ I’m glad he finally got there so I could see the dance.”

  The game was all Prime Time. He intercepted a pass, returned two punts for 21 yards, caught a pass for 13 yards, and nearly snagged a sideline bomb from Aikman. The Cowboys won handily, 30–11.

  “We kicked their ass today,” said a visibly relieved Switzer. “If we’d played like that last time, it wouldn’t have come down to fourth-and-a-foot.”

  As soon as the Cowboys and Packers were confirmed to meet in the NFC title game, a predictable
local and national media felt compelled to evoke the 1967 NFL Championship clash, which featured Dallas traveling to Green Bay for the now-historic “Ice Bowl.”

  (Cue Sam Spence music.)

  On that day, two evenly matched teams battled through temperatures that plummeted to –13 degrees (coupled with a windchill of –48 degrees) before Packers quarterback Bart Starr dove into the Lambeau Field end zone with thirteen seconds remaining for a 21–17 win. The game was an instant classic.

  Yet any comparisons between the teams of the Ice Bowl and the modern-day Cowboys and Packers were forced. Vince Lombardi’s 1967 Packers of Bart Starr, Willie Davis, and Forrest Gregg were far superior to the modern, up-and-coming Pack of Brett Favre, Reggie White, and LeRoy Butler. The current version of Green Bay’s gridiron heroes won the NFC Central Division with an 11–5 mark, but were merely a good team. The Cowboys of ’95, on the other hand, were significantly more talented than the ’67 edition.

  The opportunity to return to the Super Bowl had Dallas in a renewed state of euphoria. Not only had Cowboy Fever returned to the city, but so had Packer Disgust. In the days leading up to the game, the Kroger supermarket chain pulled all Wisconsin-made cheese products from its Dallas shelves. Minyard’s Grocery Store went one step further, firing Sam Young, a twenty-six-year-old bagger, when he arrived at work wearing a Packers T-shirt. “Write me up, send me home, dock my pay,” Young said. “But don’t fire me.”

  Though the Cowboys knew they were the better team, there was concern over Favre, a cocky, tobacco-chewing quarterback who turned ordinary receivers into great ones. Dallas’s defensive philosophy was simple—badger Favre into committing mistakes—and ineffective. On the second play of the second quarter, Favre hit tight end Keith Jackson with a 24-yard touchdown pass and the Packers took a shocking 17–14 lead. Texas Stadium, earlier swaying with emotion, turned into a ghost pavilion.