Boys Will Be Boys (15 page)

Wait. Hold on. Perhaps this is overly dramatic. After all, some would say the wedge between owner and coach first came to be on February 25, 1989—the day Jerry Jones announced he had purchased the Dallas Cowboys. They were never as close as it seemed, of course, but there was a mutual need. Jerry Jones
needed
Jimmy Johnson to win football games. Jimmy Johnson
needed
Jerry Jones to purchase the chess pieces.

But until 1992—until success was not a
hypothetical,
but an
inevitability
—the egos of two men with grandeur in their horoscopes coexisted well. Yes, the coach was exasperated by the owner’s buffoonery—his desire to drag celebrities into the locker room after games; his tendency to name-drop and brag of a gridiron knowledge that, quite simply, didn’t exist. And yes, the owner wondered aloud why his coach was so guarded; so secretive; so damn stubborn. Why he refused to let the man paying the bills into his inner circle?
Dammit
, Jones thought,
I own this team, not Jimmy
. But again, before 1992 everything was under control.

And then, during the ’92 preseason, it started. The
I
Syndrome.

Where once there was “We” in the Cowboy-themed sentences of Jones and Johnson, now—suddenly—it was all “I.” When the Cowboys traded for Haley, Johnson intoned, “
I
thought Charles could bring
a lot to the table.” When the Redskins were battered and bruised, Jones bragged, “The way
I
built this team…” The two not only noticed each other’s linguistic transformations, but raised the ante with comical regularity. There might be no
I
in T-E-A-M, but there was plenty of it in J-O-N-E-S and J-O-H-N-S-O-N.

Though Jones was often irritated by Johnson’s need for control, it was the coach who fumed—and rightfully so. Why was it that whenever the media wrote about Dallas’s rejuvenation, it was always HOW THE JJ TWINS TURNED AROUND THE COWBOYS (
Newsday,
July 14, 1991) and JONES, JOHNSON REVIVE COWBOYS FAST (
Washington Times,
September 6, 1991)? When it came to seeking out oil, Jones’s accomplishments could not be denied. When it came to football, however, Jones was a dolt. Sure, Jones could watch a Herman Moore and understand why the Detroit wide receiver was a star. But in terms of the nitty-gritty—in deciding whether a Division II nose tackle could transition to NFL linebacker or whether an opposing team was disguising its blitz package—he was no more insightful than the schlub at home in his Barcalounger.

When Bob Oates of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote that Jones “makes the calls in the Cowboys front office while Johnson replaces Landry on the practice field,” he was eating out of the owner’s hands. Because he played collegiately, and because he had paid $150 million to purchase a team, Jones considered himself Johnson’s football equal. He took credit for moves in which his sole contribution was an official sign-off. Jones bragged about the 1990 trading of Steve Walsh to New Orleans, even though Johnson had brokered the deal. He talked about how he ironed out the Haley blockbuster, when it was Johnson and the team’s advance scouts who did 99.9 percent of the grunt work. And for Christ’s sake, how many times did Johnson have to hear about Jones’s draft-day genius? Were it up to the coach, Jones would spend the two days of the NFL Draft relaxing on a beach in Bermuda or climbing Mt. Washington or…something.
Don’t call us, Jerry. We’ll call you.

Instead, Jones had treated the most recent draft as if he were planning his own bar mitzvah. Having invited ESPN’s cameras into the
team’s “war room,” Jones surrounded himself with friends, family members, and associates—all to make him appear presidential. Inside the room were Jones’s two sons, his business partner, his treasurer, his marketing director, and a gaggle of corporate sponsors.

“I can’t control that,” an exasperated Johnson told writer Skip Bayless. So, ever the brawler, Johnson invited his own entourage. While most teams had, oh, six or seven men in their draft bunkers, the Cowboys’ room contained nearly forty.

More than anything, Johnson blamed Jones—whom he considered to be excessively tightfisted—for unnecessary training camp holdouts. He found Jones’s rip-the-agent-to-the-press tactic during the Emmitt Smith negotiations of 1990 to be juvenile. This year was even worse. During Irvin’s holdout Jones refused to offer the receiver more than $700,000 per year—and it was baffling. Hadn’t Irvin just caught 93 passes for 1,523 yards? Hadn’t he emerged as the team’s leader and spark plug?

So, as the Cowboys prepared to travel to New York for a Week 2 meeting with the Giants, Johnson upped his efforts to shut Jones out. To players, Johnson complained their owner’s meddling was damaging morale. To the scouts and coaching staff, Johnson moaned that, because of the owner, they were all underpaid. “Jimmy kept his coaches and players as far away from Jerry as he possibly could,” says one team official. “It was sad, because Jerry meant well and wanted to help in any way he could. But in Jimmy’s mind it was
his
team, not Jerry’s.”

The most impressive attribute of the ’92 Cowboys? None of it mattered. Contract holdouts, coach-owner disputes, Haley’s penile Olympiads, late-night clubbing with Michael Irvin and twelve strippers—distractions came, distractions went. Dallas stormed into Giants Stadium and, before New York coach Ray Handley could blink, attacked the hosts with unrivaled ferocity. Dallas drove 72 yards on its first possession to build a 7–0 advantage, then followed with a blocked punt by linebacker Robert Jones. When Cowboy defensive back Robert Williams rovered the ball in the end zone, Dallas was up 14–0—and the rout was on. By the end of the second quarter the score was 20–0,
and New York had yet to achieve a first down. At halftime the scoreboard read 27–0.

As they entered the locker room, Dallas players behaved as if they were planning a week at Club Med. Under Johnson’s hypercompetitive guidance, rarely was any lead big enough. But here they were, up big and already thinking of the week ahead.

Uh-oh.

When Aikman hit Irvin with a 27-yard touchdown pass early in the third quarter, the score was 34–0 and the stadium broke out into a chant of “Ray Must Go!” (Having replaced Bill Parcells, the charisma-deprived Handley was reviled in New York.) The Cowboys’ defense came out relaxed, and New York—unburdened by the expectations of victory—pounced. Quarterback Phil Simms led his team to consecutive touchdown drives of 80, 80, 62, and 55 yards, and a once-mute Giants Stadium crowd turned wild. In the history of the NFL, no team had ever overcome a 34–0 deficit. Now here were the Giants, down 34–28 late in the fourth quarter. Up in the coaches’ box, defensive coordinator Dave Wannstedt was losing his cool. At one point, with New York facing a second-and-7 at the Dallas 21-yard line, he looked at the field and screamed into his headset, “Who’s got the tight end?”

Again—“Who’s got the tight end?”

Nobody answered. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Wannstedt yelled. “Nobody’s got the tight end.”

Moments later, Simms found receiver Ed McCaffrey for a 19-yard gain.

In the end, Dallas held on—barely. With 3:42 left in the game, the Giants had the ball on their own 19-yard line. Simms coolly jogged onto the field, a wave of noise drowning out his play calls. Panic reigned along the Dallas sideline.
What if we lose this game? How will we ever recover?
On first down, Haley charged through the line, forcing Simms to toss an incomplete pass. On second down, Simms completed a pass for 1 yard. On third down, another completion, this one for no gain. New York punted. Wannstedt praised Jesus. Dallas hung on.

Afterward, Tony Wise, the offensive line coach, put the afternoon
in perspective: “We’ve got a lot of young guys,” he said, “with shit stains on their underwear.”

Ghosts are unpredictable. According to mediums, they arrive when they want and haunt as they please. Throughout history there have been millions of sightings, at venues ranging from the White House to the Kremlin to a Toys “R” Us in Sunnyvale, California.

On October 5, 1992, a specter would appear before the most unlikely of places—the Dallas Cowboys defensive.

Unlike your clichéd, run-of-the-mill spirit, cloaked in either invisibility or a king-sized sheet, this specter wore a helmet, shoulder pads, and the white-and-green home uniform of the Philadelphia Eagles.

His name was Herschel Walker.

In the three years since Dallas had hoodwinked the Minnesota Vikings, Walker had become an NFL cautionary tale. He was Exhibit A in the no-single-player-is-worth-all-those-picks rule of thumb to franchise building. When a team talked about swinging a trade, someone inevitably would note, “We don’t want to end up with a Herschel.”
Ha, ha, ha.

It was all fun and games for everyone but Walker, who had gone from the featured back on America’s Team to a joke. “He’s a con artist,” one NFC personnel director told
Sports Illustrated.
“Nobody has made more money and done less.” Following a 1991 season in which Walker ran for just 825 yards, the Vikings exhausted every effort to trade him. Only the Eagles showed any interest. They signed him as a free agent and found themselves with an angry, motivated thirty-year-old. “People have questioned my heart,” he said early in the season. “Go ahead and get in the ring with me. I’ll tear your head off.”

Walker spoke in general terms, but his target easily could have been the Cowboys. Following the victories over Washington and New York, Johnson’s team beat up on the Phoenix Cardinals, 31–20, to post its first 3–0 start in nine years. After a bye in Week 4, Dallas traveled to Philadelphia for a Monday night dance with the Eagles and their new tailback.

Though coach Buddy Ryan had been replaced by the mellow Rich Kotite, and All-Pro nose tackle Jerome Brown had died in a car accident, Philly appeared as physical as ever. Quarterback Randall Cunningham was healthy for the first time in months, and Walker was pounding opposing tacklers. In anticipation of the Cowboy game, the
Philadelphia Daily News
ran a twenty-page pullout section on the matchup. WIP sports radio began its pregame show fifteen
hours
before kickoff. Tickets were being scalped for $225 a pop. This was big.

An hour or so before the game, Jimmy Johnson strolled to the Eagles’ side of the field to seek out Walker. Though the Cowboys coach was never a fan of his former halfback, he’d always had respect for the man. Walker was, after all, a kind and decent soul, hard to root against in even the most heated of rivalries. “I’m glad to see you doing so well,” Johnson told Walker. “You deserve the success.”

If Johnson was trying to soften Walker up, it didn’t work. In what surely goes down as one of the most gratifying days of his life, the Eagles running back scored on second-half touchdown runs of 9 and 16 yards in a resounding 31–7 victory. Long ripped for possessing the dexterity of a boot, his first score—the 9-yard bolt out of the I-formation—was a thing of beauty. Walker took the handoff from Cunningham, broke Ken Norton’s tackle in the backfield, shifted from left foot to right, and followed a block into the end zone.

Meanwhile, Emmitt Smith—beloved by Dallas fans in a way Walker never was—was held to 67 yards on 19 carries. That, along with Aikman’s 3 interceptions, was more than enough charity for a fierce Philadelphia defense. The game was never close.

“All this misery for Dallas,” wrote Randy Galloway in the
Morning News,
“and even Herschel gets to rub it in.”

In the wake of the Eagles loss, Johnson looked over his men and insisted this was “a test.”

“We’ll see who you are,” he said, “champions or pretenders.”

In a 27–0 rout of Seattle the following Sunday, the Cowboys an
swered, blitzing and battering Seahawks quarterback Dan McGwire until he could be blitzed and battered no more. The younger brother of Oakland A’s slugger Mark McGwire, Dan was a 6-foot-8, 243-pound oak tree, prime for chopping. The Cowboys hit him high, low, helmet-to-helmet, helmet-to-back. They told him that he sucked, that he was a punk, that he was theirs for the taking—and his mama, too.

The Cowboys defense sacked McGwire four times, knocked him out in the third quarter, then sacked backup Stan Gelbaugh three more times. Seattle lost yardage on five of its first fourteen offensive possessions and averaged 1.3 yards per snap, gaining 62 total yards and only 8 on its final thirty-one plays. Tony Tolbert and Jim Jeffcoat each had two sacks and safety Ray Horton returned an interception 15 yards for a touchdown. “This,” said Jeffcoat, “was the best defense I’ve ever seen us play.”

On a wall in Wannstedt’s office hung a chart featuring the record of the 1976 Pittsburgh Steelers defense. With quarterback Terry Bradshaw battling neck and wrist injuries, the unit carried the franchise to a 10–4 record, pitching five shutouts, holding one team to 6 points, and limiting two other teams to single field goals. “Eight games without allowing a touchdown,” Wannstedt raved. “Now that’s a dominating defense.”

The chart was not mere wall fodder, but a message to his troops of what they could accomplish. “And it began,” Wannstedt says, “with the defensive line.” On most teams, there was a clear order: Starters started, backups came in occasionally to provide a breather. Under Wannstedt, however, the Cowboys shuttled linemen as if they were commuters on a train platform. The starters were Haley at right end, Casillas and Russell Maryland at the tackles, and Tolbert at left end. But there was almost no drop-off when the reserves—Chad Hennings, Jimmie Jones, Leon Lett, and Jeffcoat—entered. “Those were the hardest-working guys I’ve ever been around,” says Hennings. “We challenged each other to be great.”

Although Haley was the star and Tolbert and Lett on the rise standouts, the heart of the line was Jeffcoat, who at age thirty-one possessed maturity most teammates lacked. When the Cowboys initially signed
Haley, Johnson called Jeffcoat into his office. “We got Charles Haley, and eventually he’s going to be the starter,” Johnson explained. “You’ve got two ways you can look at this: You can become more valuable to us because of the things you can do in the pass rush, or we can cut you.”