Boys Will Be Boys (24 page)

“The forgiveness began for Coach Landry right there,” says Staubach. “It was very meaningful for him.”

As he walked off the field, Landry looked to the stands and smiled. A man who was revered for his sense of righteousness had, in the end, done the right thing.

Of America’s major professional team sports, none offers the unpredictability of football. While baseball’s pennant race is exciting and the NBA presents unmatched flair, the NFL is the lone entity where today’s Super Bowl favorite can be tomorrow’s cellar dweller.

For this, there is a single reason: injuries.

From the garden-variety sprains and bruises that happen twenty
or twenty-five times per game to the torn rotator cuffs and snapped femurs that wipe out entire seasons, the NFL team that finds itself unprepared for maladies is the NFL team that has a season doomed to be flushed down the toilet.

In 1993, the Dallas Cowboys seemed doomed.

With nine minutes, thirty seconds remaining in the third quarter of the November 7 Giants game, Aikman was being chased by defensive end Keith Hamilton when his left shoe stuck to the artificial turf. With a scream, Aikman collapsed and grabbed for his left leg. “We’re treating it with ice,” Robert Vandermeer, the team’s physician, said afterward. “We hope it’s not too bad.”

In the following days Aikman could be seen limping around the locker room, an armful of ice packs strapped to what was diagnosed as a strained left hamstring. He was out for the upcoming game against Phoenix, and perhaps for several more weeks as well.

If Jones and Johnson had learned anything from their early failures, it was the value of a top-notch backup quarterback. With the laughable Babe Laufenberg at the helm for the final two games of 1990, the Cowboys flopped. With Steve Beuerlein filling in for Aikman the following year, Dallas went 6–0 and beat Chicago in the playoffs. Unfortunately for Johnson, Beuerlein had signed a lucrative free agent deal with the Cardinals after the ’92 season. In his place Dallas traded for Millen, a seventh-year veteran who had spent much of the past two seasons starting for New England. Millen was a laid-back Seattle native who arrived in Dallas with a higher annual contract than Aikman’s. When Jones called him into the Valley Ranch offices and told him, “You’re making more money than Troy, and we can’t reconcile that,” Millen smiled and cracked, “Well, I have no problem with Troy getting a raise.” Millen’s salary was promptly slashed to backup level, and he spent the preseason playing bargain-basement football. “I wasn’t happy with how I performed, and neither were they,” Millen says. “I struggled.”

Hence, when Aikman went down against the Giants Johnson decided Dallas’s new starter would be a freckle-faced redhead whose ré
sumé was highlighted by unexceptional stints with the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League and the San Antonio Riders of the World League. Jason Garrett didn’t even have much in the way of a college background—he played at Princeton, where he was named the 1988 Ivy League Player of the Year. When he walked through the locker room at Valley Ranch, teammates often serenaded Garrett with chants of “Roo-dee! Roo-dee!”

To make matters more confounding, five days before the Cardinals game Dallas signed Bernie Kosar, the former University of Miami quarterback who had been released by Cleveland earlier in the week. Though only twenty-nine years old, Kosar seemed to have aged overnight. His passes lacked zip, and his mobility was nonexistent. Despite such concerns, Jones agreed to pay Kosar $1 million for the remainder of the year. “They talk around here about how they don’t have the money,” snapped an agitated Emmitt Smith, still licking the wounds of his contract war. “But they get a new quarterback and they give him big money. I don’t understand it.”

Smith quickly came to understand it when Garrett took the field at Texas Stadium on November 14, strolled into the huddle, and showed the poise and moxie of a six-year-old. Garrett’s eyeballs were the size of silver dollars. Across the line of scrimmage, Phoenix’s defensive linemen took pleasure in filling his head with the vilest of threats. They were going to break Garrett’s legs and tear off his head. “When you looked at Jason, it was obvious he wasn’t an amazingly gifted athlete,” says Rich Bartlewski, a Dallas tight end. “He relied on intelligence and doing things right at the right times.”

On this day, Garrett was all wrong. He attempted six passes in three offensive series, completing 2 for 25 yards. By late in the first quarter Johnson had seen enough. The gawky Kosar trotted into the game and connected on 13 of 21 passes for 199 yards and a touchdown. He was methodical in approach and Aikman-esque in demeanor, and Dallas beat the lowly Cards, 20–15. Following the 0–2 start, the team had won seven straight.

“We’re hoping Troy will be back with us,” Johnson said afterward. “If not, we’ll be a much-improved team next week with Bernie Kosar.”

As it turned out, the Cowboys were
not
a much-improved team with Bernie Kosar the following week. They weren’t even a good team, falling to the Falcons, 27–14, at Atlanta. But while the loss was disconcerting to Johnson and Co., in Dallas it ranked a distant second to the biggest news since the Kennedy assassination.

Troy Aikman was in love.

In a city that cherished its heartthrobs, Aikman was the biggest to come along in decades. To start with, he was the star quarterback of the Cowboys—a 6-foot, 4-inch, 220-pound custom-made classic with a crooked smile and freckled skin that reddened in the sun. Aikman was everything white Dallas looked for in its leading men. He eschewed sneakers for cowboy boots and sweatpants for tight Wranglers. His car of choice was a pickup truck and his favorite band Shenandoah. In an era where a wad of chewing tobacco was no longer the status quo, Aikman pulled it off with aplomb. He made spitting sexy.

Not that Aikman went out of his way to endorse the image. Following the ’91 season he was asked to appear on an episode of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
celebrating fantasy dates. “When you walk onto the stage, come out in jeans and boots,” a producer told him. “It’ll be great.” Aikman did as he was instructed, only to find the other men decked out in snazzy suits and ties. “I think they wanted me to look like a hick,” he said. “I may have grown up in the country, but to simply describe me as a country boy is rather narrow-minded. I’d like to think there’s more to me than that.”

Aikman was intelligent and contemplative. Though raised in all-white environs that bred a certain degree of prejudice, he maintained open-mindedness toward teammates of different races and ethnicities. While his best friend on the Cowboys was fullback Daryl Johnston, his brother—the man he’d have taken a bullet for—was Irvin. “Troy
valued loyalty more than any other quality,” says Brad Sham, the Cowboy announcer. “He’ll always have loyalty toward Michael, because Michael is loyal toward him.”

What Aikman lacked, but craved, was that sort of bond with a member of the opposite sex. Although he’d dated a steady stream of women during his first four years in Dallas, nothing stuck. Like many athletes, he was suspicious of those interested in spending time with him. Did they want his money? His fame? An experience to brag about to their friends and coworkers? He once returned to his house to find a couple of strange women eating pizza on his patio (they had scaled the fence). Another time a woman licked Aikman’s face as he bent down to help her pick up a napkin. “Troy had to fax his grocery list to Tom Thumb Market because when he shopped there it’d cause a near-riot,” says Rob Awalt, the former Cowboys tight end. “He was the Elvis of Dallas.” Aikman even had a code—“Eight ball”—that translated to friends and companions as, “Let’s get the hell out of here. It’s too crazy.”

Dale Hansen, the Cowboy radio announcer, still recalls a night during the 1990 season when he, Aikman, and Kevin Gogan went to Borrowed Money, a popular country-and-western bar. As soon as Aikman walked through the door, a tidal wave of humanity surged his way. “Troy agreed to sign autographs for thirty minutes,” says Hansen. “I mean, girls were on all fours, crawling under a rope to get a piece of him. He could have slept with any number of drop-dead gorgeous women there that night. But that generally wasn’t Troy’s way. He wasn’t looking for that.”

No, he was looking for love. And here it was—here
she
was.

Throughout much of the season, there were ever-intensifying reports of Aikman’s involvement with Lorrie Morgan, the sexy blond country music star whose hits included “Five Minutes” and “What Part of No.” Though modestly accepted in Nashville for her passable vocal skills, Morgan was best known as a pre–Shania Twain sex symbol—one who made form-fitting outfits and low-cut shirts a prime component of her image. In August, Morgan even wrote a guest review for the
Morning News
of Aikman’s song, “Oklahoma Nights.” (“We all
know Troy’s not a professional singer…but I think he did a real good job. It’s possibly a very sexy voice over candlelight.”) Never was Aikman’s attachment to Morgan more visible than before the Cowboys-Cardinals game, when Morgan sang the national anthem, walked toward the injured quarterback, and embraced him in a kiss. A day later, Aikman and Morgan walked arm-in-arm to a sports memorabilia auction benefiting the Troy Aikman Foundation. To male fans, the news of Aikman’s attachment was greeted with a sort of “Way to go, bro” collegiality. Morgan, after all, was a blond bombshell. Women, though, were devastated. Troy Aikman was the ultimate fantasy, and as long as he was single, there was always a chance.

“They only wound up dating about a year, but it was a huge deal in Dallas and Nashville,” says Susan Nadler, Morgan’s former spokesperson. “Every day there seemed to be a different sighting in the newspaper. There’d be Troy and Lorrie eating, Troy and Lorrie walking, Troy and Lorrie kissing. But you know how football fans get. When Troy got hurt or didn’t play well or the Cowboys lost, Lorrie would get blamed.”

As Aikman became moderately comfortable with the celebrity of his romance, he was more willing to be spotted with Morgan (who was in the process of divorcing her third husband and would later date Fred Thompson, the 2008 presidential candidate). Yet over time, with her music career calling her to Nashville and his football career keeping him to Dallas, the relationship frayed. By the end of the season Aikman would be single once again.

Women across the state of Texas let out a cheer.

In the months that followed his fumble near the end of Super Bowl XXVII, Leon Lett received enough venomous letters to fill the combined mailboxes of Howard Stern and David Duke. Gamblers enraged over his flub’s impact on their bets would track down Lett’s home phone number and threaten to lodge a bullet through his temple. Fans would see him in the grocery store or a movie theater and crack jokes. Kids would point his way and snicker, “He’s the guy who blew it.”

Lett tried to brush it off; to pretend the words didn’t wound. But they did. Dating back to his youth in Fairhope, Alabama, Lett was the athletic star who preferred invisibility to the limelight. “I think everyone has met a guy like Leon,” says Darren Woodson. “A big guy, a huge guy, tough as nails and nice enough, but he could not talk to people. It probably took me three years to have a conversation with him. He just wanted to be left alone.”

If the Super Bowl gaffe was hell to Lett, what next transpired was an endless loop of
Joanie Loves Chachi.
Aikman returned from his two weeks off to lead the 7–3 Cowboys into a Thanksgiving Day matchup with Miami at Texas Stadium. At 8–2, the Dolphins were the class of the AFC. Prognosticators hyped the game as a potential Super Bowl XXVIII matchup—Jimmy Johnson versus Don Shula; Michael Irvin versus Irving Fryar; Troy Aikman versus um, well, thirty-nine-year-old Steve DeBerg (Dan Marino was injured).

To the surprise of few, the Cowboys jumped out to a 14–7 lead on two big plays courtesy of rookie Kevin Williams—a 4-yard touchdown reception and a 64-yard punt return, also for a score. Unfortunately, the Dolphins’ defense, ranked twenty-fourth in the league, held the Cowboys scoreless in the second half. The biggest factor was the fierce sleet that pelted the field. “Sunshine is nice,” said Miami fullback Keith Byars, “but when the elements come into play, that’s when we find out which players can step up.”

With two minutes, sixteen seconds remaining in the game and Dallas leading 14–13, the Dolphins took over on their own 20-yard line. Dismissed throughout the years as someone who would break a coach’s heart with boneheaded decisions, DeBerg coolly guided his team into Dallas territory, completing 8 of 11 passes, including a clutch 16-yard connection with Byars. With fifteen seconds remaining and Miami out of time-outs, kicker Pete Stoyanovich lined up for a 41-yard field goal attempt. Under normal circumstances, Stoyanovich ranked as one of the league’s best. He’d converted 81 percent of his attempts in 1992, and 84 percent in both ’90 and ’91.

But with the sleet and the snow and the cold and the wind, a
kicker’s odds (especially a Miami-based kicker) dropped precipitously. When the ball was snapped, Stoyanovich leaned forward, whipped his leg back, kicked the ball, and—
THUD!
From the middle of the defensive line, Jimmie Jones had raised his arm into the air and knocked the ball to the ground. It rolled and rolled and rolled toward the 7-yard line. “Peter!” yelled Dallas safety Darren Woodson, shouting the code for
Don’t touch the damn football!
Others joined in. “Peter! Peter! Peter!” (Explained Joe Avezzano, the special teams coach: “That term ‘Peter’ originated years before because it means, uh, don’t play with it.”)

Out of nowhere came Lett, barreling into the football like a moose on Rollerblades. Well aware that with Lett’s contact the ball was now live, Dolphins center Jeff Dellenbach slid through the ice and snow and recovered the ball in the end zone. Miami players screamed, “Touchdown! Touchdown!” while Dallas’s defenders looked on in befuddlement.

Officials initially placed the ball at the 7-yard line, then moved it to the 1, the spot where Dellenbach made the recovery. Given the second chance, Stoyanovich nailed the kick.