Boys Will Be Boys (37 page)

What few Steelers could know in the immediate aftermath was that while O’Donnell was responsible for interception number one, it was the inexperienced Hastings who, in the final minutes, cost his team the victory with the errant route. Hastings later publicly blamed O’Donnell, kicking off a mini–war of words among ex-Steelers. “That definitely wasn’t Neil’s fault,” says Tomczak. “He made a read and it was right. Mistakes were committed by other people. But the quarterback always gets blamed.”

Though O’Donnell turned into Pittsburgh’s No. 1 goat, Brown found gridiron salvation. Upon entering the locker room, he was
greeted by an unruly serenade of “L. B.! L. B.! L. B.!” The twelfth-round pick was now Super Bowl XXX’s unlikely MVP. He would get the car and—as a pending free agent—a $12 million contract to join the Oakland Raiders.

Wrote Shaughnessy in the
Boston Globe:
“[Brown] was like a backup catcher who wins a World Series game by getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded. He did almost nothing to earn the trophy. Twice Brown was standing in the open field, minding his own business, when an O’Donnell pass came his way. Both of his catches could easily have been made by Mike Greenwell, Jose Canseco, Charlie Brown or Downtown Julie Brown.”

Few could argue.

“Man, Larry knows he’s lucky,” says Briggs, the Cowboy defensive back. “If I’m standing there like he was, minding my own business, I’m the Super Bowl MVP. Shoot, that would have been sweet.”

Briggs pauses, taking a minute to reconsider.

“But you wanna know something?” he says. “Larry was a great dude. And guys like that deserve to have their moments too. So God bless Larry Brown. God bless him.”

T
WO WEEKS AFTER
the Super Bowl, the Cowboys met with President Bill Clinton at the (real) White House. This being the team’s third championship in four years, a trip to the nation’s capital no longer had the same cachet. It was old hat—the reason a mere eighteen players attended.

As is standard ritual, the president held an East Room ceremony, during which he said some kind words, then was presented with Cowboy memorabilia. Afterward the players formed a line in the Blue Room, and Clinton gradually worked his way down, shaking hands and engaging in a bit of chitchat.

Near the end of the line stood seldom-used running back David Lang, rookie tight end Eric Bjornson, and Charles Haley, who had just won his league-record fifth Super Bowl ring. As Clinton approached, Lang nudged Bjornson and, with a sly grin, said, “Watch this.” When
the president stuck out his hand, Lang softly grabbed his bicep and said, “Hey, man, you’re sorta big!” Clinton was flattered. “Thanks,” he said. “Not too bad for an older guy, right?”

With that, Haley leaned over and whispered softly to the leader of the free world, “Don’t listen to him, Mr. President. He’s bisexual.”

What?

“Clinton has this awkward look on his face,” says Bjornson. “And I feel like the biggest horse’s ass, standing between these two clowns. It was typical crazy, from-the-seat-of-his-pants Charles.”

It was also one of the final moments of innocent mischief for a football team that had long ago lost its moral compass, its personnel judgment, and, in many respects, its way. As the Cowboys shuffled off from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and back out into the real world, a bitter truth awaited. Throughout football history, few dynasties stretched beyond a decade. Oh, Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers had dominated the NFL during much of the ’60s, and the Steelers of the ’70s and 49ers of the ’80s certainly boasted impressive runs. But every successful franchise inevitably encountered a tipping point, be it influenced by age, player turnover, or a mounting lack of discipline.

For the Dallas Cowboys, a team that somehow managed to overcome one drama after another in 1995, all three would apply.

Many believe the downfall officially commenced five weeks after Super Bowl XXX when, at 11:45
P.M.
on March 3, 1996, Mike Bailey, a manager of the Residence Inn in Irving, Texas, picked up the phone and dialed 273-2450, the number of the local police department:

OPERATOR:
“Irving Police Department. This is Laura…”

BAILEY:
“We have two individuals that keep checking into our hotel and…the better word is, they’re prostitutes. They’ve been running the rooms and when we have to clean up after them we have been finding cocaine and crack and marijuana. Well, they’re back…”

At 11:55
P.M.,
four policemen arrived at the hotel. When Officer Matt Drumm knocked on the door of Room 624, he heard shuffling,
but nobody answered. “When we did get the door [partially] open, they had the security bar on it,” said Drumm. “A big cloud of marijuana smoke came out.”

The door was finally opened by Angela Renee Beck, a twenty-two-year-old “model” and former dancer at the Men’s Club of Dallas. She was wearing a black miniskirt and halter top. Standing inside the room was another “model” and former Men’s Club dancer, Jasmine Jennifer Nabwangu, twenty-one, and two football players. One, former Dallas tight end Alfredo Roberts, remained silent. The other did not.

“Hey,” said Michael Irvin, “can I tell you who I am?”

“I know who you are,” replied Drumm.

With that Irvin, wearing baggy blue jeans but no shirt, hung his head.

The officers confiscated 10.3 grams of cocaine and more than an ounce of marijuana, as well as rolling papers, a six-inch tube used for snorting cocaine, and two vibrators. Because Beck claimed the drugs were hers, Irvin, Roberts, and Nabwangu were not arrested. But for the brightest of the Dallas Cowboys’ stars, the succeeding attention was far worse than a night in the clink. A local television station broke the story, and rival networks quickly followed with their own reports of Irvin’s soiree.

“I don’t understand how you can be so stupid to get yourself in that position,” says Chris Boniol, the Cowboys kicker. “What the hell are you thinking?”

Sandy Irvin, the woman Michael still loved, learned of the drug incident from watching TV. She was hurt, scared, enraged, and—mostly—humiliated. Her marriage had been one embarrassment after another, but this was, hands down, the worst. “I’m on my way home,” Michael Irvin later recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘What am I going to say? What will I say?’ It’s one thing to have a thought that your husband is doing something. It’s a whole other thing to turn on Channels 4, 7, 10, 11 and he’s right there. So…I walked in the house—I was getting ready to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’—and all she said was,
‘Baby, don’t apologize to me. You need to go in the room and make your peace with God.’”

Was the five-time Pro Bowler truly addicted to cocaine? Few who know him—friend or enemy—believe the question can be answered with a black-and-white reply. (Anthony Montoya, Irvin’s gofer, says, “Mike didn’t have a drug problem. He had a pussy problem.”) Irvin could spend three days gobbling up drugs as if they were Pez, then devote a month to nothing but football. Repeatedly Irvin told people that winning was the ultimate euphoria, but he also relished the feeling of a quick high, and
really
enjoyed the feeling of a quick high in bed with two or three women.

The Irving police initially seemed willing to back off of Irvin and only pursue charges against Beck. Yet the receiver’s arrogance was just too much. Irvin skipped one scheduled grand jury appearance and arrived for another sporting $500 sunglasses and distributing donuts to nearby reporters. The behavior would have been egregious enough had Irvin not been wearing a black floor-length mink coat. “I remember saying to Mike, ‘You just can’t wear that sort of outfit to court,’” says Jay Ethington, one of Irvin’s attorneys. “He turned to me and said, ‘Jay, I’ve got a different audience than you.’ That’s when it dawned on me—it was all theater to him.”

In the month following the incident at the hotel, a Dallas grand jury indicted Irvin and the “models” on two counts of drug possession (the grand jury took no action against Roberts). Irvin pleaded no contest to second-degree felony cocaine possession and was fined $10,000 and placed on four years’ probation. He was suspended for the first five games of the 1996 season. “It was around that time when I really felt Mike wasn’t in control of himself anymore,” says Kevin Smith, the Cowboys cornerback. “He just didn’t care. His attitude was, ‘To hell with it and to hell with this city. I don’t want to play football anymore.’” Indeed, Irvin would spend night after night with different women ingesting different drugs, often going long stretches without contacting his wife. Was Michael high? Was he dead? Sandy Irvin had no idea. “I would call his cell phone, and what I would do is leave a
message telling him that we love him,” she said. “I knew that Satan had him out there in deep, deep dark hell.”

In the Cowboy offices, Irvin’s downfall was striking. Yes, he had issues. But he was also a team leader. He was bighearted and open-minded, and would do anything to help a teammate. Why else would Aikman—with nothing to gain from the publicity—attend Irvin’s trial for all the public to see?

Why? Because Irvin would have done the same. “Everything that happened in Mike’s life was self-inflicted,” says Larry Brown. “He wasn’t someone who tried to damage others. He’s like an alcoholic, in that the problem was something he wanted to handle, but couldn’t. His demon was with women and sex. I couldn’t be mad at him for that, because it wasn’t his choice. It just…
was.
”

The Cowboys had planned on marketing themselves as the reigning Super Bowl champs and the dynasty of the decade, but the good vibes were dwarfed by all the bad. Nobody in the media cared about players holding charity bowling tournaments or traveling to unique vacation spots or posing for pictures with poor little Butchie Smith at the Boys & Girls Club (the requisite offseason story lines that fill the three-month dead zone between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft). Whereas Irvin was once hyped from within as the name and face of the Dallas Cowboys, now he was raw meat for the news media—yet another clichéd-but-irresistible tale of the great athlete gone bad.

The Cowboys hardly helped themselves as an organization. As the Irvin case began to unfold, Jerry Jones decided it wise to sign free-agent linebacker Broderick Thomas, who had recently been arrested for trying to bring a semi-automatic pistol through the metal detector at Houston Intercontinental Airport. Such was the swagger of the Dallas owner, who seemed to take pride in confronting criticism with bold (read: inane) moves that spit in the face of the general public.
You think we’re bad off with Irvin. Well, wait’ll you get a load of the next guy we sign!
At his best, Thomas was a marginal player whom most NFL teams avoided with a 100-foot goalpost. Not Jones—he was in the business of making statements.
We’re the Dallas Cowboys, and we’ll do whatever we damn well
please.
Noted William Bennett, the former U.S. secretary of education: “If this is America’s Team, then woe is America.”

By the beginning of the ’96 season, the media had made sure the country was fully aware of the Cowboys’ thousand-page résumé of misdeeds. There was the White House. There was Erik Williams’s drunk-driving accident, as well as charges of sexual assault by the sixteen-year-old topless dancer. There were the drug-related suspensions of Leon Lett and Clayton Holmes. There was defensive end Shante Carver, who during the ’94 season wrecked his truck in an accident, but reported it stolen to the police. (Carver would also be suspended six games in ’96 for violating the league’s substance-abuse policy.) There was wide receiver Cory Fleming, who failed the drug-and-alcohol test administered to him immediately before Super Bowl XXX and was subsequently released. There was, of course, Irvin, who arrived at a south Dallas drug treatment center for his first day of community service accompanied by an entourage of seven hangers-on. “We should have policed ourselves,” says Chad Hennings. “When I was in the military, anyone who messed up would be pulled aside and told, ‘You’re screwing up, and it can cost lives.’ In Dallas, it wasn’t costing lives. But it was costing livelihoods.”

The Cowboys were crumbling. Fans still filed into Texas Stadium in 1996, but the connection between Average Joe and Football Star had disintegrated. Whereas Cowboy die-hards once pulled earnestly for men like Irvin and Lett, now they felt fewer and fewer emotional connections. Drug users? Strip club patrons? Criminals? These were the Cowboys?
Our Cowboys?
Fans love players they can relate to. But who could relate
to this
?

Without their game-breaking receiver and emotional spark plug, the Cowboys were lost. They went 2–3 to start the ’96 season, then celebrated Irvin’s return by struggling against the woeful Arizona Cardinals in a lackluster 17–3 victory. “We’re not close to being a championship team,” Darren Woodson said afterward. “If we think getting Michael back fixes everything, we’re kidding ourselves.”

By now, it was painfully clear that Jones’s decision to run Jimmy
Johnson out of Dallas had been a gargantuan mistake. Perhaps Jones was correct that any moron with a clipboard could have coached the ’92 and ’93 Cowboys to Super Bowls. But Johnson was more than a coach. He was a guru. When Switzer arrived in 1994, so did the first NFL salary cap, which limited teams to $34.6 million in player salaries. Jones was successful in many fields—salary cap management
not
being one of them. “Jimmy understood franchise construction better than Jerry or Barry,” says Larry Lacewell, the director of college and pro scouting. “He would have been on top of free agency, would have found a way to figure it out.”

With Jones serving as the primary decision-maker, the Cowboys blew a third straight draft, using their first pick in 1996 to select defensive end Kavika Pittman out of McNeese State (ouch), then following with linebacker Randall Godfrey (solid), center Clay Shiver (ouch), wide receiver Stepfret Williams (ouch), defensive lineman Mike Ulufale (ouch), offensive lineman Kenneth McDaniel (ouch), linebacker Alan Campos (ouch), defensive back Wendell Davis (ouch), and running back Ryan Wood (ouch). Save for Godfrey, who enjoyed a productive four-team, eleven-year NFL career, all were busts. “Jerry has done a phenomenal job promoting the franchise,” says Hennings. “But is he a football guy? Does he know the Xs and Os? Does he know personnel? It’s like the Ronald Reagan principle—you have the best people around, delegate, and stay the hell out of the way. That’s where the downfall of the Cowboys organization starts. Sometimes Jerry needs to stay out of the way.”

Under Johnson’s reign, every Cowboy knew whom he had to answer to. Now, if Switzer called for a meeting and Sanders had a problem with the time, he’d take matters into his own hands. On multiple occasions, Sanders was told he needed to arrive at Valley Ranch for, say, a 7:30
A.M.
training session. “And Deion would say, ‘Well, that ain’t gonna work for my schedule,’” says Jean-Jacques Taylor, the
Morning News
beat writer. “‘Let’s call 952 [Jones’s extension] and see about that.’” Sanders would connect with Jones, ask for the training to be pushed back an hour, and without fail hear the owner say, “Sure. No problem. I’ll tell Barry.”

In the best of times, Johnson would never, ever,
ever
allow such behavior. Yes, he had his favorite players. Yes, he gave leeway to the stars. But nobody—not even Jones—walked all over the coach. If a meeting was scheduled for 7:30, you damn well better have arrived at 7:15.

“When you look at the best leaders in history, whether we’re talking militarily or professional sports, there’s usually one voice,” says Dave Campo, the Dallas defensive coordinator. “Jerry never tried to coach the football team, but he felt it important to be involved in everything. That doesn’t work.”