Boys Will Be Boys (19 page)

The 49ers responded with a field goal, but on their next series the Cowboys scored again, this time on a 16-yard pass to Emmitt Smith. With 12:25 remaining in the game, Dallas held a 24–13 lead.

Then the Cowboys coaching staff outthought itself.

Norton intercepted Young on the ensuing possession, and Emmitt Smith’s 28-yard scamper through the San Francisco defense gave the Cowboys a first-and-10 from the 49er 16-yard line. But Dallas struggled to move the ball, and found itself facing fourth-and-1 on the 7 with 7:13 left to play. Johnson looked down the sideline toward Lin Elliott, the rookie free agent kicker who’d missed 9 of 35 field goal attempts. Johnson liked Elliott; thought the boy would have a solid NFL career. But now was not the time to test the mettle of young kickers—it was the time to put a knife to the 49ers’ throat.

Norv Turner called for Aikman to hand the ball off to Emmitt Smith, who had run for 1,713 yards in the regular season and surely could grind his way to one more. Johnson signed off.

But with the Candlestick Park faithful screaming and the field looking like a half-baked cake mix and the future of two franchises in the balance, Smith took the handoff, cut behind right tackle—and met a brick wall: Mike Walter, linebacker. No gain.

On the sideline, Johnson was dumbfounded. Did that just happen? The 49ers offense charged back onto the field, and with 4:22 remaining Young hit Rice with a touchdown pass, cutting the Dallas lead to 24–20. It was not hard to predict what was about to transpire: The 49ers’ defense would stop the Cowboys, then Young would strut back onto the field, guide his team to glory, and take the greatest franchise in modern football history to a fifth Super Bowl. Wrote Paul Zimmerman in
Sports Illustrated
: “The momentum had switched, all right, and when you’re a coach caught in a momentum shift, you do one of two things: You ride with it and pray, running the ball and working the clock in the hope that the other team won’t have enough time to beat you, or you try to switch the momentum back in your favor and put the game away.”

Johnson was no wimp. He chose the latter.

The Dallas coach sent Aikman onto the field with instructions to win a trip to the Super Bowl. On first down from the Cowboys’ 21-yard line, Turner called for Ace Right 896 F Flat—a crossing pattern to Irvin, who had spent much of the day manhandling the 49er secondary. Dallas had already run the play successfully five or six times, with the ball always going to Harper, who, as the second option, would run 10 yards and curl. “Michael got greedy,” said Aikman. “He was tired of running [the cross] and not getting the ball. So as we’re breaking the huddle, Michael says to Alvin, ‘You take the [cross], I’m taking the [curl].’” Aikman dropped back and immediately checked on Irvin, who was blanketed, so he looked for Harper. “We rarely threw the ball to Harper on the slant because he’s got those short ‘alligator arms,’” said Johnson. But as Irvin’s understudy crossed the middle of the field, Aikman hit him in dead stride, cornerback Don Griffin slipping a couple of yards behind. Throughout his first two years in the league, Harper had earned the reputation as an undisciplined route runner with a low football IQ. This time he was perfect. Harper angled across Candlestick’s battered turf, mud and muck leaping from his heels. When he was finally tackled, it was at the 49ers’ 9-yard line.

The stadium, euphoric seconds earlier, was now a winter’s crypt. No noise. No emotion. The 49ers were about to lose, and the Bay Area’s denizens seemed to know it.

On third-and-goal Aikman hooked up with Kelvin Martin on a 6-yard touchdown pass and, even with a blocked extra point, the Cowboys held a commanding 30–20 lead. When safety James Washington intercepted Young’s pass to Mike Sherrard, the Cowboys could finally celebrate. They had overcome the weather, the naysayers, the Team of the ’80s, and the specter of “The Catch” to reach the Super Bowl for the first time since 1979. For Kevin Smith, the capper came late in the fourth quarter, when a beaten-down Rice cut-blocked him from behind
and
flashed the middle finger.

“You don’t do that,” laughs Smith, “if you’re winning.”

As his team stormed into the locker room, hugging and whooping, a relieved, exhausted,
giddy
Johnson praised the men he had
tormented, tortured, loathed, and loved. Aikman, the quarterback he had once called a loser, completed 24 of 34 passes for 322 yards and 2 touchdowns. Emmitt Smith, the running back he wasn’t interested in, ran for 114 gutsy yards. Irvin, the receiver he considered cutting, caught 6 balls for 86 yards. Robert Jones, the linebacker he humiliated, made several key tackles. Three years after their 1–15 debacle, the Cowboys were heading to the Rose Bowl, site of Super Bowl XXVII.

Surrounded by his players, Johnson beamed from ear to ear. “Everybody,” he screamed, “you did one helluva job! And all I’ve got to say is, how ’bout them Cowboys!”

Yeah!

Fuck yeah!

Let’s get ’em!

Hell, yes!

The Buffalo Bills awaited.

T
HE
D
ALLAS
C
OWBOYS
spent much of the next six days bunkered at Valley Ranch. They finally flew to Los Angeles on the afternoon of Sunday, January 24, eager to dive into an ocean of pre–Super Bowl XXVII goodies but equally intent on avoiding the unavoidable pitfalls.

Yes, the Buffalo Bills awaited them.

But so did temptation.

Super Bowls are tailor-made for mishaps. Take forty-six horny, handsome, athletic, twenty-something-year-old men, place them in a city known for sexy women, late-night clubs, and rock-your-world drugs…then shake and serve. Only two Cowboys—Charles Haley and Ray Horton—had experienced a Super Bowl before. For the rest, this was Mardi Gras.

Though it would be six more years before an Atlanta Falcons safety named Eugene Robinson was arrested the night before the Super Bowl for offering an undercover female police officer $40 for oral
sex, Jimmy Johnson made certain his players comprehended—or at least
seemed
to comprehend—what they were in for.

Before allowing his troops to hit L.A. for a Sunday night of all-out debauchery, Johnson called a meeting to issue a stern warning. The Cowboys had no curfew their first three nights, then an 11
P.M.
room check the rest of the week. “When you lay down a two-by-four board in the middle of a room, most everybody can get on that board and walk across it and not fall,” Johnson said. “Now take that board up ten stories high between two buildings. Some of the people aren’t going to make it across that same board because they let themselves get distracted.

“If you let it overwhelm you that this is going to be the single-most-watched sporting event in the entire world this year; if it overwhelms you that there are three thousand media people here; if it overwhelms you because of how much money is involved, it will be a distraction. Don’t be distracted by the fact that there are other things going on here besides football this week.”

As soon as they were dismissed from official team duties, the Cowboys stormed Los Angeles like ants upon a picnic basket. Headquartered in the luxurious Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel (as opposed to the Bills, who were shacked up at the Hyatt Regency in boring, deserted-at-night downtown L.A.), members of the team
might
have thought they’d hit it big when they headed down to the lobby bar and spotted the likes of Gene Hackman, Tom Berenger, Whoopi Goldberg, and Betty White (Yes,
Betty White!
). But they
knew
they had it made when it was learned that a who’s who roster of models from a New York City agency were pitching tent in the hotel for a week of photo shoots.

Such potential conquests were why, in the days after the San Francisco triumph, the Cowboys held a vote as to whether wives should be allowed to come immediately or be forced to wait until later in the week. Nary a player raised a hand in favor of an early arrival.

“I’d say most of the women knew what was going on and sort of accepted it as a trade-off for the lifestyle,” says Lisa Holmes, the
spouse of Clayton Holmes, a defensive back. “As a wife, you’d find phone numbers in your husband’s pocket, find pictures of half-naked women with CALL ME notes on the back, know he was going to a strip club with the guys. I guess we all wanted to believe the best, but we knew.”

With rare exception, the majority of the Cowboys viewed getting married as an annoying-yet-required obligation that men in their mid-twenties did because, uh…hmm…well…nobody was quite sure why. Some married their childhood sweethearts. Others wed college girlfriends. The vast majority of WOCs (Wives of Cowboys) were long-legged, big-breasted beauties with résumés chock-full of homecoming queen anointments. Yet the vast majority of their husbands cheated on them with reckless, indifferent abandon.

“I was a terrible husband—the worst there ever was,” says Nate Newton. “I loved my wife, but I didn’t want to be just with her. She’d be lying if she told you I said it’d be any different. My wife knew who I was. Oh, she’d say, ‘But you were gonna try!’ Maybe, but this is who I am and this is how I act.”

“What can I tell you?” says James Washington. “A lot of us were addicted to
it
.”

To what?

“To the pussy.”

In Los Angeles,
it
was everywhere. At the hotel bar, where women in miniskirts and leather pants paraded their wares like peacocks at a petting zoo. At the clubs, where “Oh my God—he’s a Cowboy!” spread from lips to ears to lips to ears. “Being a Cowboy—the women came easy,” says Lin Elliott, the scrawny 6-foot, 180-pound rookie
kicker
. “I was a slightly-out-of-shape balding guy who wore glasses, but the star on the helmet works magic. If I had practiced kicking footballs as hard as I worked on chasing girls and drinking beers, I’d have had a fifteen-year career.”

Throughout a week that, according to the pundits, was all about gridiron supremacy and the American game and football immortality, Dallas’s players overtook the town. There were parties atop parties,
from singer Babyface’s gala at Club Escape to a ten-women-for-every-guy shindig hosted by rapper Heavy D. The ultimate blast was NBA star Ron Harper’s twenty-ninth birthday bonanza, featuring a wall-to-wall army of celebrity men and half-naked women. “Man, I met
a lot
of people in that one night,” says Kenny Gant, the reserve safety. “I met Magic Johnson; I met the chicks from [the TV show]
Martin
and danced with them. It was insane.”

In what may well be an NFL record, Michael Irvin escorted approximately a dozen women to his hotel room in a four-day span—and his wife didn’t get mad. Not once. Of course, she didn’t know, either. “The one thing I feel guilty about is helping Mike lie so many times to Sandy,” says Anthony Montoya, Irvin’s assistant and a team gofer. “He cheated on her nonstop, and we always had to make sure she never found out. It hurt me, because she deserved better.”

“Mike had more pussy stories than anyone I’ve ever met,” says Jean-Jacques Taylor, the longtime
Dallas Morning News
writer. “He was legendary.” Others—Alvin Harper, Nate Newton, and Charles Haley among them—were near legendary. If Irvin had a dozen women, the nine or ten Alvin Harper latched onto wasn’t so shabby, either (his wife, Jamise, was in the dark, too).

In storming their way through Los Angeles, the Cowboys somehow managed to escape the gossip columns. This was due in large part to Bills linebacker Darryl Talley, who on that first Sunday night accompanied some teammates to a Sunset Boulevard club called Roxbury and found himself face-to-face with Magic Johnson’s bodyguard. According to witnesses, Talley, a ten-year veteran and two-time Pro Bowler, and Bills quarterback Jim Kelly drank excessively and teased Johnson—who is HIV-positive—about his nightclubbing ways. The ribbing went too far. Johnson’s bodyguard—a mountainous man nicknamed “Big Anthony”—first advised Bills lineman Bruce Smith to have his teammate “cool it down,” then punched Talley in the face, flipped him to the floor, and said, “Let’s stop it here.” The
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
termed it “the first unofficial contact drill of Super Bowl XXVII.”

Although Dallas’s players were significantly wilder than the relatively mild Bills (a handful of Cowboys were at Roxbury when “Talley-gate” took place), the hundreds of media representatives in attendance found the incident too juicy to ignore. Talley was forced to hold a redemptive press conference, but when his answers came off as unrepentant (“What would
you
do in a bar?” he snapped when asked if drinking was involved) Bills coach Marv Levy tried to defend his player. The succeeding twenty minutes were even more disastrous. “The report is untrue,” Levy said. “It didn’t happen. It’s a lie! It’s a lie!”

In addition to finding the whole Talley affair uproarious, the Cowboys were encouraged that, in the heat of the action, not one Bill came to the linebacker’s defense. As he sat bloodied and humiliated on the Roxbury floor, teammates failed to gather around Talley. “No chance that happens with us,” says Kevin Smith. “Absolutely no chance. We looked out for each other.”

Had this incident been insufficient to convince the Cowboys that they would walk all over the Bills, then a final week of practices and tape sessions did the trick. Making their third straight Super Bowl appearance (and still without a win), Buffalo was a solid, talent-laden ball club that committed a lot of mistakes and, according to Johnson, played tissue-soft football. In an early-week meeting with his players, Johnson implored the Cowboys to smack Kelly around—even when there was no reason to do so. “Make sure he knows you’re there,” Johnson said. “Touch his uniform, tap his helmet, step on his foot—make him
feel
us. Make him scared.” The coach assured his team that the Bills, fearful of dropping yet another Super Bowl, would inevitably unravel. “Capitalize on mistakes,” he said, “and we can’t lose.”

The youthful Cowboys were portrayed as the team more prone to nervousness, and nothing could have been further from the truth. Take Tuesday’s Media Day, when Dallas’s players and coaches gathered on the Dodger Stadium infield and set the press ablaze with a charm, charisma, and swagger last seen at a Super Bowl seven years earlier, when the Chicago Bears of Jim McMahon, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, and Walter Payton dazzled the masses.

The star of the show was Johnson, who seemed to enjoy escaping from his cave after a season of eighteen-hour workdays. Runner-up was Johnson’s hair, famously coiffed to take the form of a light brown ladybug shell. Throughout his years as the Cowboy coach, Johnson had faced an endless stream of questions about his trim—
What do you use? How come it never moves?

Now, Johnson reveled in the attention, especially when a sexy MTV veejay named Downtown Julie Brown ran her hands through his scalp and smiled devilishly. “What’s the one rule of thumb you’ve given to the players?” she asked, shoving a microphone in the coach’s mug.

“Don’t kiss Julie Brown!” Johnson yelped—then smooched her on the lips.

The Buffalo Bills came to Los Angeles sporting a 14–5 record and featuring a high-flying, no-huddle offense. Led by Kelly, running back Thurman Thomas, and 65-catch receiver Andre Reed, the Bills scored the third-most points in the league, regularly overwhelming opposing defenses.

But while the Cowboys enjoyed a week of good times and crisp practices (“In my four years with the team, we’d never, ever looked that sharp,” says receivers coach Hubbard Alexander. “I don’t think we dropped a pass all week”), Buffalo appeared tight. The team’s workouts were unusually quiet and stiff. Banter was kept to a minimum. Such was the by-product of repeated big-game failure. Drop one Super Bowl—no biggie. Drop two in a row—trouble’s brewing. Drop three—you’re Greg Norman.

But the Bills were more than tight. They were anxious. Paranoid, even. On the Monday before the game, the Bills practiced in jerseys without numbers—an effort by Levy to confuse the imaginary spies he believed to be watching Buffalo’s every move. Two days later, Bill Polian, the team’s general manager, demanded security investigate a pair of binoculars peeking out from a nearby window (nothing was uncovered). On Thursday, three days before the game, Polian ordered that
security confiscate the film of an Associated Press photographer. Every move the Bills made reeked of nervousness. “Apples to apples, I think we were the better team,” says Bills safety Kurt Schulz, a rookie at the time. “But they had something that allowed them to play at a higher level. Maybe the monkey on our back was too heavy. One thing I know—the pressure we put on ourselves was greater than what the Cowboys felt.”

Especially at ease was Aikman, the former UCLA quarterback who felt at home practicing on his old campus in his old city. Save for a highly publicized dinner date with actress Janine Turner of the TV show
Northern Exposure,
Aikman kept the week simple. A few days before the game, he was driving along the Pacific Coast Highway with Mike Fisher and Richie Whitt of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
when a radio DJ cracked the joke, “What’s the difference between a football and a gallstone?”

Lengthy pause.

“Jim Kelly can pass a gallstone.”

Aikman smiled. “Don’t laugh too hard,” he told the scribes. “Come Sunday they could be making that joke about me.”

But they wouldn’t be, and the Cowboys knew it. On the Saturday night before the game, Johnson relocated his team from the hopping Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel to the quiet Beverly Garland Hotel, where they could peacefully reflect in the final hours. In his address to the players over dinner, Johnson spoke of “planting the seed.”

“I know that your thoughts are that you’d like to do this for certain individuals,” he said. “The best way to honor those individuals is to go out there and play your ass off for yourself. Because this is something that all of us will have with us for the rest of our lives. The best way for those people to remember you and remember this game is with a Super Bowl ring on their finger, remembering the feeling of the win.”

The room fell silent. Players looked at one another, almost in a sort of reverential meditation. “We loved each other—all of us,” says Newton. “The last thing we wanted to do was let our teammates down.
We were gonna win the motherfucking game for each other. For our brothers.”

For the first time since the team’s arrival in Los Angeles, that night not one player violated curfew or hit the town for a few beers or invited three strippers onto the premises. Instead, the Cowboys congregated in their hotel rooms and played cards, watched movies, ordered room service, and talked shop. “That was something special about that night,” says Kenny Gant. “I was Alvin Harper’s roommate, and we just sat there with Clayton Holmes and Derrick Gainer, unable to sleep, planning for the biggest game of our lives. Just talking.”

Aikman, who had spent most of the week holed up with his new Mac Apple PowerBook 160, hung out with John Gesek, Jay Novacek, and long snapper Dale Hellestrae and watched
Unforgiven,
the Academy Award–winning Clint Eastwood film. In one of the more memorable scenes, the characters portrayed by Eastwood and Gene Hackman fight beneath a driving rainstorm.