Boys Will Be Boys (23 page)

A bawling Haley proceeded to approach Jones, lean into his ear, and whisper, “Sign Emmitt! I don’t care how you do it. Cut me. Take the money out of my check. Just sign Emmitt!” It was a new type of crazy for Haley, who—in a career chock-full of nutty moments—had never before whipped a helmet at the man signing his paychecks.

Lassic, meanwhile, sat quietly at his stall. It wasn’t his fault Smith remained unsigned—but it sure felt that way. “The fans showed no class,” he said of the merciless booing. “But it really bothers me when one of my teammates says something like that. That hurts bad. I only heard it from one person, but it makes me wonder what everybody else is thinking.”

Prior to the opener against the Redskins, Tony Wise, the offensive line coach, had held a meeting to tell his minions that it was they, not Smith, who made the Dallas rushing attack work. “We’re gonna block
our asses off and this kid is gonna have a huge day!” Wise yelped. “It’s about time you guys started getting the attention you deserve! It’s not Emmitt who makes this thing work. It’s you!” Immediately following Wise’s plea, the linemen studied a tape from a 1991 game, during which Smith spun, dipped, and charged to 100-plus yards. “Guys were like, ‘Yeah, Tony. Right,’” says John Gesek. “We knew how good Emmitt was.” By the time the Bills game had ended, nobody was fooling himself any longer.

“Tony couldn’t pull that shit on us, because the truth was so damn obvious,” says Nate Newton. “Lassic was a nice kid, but if we expected to get back to the Super Bowl, we needed Emmitt in the lineup. It was as clear as motherfuckin’ day.”

The day after the Bills debacle, the PLO and Israel signed a peace accord on the South Lawn of the White House. The news was the talk of the world—save for Dallas, Texas. When a local radio station asked listeners for their opinion about the breakthrough, the only thing callers wanted to discuss was Smith’s absence. Forget Yasir Arafat’s plan—what was Jerry Jones’s?

On September 16, four days after the Cowboys dropped to 0–2, Howell and the Cowboys agreed to a four-year, $13.6 million deal that made Smith the NFL’s highest-paid running back. At a press conference that evening, Jones smiled, handed his star a check for $2 million, and flashed a rare dose of humility. “Some might wonder who the winners and losers are in this,” he said, standing alongside Smith. “When he signs his contract for four years, then the Cowboys are big winners. And when I sign this bonus check—it’s a big one—then he’s a winner.”

Dallas’s Pro Bowl rusher smiled politely, but he had learned a lesson. “I spoke to Emmitt at that time and I told him, ‘Always remember this,’” says Dennis McKinnon, a former Cowboys receiver. “No matter how big you get, the color issue never changes. You’re always black first and foremost to those doing the paying.” For many Cowboys, the contract squabble resulted in the continued shift in Smith’s outlook and priorities.
Where joy and passion once served as his motor oil, now there was a palpable need to look out for No. 1 first, everyone (and everything) else second.

Smith returned to practice that Friday, and the debate began as to whether he’d be ready to play against the Phoenix Cardinals on Sunday night. In earlier times Smith would have been one of the first to practice, anxious to reestablish his status. But this was a different Emmitt—in the eyes of running backs coach Joe Brodsky, a
disappointing
Emmitt. Smith arrived late for practice, jogged at half speed, and seemed more interested in gloating over his financial windfall than in preparing for action. He was flabby in the stomach and soft in the legs. If Smith had lifted anything since the Super Bowl, it was a glazed donut. “I’m mad at him,” Brodsky said. “He needed to be in my office at seven this morning getting himself ready for the mental game. I don’t know what he was doing. I don’t know whether he was putting money in the bank or trying to take money out of the bank.”

The Smith who spent the following days treating his return to the NFL as if it were a spa retreat was not a player Brodsky wanted to deal with. He scowled at Smith; barked at him and told him money had already changed his work ethic. The Cowboys flew to Phoenix and beat the Cardinals 17–10 for their first victory of the year, but Smith was a nonfactor. He carried the ball 8 times for 45 yards.

Yet whether Brodsky wanted to admit it or not (he didn’t), Smith’s signing represented more than the addition of a lazy, overpaid slacker. With his return came hope. Although Dallas had lost a few free agents from the ’92 roster, the only striking difference from the world champion Cowboys and the 0–2 Cowboys was the running back from Florida.

“We had some hosses on our offensive line—guys who could dominate the defense,” says center Frank Cornish. “But it takes a great back to set up good blocks and take an offense to a different stratosphere. We had our guy back in the fold, and we were dangerous again.

“With Emmitt, we were in a different stratosphere.”

J
OE
F
ISHBACK LIKED
sex.

No, let’s amend that. Joe Fishback loved sex.
Looooooved
it. He loved it with black women, with white women, with short women, with tall women, with thin women, with fat women. He loved it once a day. Twice a day. Ten times a day. “I couldn’t go to sleep unless I had
at least
three sexual encounters,” says Fishback, a Cowboys defensive back. “Some guys might say, ‘I have to smoke.’ Some guys might say, ‘I’ve gotta drink.’ I had to find women. I was addicted.”

Fishback is hardly exaggerating. He was, in the most clinical of determinations, a sexual addict—one of the estimated 9 million residing in the United States. “It got so bad for me that the night before home games we would go to the hotel and go over everything, and then we could go home for a couple of hours. I would go home and have someone waiting on me. I just
needed
it.”

For the first two years of his career, split between the Atlanta Falcons and New York Jets, Fishback’s sexual addiction was, if not under
wraps, restrained. Though the Falcons and Jets certainly had their groupies, they were relatively limited in scope and size. Then, on October 12, 1993, he was claimed off waivers by the Cowboys.

Mr. Cocaine Addict, welcome to Colombia…

On the road, the Cowboys’ team bus would arrive at a hotel, the players would file into the lobby and—
WHOOSH!
—females aplenty. Much like a junior high classroom, there would be a series of note passings. A piece of paper slipped to the leggy blonde—COME TO ROOM 222 @ 11:30. Another one handed to the brunette and her redheaded friend. GOOD TIME? LET’S MEET @ 12. Vixens who arrived too late for the grand entrance would wait until later in the night and pull the hotel fire alarm. “That way,” says Rob Geiger, a KRLD radio reporter who traveled with the team, “they could stalk the players as they filed out.”

Although many organizations discouraged salacious behavior, Jerry Jones chalked it up to boys being boys. It was the Dallas owner, in fact, who approved one of the more tasteless plans in recent sports history. When Jones purchased the Cowboys and agreed to have American Airlines continue to serve as the team’s transportation provider, the deal came with the caveat that a Dallas representative be allowed to select the airplane crews. According to an American employee, airline supervisors were told to approach beautiful flight attendants, make certain they were single, and solicit them to work Cowboy charters.

Under the Jones reign, American maintained a book with the photographs and measurements of the most attractive flight attendants. Cowboy employees would then flip through the pages and select who they wanted to fly with the club—long legs and enormous breasts a priority. “We did a cross section, because you had redheads, brunettes, blondes,” says the American employee. “The understanding was that the flight attendants would get to go to the first half of the football games, then at intermission go back to the charter and get the planes ready.”

This was the type of organization Fishback was joining—and now, with the team back on top, the adulation was greater than ever.
“The Cowboys were hot, hot, hot,” Fishback says. “Everyone wanted a piece of us.” Within the first three weeks of Emmitt Smith’s return to the Cowboys, righteousness was back in Big D. Following the victory over Phoenix on September 19, the Cowboys ran off wins against Green Bay (featuring 5 field goals from the team’s new kicker, veteran Eddie Murray) and Indianapolis. Despite initial accusations of laziness, Smith quickly regained form, grinding out 71 yards versus the Packers and 104 more against the Colts. “With Emmitt back there,” says Jay Novacek, “the other team always had to be afraid.”

Any humility gleaned during the 0–2 start was now overtaken by a familiar swagger. The Cowboys were rock stars—Kiss, Aerosmith, and the Stones rolled into one. When they hit the town, they hit the town in a pack—twenty, twenty-five Cowboys sitting at a table in the hottest gentleman’s club, slinging $100 bills and screwing dancers and ducking into back rooms for pulls on bongs and snorts of cocaine. “It was bananas,” says one Cowboy rookie from the ’93 season. “I was a complete nobody on that team, and I’d get back to my hotel room after a game and have two or three gorgeous women leaving me messages on my machine. I hooked up with girls in the stands, I hooked up with girls waiting outside the locker room. In college you might hook up with a couple of eights and nines. With the Cowboys they were all tens and even some elevens. It wasn’t like taking candy from a baby, because a baby might put up a fight. It was too easy.”

Dallas was riding high, with its biggest test to come. On October 17 San Francisco arrived at Texas Stadium intent on exacting revenge for the prior season’s crushing loss in the NFC title game. In the days before the contest, 49er star Ricky Watters told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that he—not Smith—was the league’s best running back. “I heard what he said,” responded Ken Norton, Jr., the feisty Dallas linebacker. “He’ll pay for it on Sunday.”

The Cowboys walloped the 49ers, 26–17, inspiring the
Dallas Morning News
headline, THE REMATCH IS NO MATCH. Smith gained 92 yards, Watters a paltry 32. More noteworthy was that Michael Irvin seemed to be making a run at Jerry Rice’s longtime reign as
the NFL’s top receiver. At the same time Irvin was catching 12 balls for 168 yards and a touchdown, Rice was held to a couple of catches in the first half and 7 for the game. The striking difference, however, was not statistics, but attitude. With increased fame, Rice had become a whiner and moper. Win or lose, if Steve Young was not throwing the ball his way with sufficient frequency, Rice would pout, brood, and vanish from the game. Though he, too, demanded the football, Irvin’s priority was winning. “I once counted that I played with eighty-eight Pro Bowlers in my career,” says Hugh Millen, a Cowboys backup quarterback. “Michael was easily the most driven, most victory-oriented player I’d ever seen. That’s what separated him from his peers—the desire to win Super Bowls above all else.”

Although the hard-playing Cowboys were clearly relishing their status as defending-champs-on-a-roll, Jimmy Johnson was not. In his first four years as Dallas’s head coach, Johnson viewed the Super Bowl as some sort of Holy Grail: Reach it, and a wondrous world of riches and happiness awaits.

What Johnson discovered, however, was that there was no Grail; no magic. In the immediate aftermath of the romp over Buffalo, Johnson held the Super Bowl trophy aloft, basked in its luminous glow, felt the rush that comes with achieving a lifelong dream.

Then, after a few days off, he returned to the grind.

The Johnson who came back to the Cowboys for the ’93 season was more fierce and biting than ever. Instead of embracing the title of “Champion,” he was burdened by the stress to repeat. After the team lost to the Vikings in an exhibition game, Johnson held the toughest practice of the summer, then had the players remain for an extra hour of drills that Millen, the reserve quarterback, calls “suicidal.” Johnson was screaming like a general in the midst of battle, spittle splattering from his lips. “Guys are doubled over, throwing up,” says Millen. “And Jimmy was running up and down the field, angry as any coach has ever
been. I still don’t understand why.” What irked Johnson was how, immediately after the Super Bowl, the most-asked question was not “How does it feel?” or “What was your greatest moment?” but “Can you do it again?”
Can I do it again? Are you friggin’ kidding me?

Johnson was unhappy, and he let those around him know it. He would snap viciously at the nearest lingerer, be it a player, an assistant coach, or even Jones. Whereas in past years he would at least attempt to handle personnel moves with a certain tact and decency, now it was all business. During training camp Michael Payton, a rookie free agent quarterback from Marshall, played well for a month before walking into the training room one day and collapsing to the floor. He was diagnosed with compartmental syndrome, a condition in which increased pressure in a confined anatomical space affects circulation and—in Payton’s case—results in severe numbing of the legs. Payton returned to his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to be operated on. For the ensuing three weeks Payton worked voraciously, running and lifting weights until his doctor cleared him to return to football.

“My first day back I had a meeting with Jimmy,” says Payton. “He released me.” As Payton headed toward the practice field to bid adieu to teammates, Aikman gave him a heads-up that a quarterbacks meeting would begin in ten minutes.

“Not for me,” said Payton. “I’ve been cut.”

Aikman’s jaw dropped. “That,” he said, “is cold.”

Not nearly as cold as when Johnson cut linebacker John Roper a day after the 49er victory. A former second-round draft pick by Chicago, Roper had arrived in Dallas as part of a five-person preseason trade with the Bears. At his best, Roper was a deft pass rusher who compiled 8 sacks in 1991. At his worst, he had the reputation for being moody and indifferent. “John was very talented, and he could really get after the quarterback,” says Kelly Blackwell, a Cowboys tight end who came to Dallas with Roper. “But he was a
me
guy, not a
team
guy.” Roper’s talent was such that, heading into the 49ers matchup, Butch Davis, the new defensive coordinator, planned to highlight him in sev
eral specially designed schemes. Two days before the game, however, Roper violated one of Johnson’s etched-in-stone commandments: Thou shall not fall asleep at a team meeting and expect to keep thy job.

With the lights dimmed in a Valley Ranch conference room, Joe Avezzano, the special teams coach, was briefing his players on the ins and outs of San Francisco’s kickoff return patterns. As Avezzano was speaking, in walked Johnson. The head coach grabbed a chair and sat directly in front of Kenny Gant, the defensive back. “I was a little late to the meeting because I went to McDonald’s,” says Tim Daniel, the second-year wide receiver. “I was about to walk into the room with my Big Mac and fries when I saw our equipment manager, Buck Buchanan. Buck said, ‘Tim, you
do not
want to go in there. Jimmy is not in a good mood.’”

Inside the room, the coaches were showing a tape of the 49ers’ recent victory over the Vikings. Players sat in their chairs and feigned interest. “A bunch of us had gone out hard the night before, so I was exhausted,” says Gant. “I had alcohol on my breath; my eyes were opening and closing, opening and closing.” Johnson spun around in his chair, turned away, spun around again, turned away, then spun around a final time.
Oh, shit,
thought Gant.
He’s looking at me.
He wasn’t. Sitting eight or nine rows behind Gant was Roper, head nestled against his elbow, a light snore emanating from his lips. “Turn the lights on! Turn the lights on!” screamed Johnson. Ninety-nine percent of the players in the room snapped to attention. Roper did not. “John Roper!” screamed Johnson. Roper failed to wake. “John Roper!” he screamed again. This time, Roper opened his eyes and propped himself up in his chair. “John Roper!” said Johnson. “You can go on and sleep through Sunday’s game! Now pick up your shit and get the fuck out of here!” Roper sat still, stunned. “Did you hear what I said?” Johnson said. “Get the fuck out of this meeting!”

The 6-foot-1, 232-pound linebacker left the room. Three days later he was cut.

What Johnson did not know was that Roper’s need for shut-eye had nothing to do with partying or laziness and everything to do with
the sleep deprivation that accompanies early parenthood: Roper and his wife had an infant daughter. “That baby had been keeping John up all night long,” says Kevin Smith, Roper’s friend and former Texas A&M teammate. “He was getting three hours of sleep per night. Dude was just exhausted.”

Roper tried explaining to his coach that he loved being a Cowboy, but Johnson would not hear it. Roper’s Cowboy days were over. “If that were Emmitt, there’s no way he would have been cut,” says Daniel. “But John Roper was the perfect guy to make an example out of. Was it cool? No. But it was vintage Jimmy Johnson.”

The Dallas Cowboys were just fine without John Roper. After beating the 49ers on October 17, Johnson’s ball club ran off consecutive wins over the Eagles, Giants, and Cardinals—all NFC East rivals, all convincingly outclassed. For Jerry Jones, the most meaningful of the triumphs came on the afternoon of November 7, when Dallas slammed the Giants 31–9 and finally inducted Tom Landry into the sacred Ring of Honor.

While most professional sports franchises recognize past legends by dangling their numbers from a wall or rafter, the Cowboys—always eager to separate themselves from the pack—have the Ring of Honor. The tradition began on November 23, 1975, when the team hosted Bob Lilly Day and unveiled a sign featuring the former defensive lineman’s name and uniform number beneath the press box. In the fourteen ensuing years the names and numbers of six more players were added, forming—for lack of a better phrase—a Ring of Honor inside Texas Stadium.

In the four years since his firing, Landry had avoided returning to Texas Stadium, and any mention of Jones or the Ring was met with a quiet-yet-pointed dismissal. Landry and his wife, Alicia, were proud people who never accepted the way Jones had handled the axing. “I felt worse for the folks around me than I did for myself,” Landry said. “My family was really upset. Then you see something like Tex’s [Tex Schramm’s]
situation. He had so much to do with building the Cowboys, but that night on TV after he introduced Jerry as the new owner, Tex had to stand back in the corner. There wasn’t even a chair for him on the podium. That bothered me.”

Jones initially told Landry he would like to induct him into the Ring in 1989, but the bitterness was too raw. Gradually, the ice thawed. By 1993 the two men had worked out their differences, and Tom Landry was ready to be a part of the Dallas Cowboys once again.

As he walked through the Texas Stadium tunnel toward the field, a CBS camera flashed the haunting silhouette of Landry and his famed fedora. Once he reached the 50-yard line, the old coach was cheered like Neil Armstrong returning from the moon. Surrounding him were past Ring inductees—Lilly, Don Meredith, Don Perkins, Chuck Howley, Roger Staubach, Mel Renfro, and Lee Roy Jordan. Booed at the start of the ceremony, Jones turned toward Landry and spoke from the heart. “Thirteen playoffs, twenty straight winning seasons, five NFC championships, five Super Bowl appearances, and two Super Bowl wins,” he said. “We honor you here today. Our Ring of Honor stands for the men who built this franchise and had it called ‘America’s Team.’ This would not be the Ring of Honor without you, Coach Landry.”