Boys Will Be Boys (27 page)

“Stuff” was Washington. On the first play of the fourth quarter, the Bills were facing third-and-6 from their own 35-yard line. With four receivers lined up along the line of scrimmage, Kelly dropped back and looked toward Beebe, who crossed the field and had a step on Kevin Smith. Kelly cocked his arm and launched a bullet. The throw
was artistic—a textbook spiral rotating through the air, Beebe’s hands rising in anticipation of making the catch. Then,
swoosh,
Washington—old, slow, a backup—stepped in, snagged the pigskin from midair, and returned it to the Buffalo 34-yard line. As he jogged toward the sideline, Washington pumped his fists in the air. “It was over,” says Awalt. “O-V-E-R. You could honestly look around and go, ‘We’re done.’ All three Super Bowl losses compounded to that moment. I had never noticed it prior to that. The guys took great pride in, ‘We’re back! We’ll piss the league off.’ But when that turnover happened it was ‘Well, we’ve lost three in a row and we just lost our fourth.’”

Nine plays later, Emmitt Smith sealed the victory with a 1-yard touchdown run. The Cowboys went on to win, 30–13—the blowout that wasn’t.

In the immediate aftermath of the game, the Buffalo locker room felt less like a gathering of defeated jocks, more like a cemetery. Though the obituary had yet to be written, the Bills were boxed and buried. Kelly had bad knees. Andre Reed’s speed was in decline. Thomas—one of the game’s greatest backs—had immortalized himself as an inconsistent big-game performer. And Marv Levy, the beloved head coach, was sixty-eight years old and, dare one say, overmatched. “Our team adopted the good-guy mentality of Coach Levy, and sometimes that worked,” says Anthony Fieldings, a Buffalo linebacker. “But at the championship level it helps to be mean, and those Cowboys were mean. They hit you while you were on your way down and made sure to get in every possible lick. I saw the Dallas players laughing and joking as they came out for the second half, and our guys were arguing about nonsense.”

Members of the Bills insisted that they would one day win a Super Bowl. As of 2008 the team has not been back. “The worst thing about losing a Super Bowl is the postgame party,” says Steve Christie, the Bills kicker. “The losers have a preplanned party, and you literally sit there in a conference room at a hotel, depressed beyond belief. You’re eating your sandwich, drinking your beer, desperate to be anywhere but there.”

Somewhat surprisingly, many Cowboys also failed to elicit euphoria
from Super Bowl XXVIII. Although Bates could be found kneeled over before his locker, crying joyfully, his emotional overload was isolated. As opposed to the triumph one year earlier in Pasadena, this victory was coupled with an emptiness. “There is nothing like the first one,” says Irvin. “We all thought we were a Hollywood team, and that first Super Bowl was in Hollywood. So now you’re gonna tell me the next one is in Atlanta? Against the Bills
again
? When people say, ‘Was the second as good as the first?’ I laugh. It couldn’t be. Not possible.”

Most demoralized was Washington, who in the wake of the game of his life couldn’t believe what he was being told. Despite 11 tackles, an interception and a fumble return for a touchdown, the media had voted Emmitt Smith (30 carries, 132 yards, 2 touchdowns) Super Bowl MVP. The decision begged the question of what, exactly, the writers had been watching.

After the reporters had cleared the locker room and Johnson gave a congratulatory speech, talk among Cowboy players turned to legacy. Who knew how many more Super Bowls this young, aggressive, energetic, talented team could win. Two? Three? Four? Hell, why not five? They had the perfect quarterback, the perfect running back, the perfect tight end, the perfect pair of receivers, and a ferocious defense.

“And we had the best head coach in the NFL,” says Gant. “Nobody doubted Jimmy Johnson would lead us to even greater glory.

“We were,” says Gant, “unstoppable.”

T
HE ARTICLE RAN
on page 2B of the February 18, 1994,
Dallas Morning News
—a seemingly ordinary offseason football piece on an otherwise ordinary day in Texas. Beneath the headline JOHNSON, BACK AT WORK, MAKES NO WAVES ABOUT JONES, writer Frank Luksa detailed the thought process of the Cowboys head coach, straight off of a ten-day vacation and preparing for his sixth year on the job.

Never one for the exotic or, for that matter, adventurous, Johnson spent his time away from football snorkeling and fishing (he caught a large kingfish) to his heart’s content in the Florida Keys. He gorged on all the seafood he could stuff in his (oversized) belly, downed one Heineken after another, basked in the sun, and thought of everything
but
the Dallas Cowboys. “For the first time in about six or seven years I didn’t read a newspaper,” he said. “I might have watched
SportsCenter
once or twice in two weeks. I had a fantastic, relaxing time.”

Now, back at Valley Ranch, Johnson seemed a new man. When asked by Luksa about his dealings with Jerry Jones, rumored to be (kindly speaking) strained, Johnson spoke optimistically. “Our relationship is
the best now that it’s been since we’ve been with the Cowboys,” he said. “We understand each other better than ever and as I’ve said before, we have a good working relationship.”

For his part, Jones said that he and Johnson were getting along swimmingly.

It was a loving time to be a Dallas Cowboy.

The atmosphere was cheerful.

Everyone was happy.

Everything was…garbage.

Throughout the 1993 season, as fans and the media focused primarily on Emmitt Smith’s contract squabble and the dramatic triumph over the Giants and Troy Aikman’s concussion and, finally, the march to a second straight Super Bowl, a pair of oncoming tornadoes swirled. In one vortex was Jerry Jones, a man with an ego as large as the Great Pyramid of Cholula; a man who, within the past year, had told reporters he was quite certain he could coach the Cowboys were he inclined to do so; a man who resented his coach’s privacy issues and need for authority and—
goddammit!
—the nonstop credit he received from the local media. “Jerry’s head,” says Denne Freeman, the veteran Cowboys beat writer, “was larger than any benevolent dictator the world has ever known.” Mostly, Jones resented Johnson’s declared interest in the Jacksonville Jaguars coaching position. Where was the loyalty? The…gratitude?

“I knew as early as 1991 that I might want to make a change with Jimmy,” Jones said. “My attitude at the time—and I told this to Jimmy—was ‘You’re doing a good job, but don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.’ There were a couple of times during the 1992 season that he practically invited me to make the change. There were two times when I had to sit him down and tell him that this is how it’s going to be or else.” Well before Jones versus Johnson had begun to trickle into the mainstream media, Jones would confer with his family over how little respect he was afforded from his coach. “I’m going to fire his ass,” he’d say. “I can go out and find myself another coach.”

In the other vortex was Jimmy Johnson, a man with an ego as
large as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau; a man who detested his boss’s incessant need for attention and mocked his limited, unimpressive, uninspiring knowledge of the game.

Wasn’t it Jones who, before the ’93 season, invited a twenty-seven-year-old defensive tackle named Fletcher Rudisill to training camp, sight unseen? Wasn’t it Jones who raved that Rudisill—a former starter at Hudson Valley Community College whom Jones had met
in a bar
—was a diamond in the rough who could prove to be another Cowboy steal? Wasn’t it Rudisill who couldn’t jog twenty feet without stopping to vomit? Wasn’t it Rudisill who was cut after two weeks? “This,” sneered Johnson to a handful of writers, “is the guy Jerry sent me.”

Why, for God’s sake, did Jerry insist on sticking his nose in the business of running a football team?
Spend your damn money, put butts in the seats…and leave me the hell alone.
“It was a joke,” says Larry Brown, the veteran cornerback. “Jerry placed the coaches in bad positions by pretending he didn’t want power but then doing everything to control every piece of the team. Jimmy didn’t go for that.” Johnson still regularly thought back to the 1991 postseason, when he wisely chose Steve Beuerlein over Troy Aikman as his playoff starter, then watched as Jones intruded by telling the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
that Aikman was—without question—the future of the franchise. So furious was Johnson that he stormed around Valley Ranch, a copy of the newspaper in hand, screaming, “Maybe I’ll just get out of here and take this staff with me to Tampa Bay! Who’s coaching this football team anyway?”

To Johnson, the deterioration of a once-cordial relationship reached critical mass on the day before the 1992 NFL Draft, when the Cowboys called the Browns and offered five draft picks in exchange for two of Cleveland’s. Later in the day, after Jones had departed from Valley Ranch, Browns coach Bill Belichick called back to sign off on the deal, and Johnson announced it to the media. Jones was furious that he was not informed, and on draft day the owner and coach exchanged words in a heated closed-door meeting. According to
Sports Illustrated
’s Peter King, five minutes before the draft Jones
told Johnson, “You know the ESPN camera is in the draft room today. So whenever we’re about to make a pick you look at me, like we’re talking about it.”

An irate Johnson stormed from the room and ducked into his office. “You okay?” he was asked by Bob Ackles, the director of player personnel.

“Yeah,” Johnson snapped. “He’s an asshole. Fuck him.”

“Jimmy,” Ackles said, “he owns the team.”

“Fuck him,” Johnson said.

Johnson headed for the parking lot, where he was lassoed by Wannstedt. “Don’t let him get to you like that,” Wannstedt said. “It’s not worth it.”

Though Johnson eventually returned, he stewed for the entire day.

In the follow-up to two straight Super Bowl victories, those observing the Cowboys from a distance applauded an owner willing to win at all costs. But perception was far from reality. Jones’s obsession with squeezing every last penny out of Texas Stadium (fans be damned) was legendary within the team’s offices. Allan Cariker, the team’s information systems manager, still fondly recalls how employees under the Murchison and Bright regimes were allotted free tickets for home games. “As soon as Jerry arrived he took back all the tickets and sold the right to have them for insane prices,” says Cariker. “Where was the decency in that?” Heading into the ’93 season the owner installed a new front row into the upper stadium deck and sold the seats at premium prices (thus resulting in a lawsuit from six longtime season-ticket holders who had purchased front-row seats decades earlier and now found themselves in row two). He replaced two thousand west end zone seats with “luxury” (aka: offensively expensive) Platinum Club chairs. “You’ve got loyal fans who bought seats when the team wasn’t doing well,” said John Gardner, a twenty-eight-year-old fan who, as a result of Jones’s policies, considered discarding his season tickets. “Now, it’s like making money is the most important thing, not what the fans think.”

Such income-generating strategies were tasteless, but in Johnson’s mind hardly compared to Jones’s inability to treat people righteously. First off, there was the ongoing issue of the Dallas assistant coaches, one of the lowest-paid groups in the league (running backs coach Joe Brodsky, for example, was making $78,000). Furthermore, Johnson was still incensed with the way Jones’s stubbornness had resulted in Smith’s two-game holdout to start the ’93 season—especially as the team’s merchandise generated an NFL-high $695 million in sales. Johnson knew opposing franchises would flock after the Cowboys’ pending free agents, and he feared Jones would let one and all willingly depart. (Indeed, on March 3 the Los Angeles Rams signed Jimmie Jones, an underrated defensive tackle, to a four-year, $7.7 million deal.)

Nothing speaks more poignantly of Jones’s ode to penny-pinching than the saga of Bobby Abrams, the backup linebacker who played with Dallas for parts of the 1992 and ’93 seasons. After appearing in four games with the Cowboys in 1992, Abrams was released and signed by the Cleveland Browns. Shortly after Dallas won the Super Bowl, a team representative called Abrams and offered him either a Super Bowl ring or $65,000. “Having earned a ring with the Giants in 1990, this time I took the cash,” says Abrams. “I just didn’t feel like I was that big a part of things.”

Abrams returned to the Cowboys the following year. He went through training camp and was active for the first eleven regular-season games, performing primarily on special teams. Upon being released yet again, he was signed by the Vikings. When Minnesota’s season ended Abrams found himself glued to the TV, rooting intensely for his old team. As Dallas won yet another Super Bowl, Abrams knew he’d take the ring. “I felt like I was a part of it,” he says. “Even though I wasn’t there at the end, it was a meaningful accomplishment.” When he called the Cowboys to request the hardware, however, he was greeted by hmms, haws, and—eventually—rejection. “They told me that since I signed with an NFC team that I wasn’t entitled to a ring or the money,” he says. “So even though I was a contributor to a championship, it meant nothing.”

The decision came directly from Jones, and it was laughable.

But that was the boss, a person Johnson no longer had affection or patience for. Johnson could only laugh when he heard that the Cowboy owner had allegedly instructed a private investigator to follow Jim Dent, the famed Dallas sportswriter, as he was researching a Jerry Jones biography. Was he that insecure? That pathetic? “Both Jerry and Jimmy had such tremendously huge egos,” says Larry Lacewell, the team’s director of college and pro scouting. “I think what it came down to was the stage just wasn’t big enough for both of them. They both lacked the intelligence to give the other guy the credit and respect he deserved. So instead of harmony, it became a mess.”

The Jerry-Jimmy soap opera was best surmised in a
New York Times
editorial titled, appropriately, J.R. AND BOBBY, PART II:

The beginning of the end came on the night of March 21, 1994, when Jones, Johnson, and a contingent of current and former Cowboy coaches and executives converged upon Orlando for the annual NFL meetings. Sitting at a restaurant table within the confines of Walt Disney’s Pleasure Island, Johnson began recounting Jones war stories with two of his former assistants, Dave Wannstedt (who’d become head coach of the Chicago Bears) and Norv Turner (who’d recently been hired as head coach of the Washington Redskins), their wives, as well as Roz Dalrymple, wife of the team’s media relations director, and Rhonda Rookmaaker, Johnson’s girlfriend. Also present were Brenda Bushell, Johnson’s former TV coordinator, and Bob Ackles, the Cowboys’ former director of player personnel—both of whom had been fired by Jones—and Ackles’s wife, Kay. With the drinks flowing, Johnson described his boss as, among other things, a buffoon, a liar, a jerk, and an incompetent. He recounted the ’92 draft fiasco, when Jones insisted Johnson make him look good for the ESPN cameras. “We were all telling stories, having a good time, and we were ten feet away from a free bar, so everyone was feeling pretty good,” says Ackles. “That’s when Jerry and Larry Lacewell walked up.”

Basking in the glow of another Super Bowl title, Jones was hovering ten feet above the ground, accepting the handshakes and congratulatory salutes of his league-wide peers. As the prime dealmaker in the NFL’s recently signed $4.4 billion television contract, Jones was now officially one of the big guns. Any owner who had initially been skeptical of this quirky outsider from Arkansas now had to acknowledge Jones’s moxie.

Carrying large plastic cups of Scotch, Jones and Lacewell walked up a grassy hill and spotted Johnson and Co. “Here’s to the Dallas Cowboys,” cackled Jones as he raised a glass, “and here’s to the people who made it possible to win two Super Bowls!” With that, Ackles spun toward wife Kay and grinned. Ever since May 4, 1992, when he was fired by Jones, Ackles had retained a bitter taste in his mouth. The owner, after all, had once promised that he would be a Cowboy for life. Now, Jones finally seemed to be acknowledging his contributions. It was almost enough to…

“Oh, B-b-b-b-ob, K-k-k-kay,” said Jones, interrupting his own toast. “I didn’t see y’all sitting there.”

Dead silence.

“It was just incredibly rude,” says Ackles. “Jimmy was looking at the man like he had an asshole in the middle of his forehead.”

Jones acted as if nobody had heard him, and he repeated the toast. Not only did the participants refuse to raise their glasses, but Johnson shot Jones an unequivocal
what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-here?
glare. “It was embarrassing,” says Lacewell. “With the exception of Jimmy, these were people who either left the organization or were fired. They didn’t want to hear a toast from Jerry.” Jones slammed down his glass and snarled. “You goddamned people just go on with your goddamned party,” he said, storming off to a chorus of snickers. How dare no one respond to his words. How dare no one invite him to sit down. He was hurt, humiliated, and, most of all, tired. Tired of the hostility. Tired of the disrespect. Just plain tired of feeling like a guest of the Dallas Cowboys.