Boys Will Be Boys (35 page)

Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, now working for NBC, called the sequence “the sequel to
Dumb and Dumber.
” Galloway penned a
Morning News
piece titled GET BARRY OUT OF HERE IMMEDIATELY. In the
Kansas City Star,
Jason Whitlock fired
away: “It may go down as the dumbest decision in recent American history—dumber than Chris Darden’s glove demonstration, more stupid than Clarence Thomas’ Coke-can pickup line, more ignorant than Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate and more foolish than major-league baseball’s work stoppage. Only the Bootlegger’s Boy could blow the easiest yes-no question in football—twice in less than a minute.” (“Who are my critics?” counters Switzer. “The guys who sat out of PE class and never dressed in the eighth grade because they didn’t want to play.”)

On the Wednesday following the loss, Sanders ranted against anyone who dared rip his coach. “We just had fourth down and a pinky to go,” he told the press. “We should have gone for it. We’re still cool on this team. We’re upset by the loss, but there is no great concern, no great panic in motion. But you [the media] have got to be fair…we’re human beings also. There are no problems on this team even though we’ve had a few stumbles. Go ask thirty other teams if they would like to be 10–4.

“Around here, if you win it’s not good enough and if you lose you are damned. I guess if you win the Super Bowl they [the media] would say you should have won by forty.”

Though Sanders’s on-field impact had been minimal (Dallas was 4–3 in games he played), his words lit a fire. The players were tired—damn tired—of a press corps that wouldn’t rest until the Cowboys were portrayed as fools and losers and hapless morons. “Everyone loves a success story,” says Newton. “And once you succeed, everyone loves tearing you down.”

Against all odds, a club that had just experienced one of the most humiliating defeats of the decade bounced back. On December 17 it squeaked past the Giants 21–20 on a last-second field goal, then the following Sunday flew to Arizona for a final week of
Monday Night Football.
Two hours into the trip a stewardess announced that the Falcons had shocked San Francisco, 28–27. With a win against the Cardinals, Dallas would clinch home-field advantage throughout the
playoffs. “It was like a switch had gone off and all of a sudden the whole plane was excited,” said Aikman. “Now we were going to Arizona for a reason.”

Newly inspired, the Cowboys crushed the Cardinals, 37–13, as Emmitt Smith scored his NFL-record twenty-fifth touchdown of the season.

Yet in the ups and downs of a trying year, everything returned to Aikman and Switzer, two men who, in the end, did not like, respect, or appreciate one another. Shortly before the Cowboys would open the playoffs, Aikman carefully, cautiously revealed his feelings toward Switzer in a scathing interview with the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Having spent the entire year seething, the quarterback could no longer keep it all inside. He needed to vent. “What I’ve always believed is that we all need to be committed to reaching our potential,” Aikman said, “and if we’re ever doing less than that, I don’t want to be a part of it.” It wasn’t difficult to figure to whom Aikman was referring. “For sixty minutes,” he continued, “I get to do what I enjoy. But this has not been an enjoyable year for me, in regard to things outside the football field. I know it’s totally a business. I do still get the spirit of competition, the camaraderie with the guys, the emotions. But beyond that, everything that’s happened has taken a lot out of me. At some point, there will be a physical reason to retire. Or there will be the fact that it’s just no fun.”

Switzer responded by noting that Aikman was a bright man listening to the wrong people—namely Brad Sham and Dale Hansen, the team’s radio announcers. “Troy gets squeezed all the time by people who have their opinions of me,” he said. “People who pretend to be his friend are trying to create a separation.”

Upon hearing Switzer’s response, Aikman lost it.
Create a separation?
All the quarterback desired was a coach who understood what it took to win in the NFL; who worked hard, required some semblance of discipline, and didn’t skip meetings to watch his son play small-time college football. “Troy is a low-maintenance guy,” says Rob Awalt, his former teammate. “He just wants loyalty. From pals, from teammates, from coaches. He wants to know you’ve got his back.”

Switzer didn’t have his back. But at least there was
some
good news. On December 31, the University of Oklahoma concluded an arduous search by naming its new head coach—a thirty-four-year-old alumnus with a passion for all things Sooners and the football IQ of a Girl Scout.

John Blake would go 12–22 in three seasons with the Sooners before being fired. He is regarded as the worst head coach in school history. But for Aikman, his hiring was a blessing.

Blake was leaving Dallas.

As the Cowboys spent their bye week waiting to learn whom they would face in the playoffs, Philadelphia was busy thrashing the Detroit Lions, 58–37. It was one of the most dominant performances in Eagles history, and turned what should have been a modest, hoping-for-the-upset football team into a swaggering, trash-talking, bravado machine.

Instead of returning to Philadelphia to prepare for the Cowboys, whom they would face on January 7, 1996, Eagles coach Ray Rhodes led his team to Vero Beach, Florida, where it would train in seclusion at Dodgertown, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ spring training facility. Rhodes compared the Eagles to a military battalion. “We didn’t get to the playoffs just to be there,” Rhodes said. “We’re fighting to get a win. I want to turn this into an army-camp atmosphere.”

Quarterback Rodney Peete followed his coach’s lead, telling the media that Dallas was overrated and beatable.

Then the Eagles got thumped. Or, more accurately,
Neoned.

With the game tied 3–3 five minutes into the second quarter, Cowboys offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese called Fake Tailback Jab Right Z Reverse Left. As soon as he heard the play leave Aikman’s lips, Sanders looked around the huddle, smiled, and said, “Touchdown, baby!”

Aikman took the snap, faked a handoff to Emmitt Smith, and gave the ball to Sanders, who came dashing by from behind…

Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh!

Sanders’s 21-yard score wasn’t a run, per se. It was a rocket launch.
He took the ball, headed left, then—bottled by defenders—spun and turned right. Sanders exploded toward the end zone, past flailing defenders and through the crisp 26-degree air. “He’s got no moves,” said an awestruck Emmitt Smith, “but he’s as fast as I don’t know what.”

At long last, a Sunday afternoon in Dallas belonged to Sanders. Upon reaching pay dirt, Sanders did his first jig of the season, a semi-stylish, New Kids on the Block–meets–the San Diego Chicken number that reminded teammates that football can still be, well, fun. “Deion’s my boy,” said Irvin. “I ride with him to the airport and all I ever hear is, ‘Man, I’ve got to get into the end zone.’ I’m glad he finally got there so I could see the dance.”

The game was all Prime Time. He intercepted a pass, returned two punts for 21 yards, caught a pass for 13 yards, and nearly snagged a sideline bomb from Aikman. The Cowboys won handily, 30–11.

“We kicked their ass today,” said a visibly relieved Switzer. “If we’d played like that last time, it wouldn’t have come down to fourth-and-a-foot.”

As soon as the Cowboys and Packers were confirmed to meet in the NFC title game, a predictable local and national media felt compelled to evoke the 1967 NFL Championship clash, which featured Dallas traveling to Green Bay for the now-historic “Ice Bowl.”

(Cue Sam Spence music.)

On that day, two evenly matched teams battled through temperatures that plummeted to –13 degrees (coupled with a windchill of –48 degrees) before Packers quarterback Bart Starr dove into the Lambeau Field end zone with thirteen seconds remaining for a 21–17 win. The game was an instant classic.

Yet any comparisons between the teams of the Ice Bowl and the modern-day Cowboys and Packers were forced. Vince Lombardi’s 1967 Packers of Bart Starr, Willie Davis, and Forrest Gregg were far superior to the modern, up-and-coming Pack of Brett Favre, Reggie White, and LeRoy Butler. The current version of Green Bay’s gridiron heroes
won the NFC Central Division with an 11–5 mark, but were merely a good team. The Cowboys of ’95, on the other hand, were significantly more talented than the ’67 edition.

The opportunity to return to the Super Bowl had Dallas in a renewed state of euphoria. Not only had Cowboy Fever returned to the city, but so had Packer Disgust. In the days leading up to the game, the Kroger supermarket chain pulled all Wisconsin-made cheese products from its Dallas shelves. Minyard’s Grocery Store went one step further, firing Sam Young, a twenty-six-year-old bagger, when he arrived at work wearing a Packers T-shirt. “Write me up, send me home, dock my pay,” Young said. “But don’t fire me.”

Though the Cowboys knew they were the better team, there was concern over Favre, a cocky, tobacco-chewing quarterback who turned ordinary receivers into great ones. Dallas’s defensive philosophy was simple—badger Favre into committing mistakes—and ineffective. On the second play of the second quarter, Favre hit tight end Keith Jackson with a 24-yard touchdown pass and the Packers took a shocking 17–14 lead. Texas Stadium, earlier swaying with emotion, turned into a ghost pavilion.

Back and forth the teams went, with Favre playing some of the gutsiest football of his life and Emmitt Smith running straight, left, and right without a breather. By halftime Smith had carried 22 times, and he would go on to gain 150 yards and 3 touchdowns on 35 carries. The Packers were emotionally ready for the Cowboys, and Favre willfully picked on the Dallas secondary. But Smith wore the opposition down. Dallas called one run play after another until Green Bay’s defenders were hunched over in the huddle, hands on hips, breathing heavily. “They said, ‘We’re going to run the ball. Try and stop us,’” Green Bay linebacker George Koonce said. “And they still shoved it down our throats.”

The Packers led 27–24 entering the fourth quarter, but their defense was spent. Smith’s 5-yard touchdown run gave Dallas a 31–27 lead, and on the ensuing series Favre threw a costly interception to Larry Brown. When Emmitt Smith scored his third touchdown, he put the game out of reach. Dallas won, 38–27.

At long last, Barry Switzer felt a sense of NFL-worthiness. The stumbles of his first two NFL seasons were in the past. He had guided the Cowboys to the brink of a championship. Surely, the acclaim would follow. Surely, critics would finally eat some humble pie. Surely…

“Let’s be realistic,” says Randy Galloway, the columnist. “With all that talent, anybody in the world could have coached those Cowboys to the Super Bowl. I know I sure could have. Only I would have been drinking Miller Lite and eating cheeseburgers on the sidelines.”

W
HEN THE
D
ALLAS
C
OWBOYS
prepared to leave Texas for Tempe, Arizona, the site of Super Bowl XXX, they made certain every necessary item was packed and loaded for the 1,056-mile journey.

Helmets—
check!

Pads—
check!

Athletic tape—
check!

Shoes—
check!

Playbooks—
check!

Skanks—
check!

Skanks?

Yes, you read that correctly.
Skanks.
Lots of skanks.

Being a veteran team with a wealth of Super Bowl experience, members of the Cowboys had learned what they needed to survive—
and, indeed, thrive—in the week before the big game. Leading up to the first two Super Bowls, Cowboys players combed the streets, clubs, and bars of Los Angeles and, to a lesser extent, Atlanta. Yet such an approach comes with risk. The women, for example, could be stalkers. Killers. They might have STDs. Or husbands with quick fingers and loaded XM8 lightweight assault rifles.

Hence, the skanks. Knowing that the wives and family members would not arrive in Tempe until the Thursday or Friday before the big game, several Cowboys—ranging from Emmitt Smith and Charles Haley to Erik Williams and Nate Newton—paid for a fleet of eleven white stretches from a local limousine service to drive sixteen hours and a thousand miles from Dallas to Tempe, several with their special skank,
uh,
female friends along for the ride. The price: $1,000 per night per limo (far from objecting, Jerry Jones brought along his own party vehicle, the six-bed tour bus that had once belonged to Whitney Houston). By the time the Cowboys arrived for check-in at The Buttes, the team’s first-class, $285-per-night hotel, on the Sunday before the game, the lobby was filled with tacky high heels and legs that stretched from Minneapolis to Mahopac.

“The limo thing was as blatant as anything the Cowboys had ever been a part of,” says one team employee. “We had this huge caravan arrive from Dallas, and some guys had a bunch of their dancer girlfriends ride out and party with them. They brought the White House to Arizona.”

Irvin enthusiastically endorsed the Port a Skank concept and, in fact, rented his own ten-passenger, thirty-foot monstrosity customized with a black leather-and-brushed-crome interior (and equipped with a bounty of Absolut vodka and hip-hop CDs). What baffled some about Irvin’s ways was that his wife, Sandy, was intelligent, loving, an excellent mother to the couple’s two daughters—and drop-dead gorgeous. “She’s the most beautiful black woman I’ve ever seen with my eyes,” says Kenny Gant, the Cowboy defensive back. “I’ve loved her to death since the first time I met her.” Yet Irvin—who sported a large gold cross around his neck—never thought twice about professing his devo
tion toward his family one minute, then jumping into the hot tub with two strippers the next. Why, on the evening before the Cowboys departed for Tempe, Irvin had partied with a pair of prostitutes at the Irving Residence Inn.

“This stuff happened more and more under Barry, because the rules were just completely relaxed,” says a team employee. “Now here comes Deion Sanders, the most flamboyant guy going. The combination of Sanders’s flamboyant ways, Irvin’s lifestyle, and the fact that Barry Switzer said, ‘Hell, I don’t care what you do; I’ll see you Sunday afternoon’—it led to bad things.”

Awaiting the Cowboys and their high-heeled entourage in Tempe were the AFC champion Pittsburgh Steelers, a gritty 11–5 football team that had upended the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship Game to reach its first Super Bowl in sixteen years. If there was ever a textbook example of overlooking an opponent, here it was. The Steelers featured the league’s No. 2–ranked run defense and a powerful tailback in 244-pound Bam Morris, but nobody—the Cowboys, the media, the fans—believed Pittsburgh could challenge Big D.

When the Cowboys prepared for Super Bowl XXVII three years earlier, they practiced with an intensity that Jimmy Johnson and his crew demanded. This time around members of the team came and went as they pleased, working out with halfhearted determination. In what was undoubtedly a Super Bowl first, Newton, Williams, Lett, and Irvin took a stretch Lincoln to and from practices. The players stayed out early into mornings and arrived to work hungover following wild sojourns to clubs like Empire and Jetz & Stixx. “The police came in and gave us a list of places not to go,” Newton said. “I wrote ’em all down and went there.”

The Cowboy who partied the hardest, the longest, the latest was not Irvin or Sanders or Newton or Lett but Barry Switzer, fifty-eight-year-old night owl. The Cowboy coach transformed his two-bedroom suite into a twenty-four-hour rave, with an endless stream of family members, friends, confidants, and strangers. “You have to understand the scene,” says Michael Silver, the former
Sports Illustrated
scribe who
spent much of the week alongside Switzer. “Barry basically decided, ‘OK, this is the only time I’ll ever be at a Super Bowl and I’m going to live it up.’ So he called everyone he knew and said, ‘C’mon, we’re all going to the Super Bowl!’” Along for the ride were—among others—Switzer’s three children; his girlfriend, Becky Buwick; his ex-wife, Kay (the two women shared a room); and a never-ending conga line of former Oklahoma players, coaches, and boosters. The end-of-the-week liquor bill exceeded $100,000.

On the night following the team’s arrival in Tempe, Switzer and a slew of assistant coaches and players attended a Super Bowl party beneath an enormous outdoor tent. Switzer and Larry Lacewell, the Cowboys’ director of pro and college scouting (and the man whose wife Switzer once slept with), downed shots until both were stumbling around like kangaroos atop surfboards. Silver was minding his own business when he turned and spotted Switzer furiously kicking with his right foot. “What the fuck are you doing?” Silver asked. Upon stepping closer, Silver saw that Switzer was actually booting Lacewell, who was trying to urinate beneath a wood deck. “Barry was getting Larry to piss all over himself,” says Silver. “Urine everywhere.” Done harassing his friend, Switzer stumbled to the dance floor and began hyperactively shaking his body—à la Pee Wee Herman. Nearby Emmitt Smith was grooving the night away, showing off the moves that, a decade later, would make him a champion on
Dancing with the Stars,
when he caught a glimpse of Switzer. “Emmitt can’t believe what he’s seeing,” says Silver. “He just stops and stares at Switzer, and his jaw drops. He just gets this look on his face that I can only describe as ‘Oh my God, my coach is fucking crazy!’”

Switzer’s week was one uproarious blur—a little bit of football (Steelers? What Steelers?) mixed in with a whole lot of debauchery. On the night of Friday, January 26, less than forty-eight hours before kickoff, Switzer hosted his dream party in Suite 4000 at The Buttes—
his
suite. With his son Greg, a trained classical pianist, jamming away on the room’s black Steinway, Switzer led an obnoxious, infectious, inebriated sing-along of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” Instead of re
peating Charles’s lyrics, however, Switzer and Co. filled in their own words—praising Jerry Jones, mocking Jimmy Johnson.

“I didn’t know if we’d win or lose the Super Bowl,” says Switzer. “But I knew I was gonna have one helluva week. You don’t reach the heights and then play it down. You make the moments memorable.”

Although the Cowboys expended a great deal of time, money, and energy partying it up in Tempe, not every player thought it appropriate to turn Super Bowl week into
Animal House II: Attack of the 300-Pound Texans.
Defensive lineman Russell Maryland, for example, spent much of his free time reading, watching TV, and quietly touring the area. Upon graduating from Chicago’s Whitney Young High School in 1986, Maryland—a former usher at St. John Church—made a promise to the congregation that he would live righteously. “My mom and dad would tell me all the time not to embarrass the Maryland name,” he said. “And I took that seriously.”

Linebacker Robert Jones, about to play his final game with Dallas, avoided the limelight and temptations by sticking with his wife, Maneesha, and their two sons. “I didn’t come to party,” he says. “I came to win.”

And then there was the man deemed Cowboy Most Likely to Blow the Super Bowl. Raised in Southern California, Larry Brown attended Los Angeles High, spending four years as a moderately successful All-City selection. With few available postgraduation options,
Brown enrolled at Los Angeles Southwest College, where he played tailback as a freshman and defensive back as a sophomore. Asked to assess Brown’s collegiate legacy, Henry Washington, his former Southwest coach, noted, “Larry wasn’t what you’d call a great player. But he always got the job done.”

Brown believed his two years of junior college ball would result in attention from UCLA or USC or at least Cal or Stanford. Instead, the only offer came from Texas Christian University, home to the mighty purple-and-white Horned Frogs.

Though Fort Worth was a far cry from L.A., Brown took advantage of the opportunity. He started both seasons for TCU and was named one of the Most Valuable Players of the 1990 Blue-Gray game. “I was sure I’d be drafted in the first four rounds,” says Brown. “I’d played on the same stage with the guys from Miami and Florida State and Notre Dame and I more than measured up.”

On the afternoon of April 21, 1991, Brown sat before his television and waited to be drafted. On April 22, he waited some more. Finally, with the 320th pick of the twelfth round, the Cowboys nabbed Brown. He was the 57th defensive back selected, following such immortals as Jacksonville State’s David Gulledge and James Smith of mighty Ripon College. In the minutes preceding the pick, those in the Dallas draft room debated Brown’s merits. “The kid’s OK,” said one scout. “Not great, not terrible.”

“That may well be,” said another, “but he’s already in Texas. He won’t cost us an airplane ticket.”

Larry Brown it was.

By Super Bowl XXX, Brown was enjoying his fifth straight season as a Cowboy regular—and nobody could quite figure out why. Neither especially fast, strong, nor tough, Brown worked moderately hard and studied film with average acumen. When Dallas signed Deion Sanders, it was assumed Brown would finally land on the bench. Then Kevin Smith got hurt and the crabgrass of cornerbacks remained. “Larry’s hands were awful—just awful,” says Clayton Holmes, his fellow cornerback. “He was knowledgeable on defense and he would bust
his ass on the field. But he couldn’t catch and he played scared. On the sideline, it was always pretty clear he just wanted the game to be over with.”

Brown may have had his drawbacks but he was liked. He cracked corny yet well-received jokes, rarely complained, attended church weekly, and never ripped teammates or coaches to the media. “He was a really good guy with a great outlook on life,” says Greg Briggs, a Cowboys defensive back. “He appreciated what he had going.”

Brown’s unyielding positivism was put to the test in August 1995, when his son, Kristopher, was born ten weeks premature, weighing 1 pound, 9 ounces. Immediately following his delivery, the baby was brought to the ICU and placed on a ventilator. With each passing hour, Larry and his wife, Cheryl, gained hope. Their 1
¹
/2-year-old daughter Kristen had been three months premature, and she’d turned out to be perfectly fine. “Then I was holding him one day and I noticed that the back of his head was kind of soft,” says Cheryl. “They took him in to do an X-ray and found that part of his brain had dissolved.”

Kristopher Brown was brain-dead.

“The hardest day was when we had to decide to take him off the respirator,” says Brown. “We talked and prayed, but when you’re not going to have a brain, there’s no hope. I’m still in disbelief. Every day, I’m in disbelief.”

Kristopher died on Thursday, November 16, the worst day in Larry’s and Cheryl’s lives. Brown had been away from the team for several days, and Switzer insisted he not return for that Sunday’s game against the Raiders in Oakland. “Take whatever you need,” Switzer said. “Give yourself time to heal.”

Despite his wife’s objections, Brown decided the best way to recover would be to do what he loved most. On the day before the game Brown flew to Oakland on Jerry Jones’s private jet. He was mentally drained and physically weak—and shocked by the reaction of his teammates. The Cowboys had decided to dedicate the rest of the season to Kristopher. Every helmet was adorned with a small KB sticker. “The whole thing moved me to tears,” he says. “Before the game I told my
self, ‘Play this for Kristopher,’ and I did. My conditioning was so poor that they took me out to give me oxygen, but I felt like I was in the right place.”

Dallas won 34–21, momentarily lifting their cornerback’s blighted spirits. For the remainder of the regular season and into the playoffs, Brown was a mixed bag of emotions. He could focus on football, but thoughts of his son always crept in. There were good days and bad days, smiles and tears. Against Green Bay in the NFC title game, his fourth-quarter interception of a Brett Favre pass sealed Dallas’s trip to Tempe. “Larry had a very, very hard season,” says Darren Woodson. “He deserved something really great happening to him.”

The Pittsburgh Steelers were pissed off. Who could blame them?

In the two weeks leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, members of the AFC champions were asked hundreds of questions—nearly all of them having to do with Dallas’s irrefutable advantages in skill, experience, and legacy. It was as if the Steelers were lambs being led to slaughter, the questions from the media their last rites prior to the butcher’s knife. “The whole thing was really annoying and disrespectful,” says Levon Kirkland, Pittsburgh’s standout linebacker. “You got tired of hearing how great Dallas was. Everyone thought Dallas would run us over. We believed we were going to shock those guys.”