Boys Will Be Boys (6 page)

Though the savvy, strong-armed Aikman left UCLA as one of the best quarterbacks in school history, having led the Bruins to a 20–4 mark over two seasons, the NFL was a long way from the Pacific-10 Conference. Johnson would keep a veteran quarterback around to begin the season, absorb some blows, and help Aikman learn the intricacies of the league. Over time Aikman would assume increased responsibility. Maybe he’d mop up now and then, enter the second half of a blowout. Finally, perhaps in year two or three, Aikman would be named the starting quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.

It was the tried-and-true way of professional quarterback development.

Jimmy Johnson was anything but tried and true.

During the 1988 season, the Cowboys were quarterbacked by Steve Pelluer, a fifth-year veteran out of the University of Washington who could throw a little, run a little, and do just enough to lose. Though Johnson was open to the idea of bringing Pelluer back, he refused to meet the quarterback’s demand of a one-year contract in excess of $600,000. He also decided against re-signing veteran backup Danny White, who tersely told the media that Johnson and Co. had no remote idea what they were doing.

Perhaps he was right.

On July 7, barely three months after Jerry Jones had hailed Aikman as “the redeemer,” the Cowboys used the first pick of the supplemental draft to select—of all things—another quarterback. And not just any quarterback.

Steve Walsh of the
University of Miami.

The media didn’t understand it. Cowboy players didn’t understand it. Aikman, who had signed a six-year, $11.037 million contract, certainly didn’t understand it. Even Steve Walsh didn’t understand it. By using a first-round supplemental choice, the Cowboys were surrendering their first-round selection in the following year’s regular draft. It was insane.

“My initial reaction was ‘Huh?’” says Walsh, who’d led Johnson’s Hurricanes to a 23–1 record and the 1987 national title. “I was very surprised. But Jimmy told me I was part of his strategy to build a championship team.”

Guarded and somewhat reclusive by nature, Aikman learned of Walsh’s addition (from TV reports, not his coach) and immediately contacted his agent, Leigh Steinberg, to come up with a plan. The options were nonexistent—he could neither demand a trade nor insist Johnson name him the starter. As soon as Walsh signed a four-year, $4.1 million contract, Johnson announced that the quarterback position was up for grabs. “This is not a formality,” he told
Sports Illustrated
. “They know they’ll get an equal chance.”

Though Johnson loved the air of uncertainty that kept his rookie quarterbacks on edge, the move had a decidedly negative impact. As two of the nation’s top college quarterbacks in 1988, Aikman and Walsh had met at a handful of preseason all-America events. Their relationship, OK to begin with, turned cool in Dallas. The two would talk on the sidelines, but only when necessary. They would compare notes, but only out of obligation. In the exhibition games, they split time. It was, for lack of a better word, awkward. “Troy felt threatened by me,” says Walsh. “I understood it. Jimmy was my college coach, not his.”

In the Dallas locker room, a line was drawn. There were Aikman guys. There were Walsh guys. Aikman’s backers listened to country music and wore blue jeans and related to his country boy aura. Walsh’s backers were the former Hurricanes in camp and other Florida-bred players who stayed true to one of their own. Jerry Rhome, the team’s quarterback coach, buddied up to Aikman and shunned Walsh. Tension reigned. Frost filled the air when the two men were in the same room. Neither performed well enough nor poorly enough to determine a clear-cut front-runner. When Aikman excelled, Walsh seemed to play well. When Aikman struggled, so, it seemed, did Walsh.

Aikman?

Walsh?

Aikman?

Walsh?

Aikman?

Walsh?

“Having both of them was a terrible idea,” says David Shula, the offensive coordinator. “It created tension that we really didn’t need. Steve was very, very bright, a tremendous leader, and a great competitor. But Troy had these physical tools that jumped off the page, and he kept thinking, ‘Wait a minute. You drafted me No. 1 and then you take another quarterback No. 1?’ Steve would never have the arm strength of Troy. Not even close. But Steve had the smarts…”

And that was the dichotomy. Walsh was known as the skinny (6–foot–3, 195 pounds) intellectual, Aikman the burly (6-foot–3, 220 pounds) stud. They morphed into caricatures, slotted into neat little compartments. “Troy was not dumb by any means,” says Walsh, “and I am a good athlete. But sometimes people get an idea and run with it.”

Though he did his best to maintain an air of neutrality, Johnson was secretly pulling for Walsh. It wasn’t simply a soft spot for all things Miami. No, Johnson loved the idea of flashing a middle finger toward conventional thinking. “I was always walking on eggshells,” says Johnson. “I didn’t want to buddy up to Troy because Steve would become
upset. But Steve and I had this natural relationship, so I couldn’t get too close to him, either.”

Clearly, Walsh was the coach’s guy. In a closed-door meeting, Johnson turned to Jones and said, “Troy might have more talent, but Steve can take us to a Super Bowl.” Assistant coaches praised Aikman’s poise, strength, and accuracy. Johnson saw him as stiff and mechanical. He questioned whether Aikman was smart enough to succeed in the NFL, and if he possessed the inner fire to own a huddle. In the days leading up to the Cowboys’ exhibition finale, a 30–28 win over the Oilers at Texas Stadium, Johnson pulled Brad Sham, the team’s radio announcer, into his office. “You know what I’m thinking of doing,” Johnson told Sham. “I’m thinking of starting—”

Sham cut the coach off. “Jimmy,” he said, “if you start Steve Walsh the fans will burn your house down. You have to give this Aikman kid a chance.”

Shortly before the season began, Johnson followed convention—not his gut—and reluctantly tabbed Aikman as the man to lead the Cowboys.

He hoped the young signal caller was ready.

T
ROY
A
IKMAN OFFICIALLY
joined the Dallas Cowboys on April 20, 1989, a day as wild as any he had ever experienced. After waking up at four o’clock that morning, Aikman, along with agent Leigh Steinberg, drove to the team’s Thousand Oaks facility, where he negotiated the finer points of a contract with Jerry Jones via satellite uplink. Upon agreeing to the six-year, $11.037 million deal, Aikman bolted for Los Angeles International Airport and boarded Jones’s Texas-bound private jet. As soon as the quarterback arrived at Valley Ranch, he was introduced to twenty or so reporters, all eager to grill the newest face of the franchise. The media came away immediately impressed—Aikman was as poised and polite as any Dallas rookie in recent memory.

Once the press conference ended, Aikman headed out for an evening on the town with Jones—dinner, drinks, the works. It was a dazzling welcome to his new life, but when he finally called it a night, Aikman spent thirty fruitless minutes trying to hail a taxi. Frustrated, he strolled over to a parked limousine and begged the driver for a
ride.
Surprise!
The stretch was occupied by ten attractive, giddy, alcohol-loaded Southern Methodist University coeds celebrating a twenty-first birthday.

Aikman jumped in, gladly accepting the lift.

Welcome to heaven.

Welcome to Dallas.

This is the stuff golden boy legend is made of. It’s Joe Namath. It’s Don Meredith. It starts with a blue-eyed, strawberry blond heartthrob and ends with a pair of panty hose draped over the bedpost.

It is not, by any means, Troy Aikman.

Though the new savior sauntered into town armed with classic Hollywood looks, good ol’ boy charm, and an $11 million contract, he was, in fact, the anti-stereotype. Neither gregarious nor chummy, the twenty-two-year-old Aikman preferred a few cold Budweisers and a flick on the VCR to a night on the town. He dated, but was anything but a playboy. He partied, but only in the comfort of trusted friends. He was suspicious of motives and questioned why people craved his company. He talked freely to the media, but not
too
freely. Any comparisons to Namath or Meredith died immediately. Aikman was more Joe Montana. He didn’t want to be the golden boy. “It takes a while for someone to gain my trust,” he said. “Loyalty and trust are important to me.”

While Aikman preferred outsiders (and, for that matter, teammates) to see him as the Dallas Cowboy quarterback and leave it at that, those who broke through the shell discovered a young man whose life story went well beyond pump ball–throw ball. “Troy is so much more than a football player,” says Brad Sham, the Cowboys’ radio announcer. “The game is a big part of his being. But it’s not who he is.”

Once upon a time, Aikman seemed as likely to guide the world’s most famous football team as Mindy Cohn was to win an Oscar. Raised in the Southern California town of Cerritos, Troy was an ordinary baby until, at eight months, his parents struggled to slide shoes over his feet. Initially unalarmed, Ken and Charlyn Aikman began to fret when their son’s legs bowed below his knees and his toes curled under his feet. The diagnosis was clubfoot.

For the succeeding five months Troy wore casts on his feet, until, shortly after his first birthday, they were replaced by special shoes—white high-tops with the toes jutting out at exaggerated angles. Troy kept the shoes on at all hours, and had his heels strapped together at night.

Though he overcame the condition to become one of the town’s best schoolboy jocks, Troy was a sensitive kid who suffered through nightmares and depression. At age ten his grandfather died, and Troy started to obsess over death. The worries kept him up late into the night—a common fear for adults in their sixties and seventies, but unusual for a child tearing up Little League. Twelve-year-old Troy’s unease was hardly helped when his father announced that, following his dream of operating a ranch, the family would be relocating to Henryetta, Oklahoma.

Home to 6,500 people, a nine-hole golf course, two lakes, and one of the state’s better Labor Day carnivals, Henryetta was famous across the nation for, well, absolutely nothing. Not only was the Aikman clan (Troy, his parents, and his two older sisters) relocating to the middle of nowhere, but they would be living in a trailer until their house was constructed. The ranch the family resided on stretched over 172 acres. Everything smelled like manure. Troy’s morning job was to feed the pigs.

Seriously. He fed the pigs.

“We ended up seven miles out of town on dirt roads that were too rough to ride your bike on,” Aikman said. “It was tough. Even at that age I could see my athletic career falling apart.”

Like countless boys growing up outside of Los Angeles, Troy had envisioned himself one day starting at shortstop for legendary University of Southern California baseball coach Rod Dedeaux.

How was he supposed to get to USC now, languishing in the troughs of far-off Henryetta?

We all have moments when life swerves. You choose to take the elevator and meet your future wife. You duck into a bathroom stall, look down, and find a wallet stuffed with $100 bills. You get hit by a bus crossing the street.

For Troy Aikman the moment came at age thirteen, when his father asked whether he was thinking of signing up for junior high school football.

“He was a tough old country boy who loved football,” Aikman wrote of his father in his book,
Things Change.
“He liked the roughness of it. I knew what he wanted, so I signed up. If he hadn’t asked, I might never have played. I never rebelled against my father. Never.”

Back in California, Aikman’s prodigious arm had made him an obvious peewee-league quarterback. Upon coming to Oklahoma, however, he decided to keep quiet and see if coaches would assign him to a less pivotal position. Young Troy cherished sports, but shied away from the attention accompanying them. Hence, Troy Aikman began his junior high gridiron career as a burly fullback–tight end who bruised easily and loathed excessive contact.

He returned to quarterbacking as a freshman at Henryetta High School, and as a sophomore won the starting job for the Fighting Hens. In his first varsity game, Aikman led a stirring come-from-behind win over archrival Checotah High. A star was in the making.

Yet in his three years as the varsity stud, Aikman never adopted the persona. He was a soft-spoken kid on a ranch who worked Saturdays in a store called Western Auto, drove around in his pickup truck, and liked a pinch of Skoal between his lower lip and his gum. If Aikman was driven by one thing, it was not football glory, but that ever-present ticking clock. When would he die? How would he die? Why did he have to die?
Tick…tick…tick.
“I remember when my father turned forty, he wouldn’t open his gifts for two weeks,” Aikman wrote. “He took it hard.”

Those sorts of anxious moments stuck with Aikman. Though Troy was not raised in the church, he gave religion a try. As a high school senior he was rebaptized—fully soaked in a dunk tank as the spirit of Jesus Christ washed away his sins. The parishioners sang and cheered and embraced the new follower, but the fear didn’t disappear. Death hung there. It still hangs there.

For some, the burden would be too great. An obsession with death
can thrust one into an unyielding spiral of depression. With Aikman, it has had the opposite impact. When he played sports, he played passionately. People often mistake his sleepy eyes and casual facial expressions for boredom or indifference. Not so. More than most, Aikman wants to feel and experience and live.

From across the dining room table, Troy the high school jock watched his father leave early every morning and come back exhausted late at night. One could throw five hundred job descriptions into a hat and struggle to pick two that are more physically demanding than ranching and pipeline construction. Ken did both. Years later, Troy still recalls the day he spotted a bandage wrapped around his father’s finger.

“Dad, let me see your finger,” the son said.

“It’s nothing,” Ken answered.

When the gauze wrap was finally removed, Troy was nauseated. Ken had sliced off the tip of his finger, and the cut was so deep the bone was exposed.

“Don’t worry,” said Ken. “I’ll be all right.”

“Part of the reason I play the way that I play and don’t fear getting hit…was wanting to prove to him that I was tough too,” Aikman wrote. “I think that deep down, I always wanted to prove that I was as tough as he was and that I could take anything that he had to give. And I think that through football I was able to prove that to him.”

In his three years at Henryetta’s Cameron Field, Aikman established himself as an elite quarterback on a crummy team. Populated by gawky receivers and slow halfbacks, the Fighting Hens went 12–18 behind Aikman. “None of us matured as soon as Troy did,” said Rick Gazalski, Aikman’s 165-pound center. “Some of the teams we played were huge. We were doing what we had to do to make sure he didn’t get hurt.”

Fortunately for Aikman, high school wins and loses had no impact on his future. He possessed a big arm and a veteran’s poise, and people took notice. The first important college coach to see Aikman for who he could be was a University of Oklahoma assistant named Merv Johnson. One day, while working Oklahoma’s 1983 summer
prep football camp, Johnson’s eyes focused on the tall, handsome kid with the most breathtaking spiral this side of Steve Bartkowski. Johnson rushed into the office of Sooners head coach Barry Switzer. “I’ve got this kid from Henryetta who you have to see!” said Johnson. “He’s kind of special.”

How many times had Switzer heard that one before? There was always another “this fantastic passer” or “this one-of-a-kind halfback,” and 99 percent of them wound up playing intramural flag football for their college fraternities. “So I went down to the practice field,” recalls Switzer, “and I watched this young quarterback set up and drop back, and when he threw the ball, I could not believe a high school kid had the release, the prototype, the natural ability to hold the ball and his motion and the delivery, and have the ball jump out with the RPMs on it that his did. And I watched him and I walked over and told him, ‘I want you to start thinking about becoming the Sooners quarterback, because I’m offering you a scholarship right now.’” Switzer’s pitch was a strong one:
Come to Oklahoma—land of the famed wishbone offense—and we’ll start passing the ball just for you.

Indeed, Aikman was promised that, with the right quarterback, the Sooners would be more than willing to air it out. In Switzer’s mind, Aikman would team up with star running back Marcus Dupree to comprise the greatest backfield in OU history.

How could the quarterback say no?

Though Aiman arrived at Oklahoma filled with dreams of guiding one of the nation’s elite college football programs to new heights, fantasy never matched reality.

First, it took the new Sooner quarterback half a week to figure out that Switzer—a man known to speak with his gut, not his conscience—had promised a Mercedes SL65 and supplied a Dodge Dart. When Aikman signed with the Sooners, they were tooling around enough with the I-formation that Switzer could point to game tapes and bellow, “See, we’re changing!” But the Sooners weren’t changing, and never intended to. It was a snake-oil sale made by yet another snake-oil coach—and Aikman was furious. “Barry wanted to run the wishbone.
No bones about it,” said Aikman of the run-oriented offensive system. “I mean, he told me they were going to stay in the I and the wishbone was obsolete when I was getting recruited, and four days after signing day they’re back in the wishbone.”

As his father would have done, Aikman grit his teeth. On October 27, 1984, an ankle injury to senior quarterback Danny Bradley forced the freshman to make his first collegiate start. Ranked No. 2 in the nation, the Sooners traveled to the University of Kansas to battle a 2–5 team that had not defeated Oklahoma in nine years. Even with a jittery freshman at the helm, it looked to be a cakewalk.

The first freshman quarterback to start for the Sooners in nearly forty years, Aikman was a disaster. Kansas blitzed at will, forcing him into a well-choreographed reenactment of
Jeff Komlo: The Detroit Lions Years.
He threw fourteen passes. He completed two. Three others were intercepted, one of which was returned for a touchdown. The Sooners lost, 28–11.

To Aikman’s credit, he accepted the setback with remarkable stoicism. While transferring crossed his mind more than once, especially while he languished on the sideline for the rest of the year as Oklahoma reached the Orange Bowl, Aikman returned for his sophomore season determined to make the situation work for him.

Reinvigorated by a summer off, Aikman won the starting job, and Switzer briefly attempted to incorporate a few more passes than usual. The Sooners started the year 3–0, and with Miami coming to town for game number four Aikman was once again a star on the threshold. Although Oklahoma was the nation’s top-ranked team, the Hurricanes brought with them to Norman’s Owen Field a threatening cockiness that screamed, “We will pummel you!” With 9:18 remaining in the first half and the Hurricanes leading 14–7, Aikman was driving his club down the field when he faced a third-and-10 from the Miami 17. The quarterback dropped back, looked to pass, and was hammered into the turf by Miami defensive tackles John McVeigh and Jerome Brown. Aikman screamed while grasping for his left ankle, which had snapped in half. His season was over.

Standing on the sideline for the rest of the year, Aikman watched as freshman Jamelle Holieway—a swift wishbone maestro—led Oklahoma to an 11–1–0 record and the national title. Aikman was witness to the future of Oklahoma football, and it didn’t involve him.

When the season ended Aikman told Switzer that he had decided to transfer. Though he assumed his coach would be angry, Switzer was emphatically supportive. “I hated it, but I looked at it more from a father’s standpoint, trying to do what’s right for the player,” Switzer says. “He told me the schools he was interested in [UCLA, Arizona State, Iowa, and Miami], and I called the coaches as soon as I could.” It wasn’t an easy sell.