Boys Will Be Boys (9 page)

“Mike Lynn always had this nice suntan,” said Ackles. “But when I gave that letter to him, the guy turned absolutely pale. He knew he had just made the biggest screwup in NFL history.”

Frustrated, angry, and humiliated, Lynn told Jones to keep the damn picks and the players.

Then he flew back to Minnesota. Alone.

Even though The Trade (as the Walker deal came to be known throughout Texas) would eventually help the Cowboys win multiple Super Bowls, for Dallas players it was a Roberto Duran hook to the gut.

Au revoir, season.

With Walker, Dallas was terrible. Without Walker, Dallas was a joke. The team was already missing Aikman to a broken finger, and second-year receiver Michael Irvin would suffer a season-ending knee injury in the sixth game. In its first contest without Walker, Dallas actually ended the third quarter tied with San Francisco at 14 before
allowing 17 unanswered points in a 31–14 defeat. Daryl Clack, the fill-in halfback, ran for 32 yards.

“We are making progress,” Johnson said afterward. “I hate to lose, as anybody who spends any time around me knows, but I can see now that we are starting to become a football team.”

An 0–6 football team. But a football team nonetheless.

The Cowboys dropped their next two games and traveled to Washington on November 5 as the NFL’s only 0–8 operation.

By now, life at Valley Ranch was unbearable. Prior to the previous week’s loss to the Phoenix Cardinals, Jones introduced former Cowboy Lee Roy Jordan into the Ring of Honor and was all but booed off the field. There were a season-high 2,461 no-shows, and one fan wore a sack over his head reading GEE, I MISS TOM LANDRY.

Ed Werder of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
summed up the bleakness with his mid-season report card, giving the quarterbacks a B, the running backs and offensive linemen Ds, and the wide receivers Fs. Wrote Werder: “The Dallas Cowboys, a team with stars on its helmets but few on the field, have spent the first half of the National Football League season losing games, fans and self-respect.”

Entering the Redskin contest, there were few reasons for optimism. The Aikman-less, Walker-less, Irvin-less Cowboys were now dependent on Paul Palmer, the halfback they had recently acquired from Detroit for what amounted to three Pepsis and a jar of B&G Pickles. A former first-round pick by the Chiefs out of Temple University, Palmer possessed two professional claims to fame. First, he was a monumental bust. Second, while playing for Kansas City he once threatened to fumble intentionally.

Palmer, though, was the best the Cowboys had. And for one day, it was good enough. Dallas came out flat. The Redskins came out flatter. The Cowboys entered halftime leading 3–0, and Johnson stormed into the locker room and gave one of the most impassioned talks of his life. “We can pull this out!” he bellowed, beads of sweat trickling
from his forehead. “This is something we need to do, and the opportunity is right there!” The Cowboys stormed back onto the field and, well, stunk. Walsh completed 10 of 30 passes for 142 yards. But the Redskins—14
¹
/2-point favorites—were even worse. They scored only 3 points in the second half, and Johnson and Co. had its first win, 13–3. The star was Palmer, who—while wearing a wristband listing his team’s plays—carried 18 times for 110 yards.

“The stress of losing those first eight games was building,” says Walsh. “Nobody wants to be known as a chronic loser. We didn’t want to win—we
needed
to win.”

Afterward, Johnson spoke of more triumphs to come, and Jones distributed hugs as if they were Peeps on Easter Sunday. Safety Bill Bates went so far as to sneak behind his coach, place his hand in his (perfectly coiffed) hair, and muss it into a poodle cut. It was a great moment. A brilliant moment.

A fleeting moment.

The 1989 Cowboys never won again. Not once. Palmer’s magic vanished, the defense was porous, and Aikman returned to take a hellish beating. He started the following Sunday against the Cardinals, threw for an NFL rookie record 379 yards, and was knocked cold for nearly five minutes before being helped off the field. “Troy earned all of our respect,” says Garry Cobb, the Dallas linebacker. “He got killed and refused to cry. I’ve been on the field when quarterbacks cry, and it ain’t pretty. Dan Marino was a crier—‘
Whose man was that! Where’s the blocking! Whah!
’ But Aikman—never. Aikman was a man.”

“Troy gave all the linemen boots as a present at the end of the season,” adds offensive tackle Dave Widell. “With the job we did, we all should have given them back.”

As the glow from victory number one faded, the Cowboys returned to their ornery, agitated ways. Johnson was spending seventeen-hour days in his office, suffocating beneath the dual weights of humiliation and strife. By now nearly all of the veterans had had it with their coach’s collegiate stylings. The players had assigned seats on flights and were required to wear suits and ties for all travel. “He even made us take the
bus together to the stadium,” says Folsom, the tight end. “It seemed weird, walking onto the bus and seeing Ed Jones and Tom Rafferty sitting there like little kids going off to elementary school.”

The two weeks following the Washington win evoked new lows in player-coach relations. There was a shouting match between Johnson and Everson Walls, when the coach spotted his veteran cornerback laughing it up with opposing players immediately after the Cardinals loss. There was a nightmarish practice the day before the Thanksgiving matchup with the Eagles, when Johnson had his team hitting in full pads beneath a frigid rainstorm. Says center Mark Stepnoski: “I was sitting there thinking, There’s a lot I don’t know about pro football. But I know this is fuckin’ stupid. Right now Philly is on a plane—they’re on a nice, warm, dry plane and they’re taking the whole day off except for meetings. And we’re sitting out here in freezing-cold rain hitting in full pads. You know what? We’re gonna get our asses kicked.” The Eagles not only won, 27–0, but left the Cowboys looking foolish. In his postgame press conference, a red-faced Johnson insisted that Philadelphia coach Buddy Ryan had placed a bounty on the heads of Aikman and kicker Luis Zendejas.

Was the charge correct? Sort of. Ryan had indeed offered money to any Eagle able to knock out either of the two Cowboys. But it was little more than a cheesy motivational tool—hardly different from Johnson’s having his players soak in the cold rain for two hours. In the end, Johnson appeared whiny and unprofessional. Two weeks later, as the Cowboys exited Veterans Stadium after another loss to the Eagles, he was pelted by an onslaught of snowballs and batteries. “If you’re going to have snow in the stands,” Ryan said with a dismissive shrug, “they’ll throw snowballs.”

It was that kind of year.

In the final contest of the regular season, Johnson’s Cowboys fell to the Packers, 20–10, for their fifteenth loss. Wrote Randy Galloway of the
Dallas Morning News:
“Sunday’s futile finish for the Cowboys was an appropriate ending to a season that set back a 30-year-old franchise 30 years.” Some fifteen hundred miles away, Tom Landry, a guest
of Giants owner Wellington Mara at the New York–Los Angeles Raiders game, was asked to assess his old team. “Well, I wouldn’t start a rookie quarterback right off—you take a chance on ruining him,” said Landry. “And I’d never have traded Herschel.”

The contrast was remarkable.

In New York, Landry was relaxing comfortably in Mara’s luxury suite.

In Dallas, the Texas Stadium toilets had frozen.

A
S HIS CAREER
progressed and Emmitt Smith went on to become one of the great running backs in the history of the National Football League, different people recall different things.

For opposing tacklers, it is Smith’s crowbar stiff-arms and incomparable resiliency.

For coaches, it is Smith’s churning legs that refused to stop, refused to slow down.

For marketers, it is his fluorescent smile.

For buddies, it is his obsession with dominoes.

For teammates, it is the outfit.

The world’s ugliest outfit.

All these years later, the memory sticks like batter to a sizzling pan. Though Smith now owns a closet stuffed with some of the trendiest threads this side of Santo Versace, it makes little difference. The outfit
is
Emmitt Smith. Emmitt Smith
is
the outfit.

“I saw what he was wearing,” recalls Richard Howell, Smith’s agent at the time, “and I just thought, Emmitt, what in the world…”

Keep in mind, the year was 1990, when big, colorful
Cosby Show
sweaters were still en vogue and larger-than-life men like Rob Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice) and Stanley Burrell (MC Hammer) were sporting pants the size of jumbo tents.

But, really, what in God’s name was Emmitt Smith thinking?

As he walked toward the podium in a Valley Ranch conference room, reporters and photographers looked at Smith and snickered. His bright purple shorts and matching vest were sprinkled with gold polka dots. His T-shirt was the hue of a box of Sun-Maid Golden Raisins. He wore black loafers on his feet, minus socks. A white Cowboys cap adorned his head.

The date was April 22, 1990, and this was Emmitt Smith’s introductory NFL press conference.

“You don’t walk up in no professional organization in no polka-dotted two-piece short set on,” says Cowboys fullback Tommie Agee. “Everybody—absolutely everybody—gave him grief for that.”

Eight hours earlier Smith had been sitting on a friend’s couch in Pensacola Beach, Florida, anxiously watching the NFL Draft and waiting for his name to be called. In his three years at the University of Florida, Smith had set school records with 3,928 rushing yards and 36 touchdowns. He had exceeded 100 yards in twenty-five of thirty-four games, including a 224-yard effort against Alabama in his first collegiate start. Smith
knew
he was a Top 10 pick.

And yet, there were doubters. At 5-foot-9 and 200 pounds, Smith was significantly smaller than the prototypical NFL back. Of greater concern was the speed dilemma: Smith didn’t have any. In college, he was often caught from behind by cornerbacks and (egad) linebackers. To ease the minds of NFL scouts, in the weeks before the draft Howell held an open workout for Smith at Florida. His client excelled in all areas—blocking, pass catching, strength. Then he ran the 40 in a pedestrian 4.59 seconds. “Emmitt is so competitive that he’s arguing
when they tell him the time,” Howell recalls. “Not only did they argue back, they told him he rocked the start, which makes the time faster. As he’s arguing I’m thinking, Emmitt, you have to stop this.”

Smith did stop—and ran another disappointing 4.59. Still, in his mind the sluggish time made little difference. Smith kept a list of his professional goals on a piece of paper back home:

The list was equal parts admirable and wacko. To many of the men involved in collegiate scouting, Smith projected as a change-of-pace back who, after some seasoning, could
maybe
get fifteen carries a game. He certainly didn’t compare with Penn State’s all-everything Blair Thomas, the faster, stronger, more powerful tailback who would go No. 2 to the New York Jets.

As the draft dragged on, Smith’s frustration mounted. “It was scary,” says Howell. “We thought he’d go between ten and thirty, but it was a deep draft. I was told the Falcons had him rated the sixth-or seventh-best running back.”

When North Carolina State’s Ray Agnew was tabbed by New England with the tenth pick, Smith stormed out of his friend’s house and stared down at the soothing waves of the Gulf of Mexico. He was one of the first junior eligible players to apply for the draft, and perhaps it was a mistake. The negative thoughts flowed through his head.
Maybe I should have stayed in school. Maybe I made the biggest blunder of my life.

Approximately forty-five minutes later, Smith’s mother, Mary, frantically screamed for her son to return inside. Bob Ackles, player personnel director for the Cowboys, was on the phone. He wanted to talk.

“Emmitt,” Ackles said, “how would you like to be a Dallas Cowboy?”

With those ten words, a team’s history was forever changed. As the years passed and Smith emerged as an all-time great, we were often told that Dallas traded up from the twenty-first pick to the seventeenth to take Smith, and that everyone was gaga for him from the beginning.

If it were only so simple.

Johnson approached the draft intent on finding the best available pass rusher. His first two cravings, USC linebacker Junior Seau and Miami defensive tackle Cortez Kennedy, were off the board before Dallas picked. So, for that matter, was James Francis, the Baylor linebacker. Johnson was so opposed to the idea of selecting an offensive player that changing his mind required Joe Brodsky, the team’s crusty running backs coach, to stand atop the table in the team’s Valley Ranch draft room and scream, “This is the guy, dammit! Emmitt Smith is the guy!” Brodsky had studied tapes of every game Smith had played in college and high school. He loved what he saw.

Johnson relented. “One of the best decisions I ever made,” he says. “How important was Emmitt to turning the thing around? He was vital.”

There was just one problem: Emmitt Smith wanted money. Lots of money.

Jerry Jones, on the other hand, was still aching from the abuse he took one year earlier, when he was crucified for paying Aikman $11 million—well above market value for a No. 1 pick. Though far from thin-skinned, Jones was sensitive to criticisms that he was an overmatched Arkansas hayseed. It hardly helped that, in the immediate aftermath of the draft, Jones raved to a local radio host that the Cowboys had Smith rated “fourth overall” on their draft list. “This is a bright spot,” Jones said. “It’s going to make Nate Newton block better, make Troy throw better, and make that defense a lot better, having this guy on our squad.”

Rule No. 1 in potential contract talks: Keep your praise to a minimum.

It didn’t take long to realize that Jones’s draft-day euphoria would not carry over into negotiations. As the team reported to its new training camp at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Smith returned to Pensacola and bunkered down for a lengthy process. Jones’s initial presentation was a five-year deal for $3.2 million—less than what picks No. 15, 16, 18, and 19 signed for. When Howell dismissed the offer as insulting, Jones went on the offensive. “Howell told me right from the start that he’s a litigator,” he told the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
“All he’s doing is dragging something out that doesn’t have to be that way.”

If Jones wanted to play hardball, Smith would play hardball. With the University of Florida about to begin its fall semester, Smith drove to Gainesville and enrolled in classes. A theraputic recreation major, he had long ago promised his mother that he would earn a degree. So why not be proactive?

The tactic was brilliant. In Gainesville, Smith was strolling to and from classes, basking in the laid-back atmosphere, and even making local headlines for running down two thugs who vandalized a former teammate’s Corvette (EMMITT’S IN MOTION: HE MAKES THE CATCH! raved the
St. Petersburg Times
). In Austin, meanwhile, the Cowboys’ top running back was Timmy Smith, the former Redskin who, less than three years earlier, had rushed for 204 yards in Super Bowl XXII. Now fat and lazy, Timmy Smith was a disaster. Shula recalls one practice in which Smith was supposed to follow a pattern called “the Choice Route,” where he would run six yards and cut either left or right. Instead Smith bolted twenty yards down the field and made two or three jukes. When Shula asked Smith if he was confused, the back replied, “Coach, you said it was a choice route. I
chose
to do something different.”

By the first week of September the Cowboys were desperate. Not only was Timmy Smith heading the depth chart, but the team sent two draft picks to Houston for fullback Alonzo Highsmith, a former standout for Johnson at the University of Miami who, in the wake of two
arthroscopic knee surgeries, was a shell of his collegiate self. Johnson praised Highsmith as “one of the outstanding talents in the NFL,” hoping his words would reach Emmitt Smith’s ears.

Perhaps they did.

On September 4, 1990, one day after the Highsmith trade and five days before the Cowboys’ season opener against San Diego, Smith agreed on a four-year deal worth $650,000 annually. According to Howell, the final contract was a nod to Jones’s ego as much as it was about money. “Jerry was concerned about the reaction from other owners,” says Howell. “So we had a little outside deal for $50,000 per year that didn’t go in the main contract, we had a signing bonus of $40,000 and a reporting bonus of $40,000 and all sorts of incentives which were also gimmes.”

But the key, from Jones’s vantage point, was that it at least
appeared
to others that Smith was locked up for four years and a reasonable amount of money. Hence, the provision for a fourth year at $495,000 that became void when Smith so much as stepped onto the field for one game at
any
point in his career.

“Jerry was able to report a four-year deal,” says Howell, “and we were able to get Emmitt in uniform and ready to play. It was win-win.”

When Smith finally joined the Cowboys, he discovered a team whose roster looked vastly different from the 1–15 laughingstock of a season earlier. Dallas had brought in a league-high sixteen Plan B free agents, including safety James Washington from the Los Angeles Rams, wide receiver Dennis McKinnon from the Chicago Bears, and fullback Tommie Agee from the Kansas City Chiefs. The team also added a lightly regarded tight end from the Phoenix Cardinals named Jay Novacek. “Professionals,” says McKinnon. “We were professional football players who knew how to play the game right.”

On the first day of camp, well before Smith had officially joined the team, Johnson called his players together and announced, “Our goal is to get to the Super Bowl…”

Long pause.

“…this season.”

Was he nuts? The Cowboys had won a single game the year before. Surely, the Super Bowl was out of reach. “Yeah, it was out of reach,” says Washington, the new safety. “But I bought what he was saying. He wasn’t telling us that we would win the Super Bowl. He was telling us that if we don’t believe, we’ll
never
win the Super Bowl.”

Following a 1–3 exhibition run (if the staff learned one thing, it was to pay the preseason little mind), the Cowboys opened at home on September 9 against San Diego. With Emmitt Smith watching from the sidelines for all but a handful of plays, the Cowboys slogged through three and a half quarters of mediocrity. But everything changed seven minutes into the fourth, when San Diego, leading 14–10, faced a fourth-and-6 from the Dallas 48-yard line. Instead of kicking the ball away, Chargers coach Dan Henning called for a fake punt. The ball was snapped directly to linebacker Gary Plummer, who ran two yards before being tackled by Dallas safety Bill Bates. Aikman proceeded to march his team down the field, then dive into the end zone for the 17–14 triumph. The quarterback was swarmed by teammates, who hugged and high-fived their young leader.

The Cowboys were undefeated.

Afterward, a distraught Henning took exaggerated pulls from his Marlboro. You don’t lose to the Dallas Cowboys. You just don’t. “I told the players, ‘I called it,’” said Henning. “‘It was my dumb mistake.’”

A few hours after the win, Johnson and Shula agreed that Timmy Smith—who had gained 6 yards on 6 carries versus San Diego—would be released and replaced in the starting lineup by Emmitt Smith. The following Sunday, the new starter gained 11 yards on a half-dozen carries in a humiliating 28–7 loss to the Giants at Texas Stadium.
This
was the savior? “Emmitt just wasn’t that impressive,” says tight end Rob Awalt. “When you first see people, you’re measuring speed, size, strength, explosiveness—all the things that make up that ‘Wow!’ factor. Emmitt didn’t look like he had any ‘Wow!’” Smith spent much of
the afternoon sulking along the sidelines. When the game ended, he rushed toward the locker room, frustration etched across his face. “I roomed with Emmitt, and I told everyone that I was sharing a room with the man who would make Cowboy fans forget Tony Dorsett,” says Crawford Ker, the offensive guard. “Emmitt just wanted a chance to play and show what he could do. Not getting it frustrated the hell out of him.”

Smith was far from the unhappiest Cowboy.

Through the ups and downs of a tumultuous rookie year, Troy Aikman believed that, inevitably, he would wind up the Cowboys’ starting quarterback. Granted, Johnson’s loyalty to Steve Walsh was more than a tad disconcerting. But if one thing became clear during the mono-win season, it was that Aikman was a far superior player. Teammates saw it. Assistant coaches saw it. Even Jones saw it. Aikman was simply too big, too powerful, too talented. “Steve had a lot of knowledge,” says Gerald Alphin, a veteran NFL receiver, “but he had an arm like a noodle.”

Johnson remained unswayed. Against the powerful Giants in Week 2, Aikman had one of the better games of his young professional career, completing 10 of 18 passes for 109 yards. Four of his incompletions were drops. “In two years Aikman will be the best quarterback in the NFL,” Giants linebacker Carl Banks predicted afterward. “He’s strong, he’s full of confidence, and he never gets rattled.”

Maybe so. But when one of Aikman’s fourth-quarter passes was tipped and returned for a touchdown by Lawrence Taylor, Johnson inserted Walsh. Afterward a furious Aikman stormed from the locker room, only briefly speaking with the media.