Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  “Not really true,” Campbell now says. “The football team had a lot of bad things going on around campus at the time—shooting guns, breaking into dorms. So I became something of a mentor. Kept the kids out of strip clubs and shit like that.”

  Wrote Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly: “Miami may be the only squad in America that has its team picture taken from the front and from the side.”

  Come season’s end, the lone team standing between an undefeated season and the top-ranked Hurricanes was No. 2 Penn State. The two legendary programs would meet in the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona for the national championship. For the media, this was perfect. Penn State was professional, Miami thuggish. Penn State was Joe Paterno, the grandfatherly head coach who had just been named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. Miami was Johnson, advanced professor of hooliganism. Penn State won with dignity, Miami with lawlessness. In the lead-up to the game, the Fiesta Bowl hosted a steak fry for the two schools. With three thousand fans in attendance, Penn State’s players arrived in suits and ties, while Miami’s representatives were decked out in black sweat suits and, following a swift wardrobe change, army fatigues. Both teams were asked to perform a comedy sketch. Penn State went first, and all was fine until Nittany Lion punter John Bruno, Jr., cracked, “We even let the black guys eat with us at the training table once a week.” When Bruno followed up by mocking Johnson’s famously helmet-shaped hair, Miami’s players had had enough. “We didn’t sit down with the Japanese the night before Pearl Harbor,” Brown announced, “and we’re not going to get up here and act like a bunch of monkeys to entertain you people.” With that, Brown and his teammates walked out.

  Because the majority of media representatives didn’t arrive in Tempe until the following afternoon, reports of the steak fry omitted vital details. Included in most stories were the fatigues and the “classless” walkout. Excluded were the racist joke and the overtly hostile reactions to Miami’s players from the 99.9 percent white attendees. Once again, Johnson was pegged as the leader of a band of disrespectful anarchists. When Penn State shocked Miami 14–10, a nation smiled. Miami had received what it deserved.

  Johnson coached two more years at Miami, leading the school to the 1987 national championship. Yet there was always that image. Johnson clashed with the school’s president; recruited players with cocky demeanors and seedy backgrounds; turned a university that had worked hard to enhance its academic reputation into a place that seemed to invite bad apples.

  When Jones came calling with an offer to leap to the NFL in 1989, Johnson was ready. “I like guys willing to walk the line,” says Jones. “I brought Jimmy to Dallas because he’s been through tough situations and he handled them better than anyone else could. He was the right man for a hard job.”

  Chapter 4

  THE ASTHMA FIELD

  I’m not saying we were naïve to the NFL. But I didn’t know what division we played in.

  —Dave Campo, Cowboys secondary coach

  HE WAS A free-agent kicker.

  That’s the first thing people need to remember about Massimo Manca, the man who—by the dual powers of mythology and bluster—unintentionally started this whole dynasty thing.

  Before there were the legends of Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin, there was a side practice field in Irving, Texas, on a weekend in March 1989. This is where the Dallas Cowboys veterans and free agents gathered for a standard three-day “voluntary” (translation: choose to attend or wind up slinging Slurpees at the nearest 7-Eleven) minicamp; the place where Jimmy Johnson would have an early opportunity to evaluate his players and set a tone.

  Ah—tone. Wasn’t that the key here? If Johnson was painfully aware of one thing, it was that the Dallas Cowboys—now his Dallas Cowboys—were woefully short on talent. Save for Michael Irvin, the prior season’s first-round draft choice, and Herschel Walker, the veteran running back who had piled up 2,019 total yards in 1988, the roster was a collection of long-past-their-prime veterans (Ed “Too Tall” Jones, Tom Rafferty), doomed-to-be-mediocre pups (Danny Noonan, Bob White, Jeff Zimmerman), and blah nobodies taking up space (Steve Folsom, Manny Hendrix). “I remember going into one of my early defensive meetings and there were five or six players older than I was,” says Dave Wannstedt, then the Cowboys’ new thirty-six-year-old defensive coordinator. “That’s a bad sign.”

  Though the upcoming draft would yield, among others, UCLA quarterback Troy Aikman, Syracuse fullback Daryl Johnston, and Pittsburgh center Mark Stepnoski, Johnson knew that counting on rookies to win games was akin to depending on the federal government to deliver timely tax refunds.

  It was March 18, 1989, and the Cowboys were already toast.

  Minus talent, Johnson’s strategy was to mold via torture. Viable or not, the new Cowboys headman believed he could take a wad of used bubble gum, pound it into the ground, and uncover a brick of gold. As an introduction to the Johnson Academy of Brutalization, on the first day of minicamp all Cowboy players were required to run sixteen 110-yard sprints under a certain time threshold before they could participate in general drills. “It was brutal,” says Ron Burton, a third-year linebacker. “I don’t think a lot of the guys were used to having to prove themselves before camp even started.”

  One man certainly unaccustomed to such a regimen was Manca. Born on the island of Sardinia, Manca attended high school in Reno, Nevada, then spent three seasons in the mid-1980s kicking for Penn State. Like many players of his ilk, Manca’s postgraduate years were an NFL travelogue. He kicked three games as a strike player for the Cincinnati Bengals in 1987, and the following year attended training camp with the San Francisco 49ers. In the spring of 1989 Manca auditioned at a free-agent kicking combine in Reno and earned an invitation to the Cowboys’ camp.

  Through his trials, Manca had come to understand that the kicker was expected solely to hone his craft. At Penn State, the 5-foot, 10-inch, 211-pound Manca lifted weights and ran stairs about as often as he shaved six-legged alpacas. It was no different with the Bengals and 49ers. “So when I showed up with the Cowboys I was totally out of shape,” says Manca. “As a kicker you know you won’t be doing anything too strenuous.”

  On his first day with the Cowboys, Manca was standing along the perimeter of the practice field, watching his new teammates divide into sprint groups, when an assistant coach pointed his way. “Manca!” the coach yelled. “Jump in there with the linebackers and running backs!”

  Gulp. Manca turned to his left, where he spotted a gaggle of sleek, muscular men with pumpkin-sized calves. He completed the first two or three runs without much trouble. The next two—a little harder. The next two—a lot harder. By the eighth sprint, Manca was walk-jogging, sweat pouring down his face. Johnson was not amused.

  “Manca, get off the field!” Johnson yelled. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “I’ve got asthma,” explained Manca, turning to the best half-truth he could muster. (On the one hand, Manca did indeed suffer from asthma as a young kid. On the other hand, Manca hadn’t been a young kid in, oh, ten years.)

  “Asthma, huh?” said Johnson. “Then go inside and talk to the doctor. But don’t come back here until you’re ready to compete.”

  That was it.

  Or was it?

  In the hours…days…weeks that passed, each retelling of the “Massimo Manca Incident” served to embroider Johnson’s increasingly larger-than-life aura. What began as “Don’t come back here until you’re ready to compete” morphed into “You have no business being here”; which morphed into “Get the hell out of my face!”; which morphed into the the now-immortal “The asthma field is over there!” Manca beat-down.

  “I remember it vividly,” says Steve Folsom, a Cowboys tight end. “The guy was having an asthma attack on the field, and Jimmy just kicked him off.”

  “One kid was trying to breathe, and he just couldn’t,” says Willis Crockett, a Dallas linebacker. “I was right there. Jimmy points and says, ‘The asthma field is over
there.’”

  “I was a witness,” swears Ray Horton, the Cowboys’ safety. “Jimmy was yelling at our trainer, ‘You get him off my field right now! You cut his ass right now and get him off my field!’”

  “It’s a true story,” says Jim Jeffcoat, the defensive lineman. “The guy’s name was Luis Zendejas. Jimmy looked at him and said…”

  Before long, Manca was no longer a free-agent kicker with little chance of making the squad, but a strong halfback. A beefy linebacker. An offensive lineman with a grizzly bear’s might and Paul Bunyan’s size. Manca was the greatest football player who had ever lived, and Johnson had banned him from the game for life. Asthma? I’ll show you asthma!

  “The whole thing grew to a ridiculous level,” Manca says. “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

  No matter. Thanks to one disposable kicker, Johnson had taken the first step in molding the Cowboys into his Cowboys: He had scared the bejesus out of his players. If Coach is willing to banish someone because of a life-threatening asthma attack, well, what the hell will he do to me?

  Nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains and surrounded by more than 14,800 acres of natural open space, Thousand Oaks is the sort of sleepy town one expects to find in South Dakota or Kansas, not in the action-packed state of California.

  With the exception of the Conejo Valley Botanic Garden and an occasional celebrity sighting (Thousand Oaks’s residents include Frankie Valli, Mariel Hemingway, and Belinda Carlisle), the main draw is the campus of Cal Lutheran University. Boasting majestic scenery and one of the state’s better liberal arts programs, the school is both beautiful and respected.

  It is here that the 1989 Dallas Cowboys began to take shape.

  For the previous twenty-six years that the Cowboys called Thousand Oaks their home-away-from-home, training camp was an annual exercise in dullness. Under Tom Landry, workouts went as planned, assistant coaches understood what to expect, and returnees knew that—unless they were inflicted with incurable blindness—their spots were mostly secure.

  No more.

  The Cowboys congregated for their first official training camp meeting on the morning of July 28, 1989, and if one thing became blatantly clear to holdovers from the Landry Era, it was that their new coach was an entirely different breed—and completely insufferable. For nearly forty-five minutes, Johnson blathered on about what could be accomplished with the power of teamwork; how effort and unity could move even the largest mountain; and blah, blah, blah, blah. “Listen,” he said. “We’re gonna play like champions, we’re gonna act like champions, and we’re gonna be champions.”

  He then presented players with a formula for success that oozed goofiness: PA + E = P.

  Translation: Positive attitude plus effort equals performance.

  “It wasn’t a good start,” says Todd Fowler, a running back who had played under Landry for four seasons. “Whereas Coach Landry treated you like a man, Jimmy stormed in there with this fire-and-brimstone approach, running all over the place like a high school kid.”

  Under Johnson, workouts lasted interminably. Weight work was mandatory and excessive. “I don’t blame Jimmy for his approach, because we had a lot of young guys who needed molding,” says Rafferty, who was then a thirty-five-year-old center. “But for me to go out and work three hours on Wednesday, three hours on Thursday, three hours on Friday, and then have fresh legs Sunday, well, I couldn’t do it.”

  Instead of confronting players about their shortcomings or work habits, Johnson often dropped hints to reporters, hoping an uncomfortable headline might evoke an inspired performance. Instead of calmly advising or encouraging, Johnson would jump up and down on the field, screaming for the entire state of California to hear. Early in camp kicker Shaun Burdick missed an imaginary “game-winning” field goal from 63 yards. Johnson bolted toward the line of scrimage and called lineman Dan Sileo—who wasn’t even on the field—offside. He had Burdick take the kick again, this time from 58 yards. When he made it, Johnson exploded with glee. “Everything is a habit!” Johnson said. “The more you can reinforce winning, the more you get in the habit of winning!”

  Rookies heard this and nodded.

  Veterans heard this and rolled their eyes.

  Making matters worse was Johnson’s soft spot for former Hurricanes. Among the eighty-six players in camp, five had played for Johnson at Miami. Two seconds after cursing out a rookie from Syracuse or Pittsburgh, Johnson would yuk it up with Randy Shannon, a former Hurricane linebacker short on skills but long on pedigree. “Every day it seemed like Johnson was bringing in another one of his guys,” says Charvez Foger, an eighth-round draft pick from Nevada-Reno. “It was a bad sign for someone like me.”

  Fearful of young players latching on to negativity, Johnson fired quickly. When linebacker Steve DeOssie screamed at one of the assistant coaches, he was immediately traded. When defensive tackle Kevin Brooks refused to report to minicamp, he was traded too. Fifth-round draft choice Keith Jennings reported to camp twenty pounds overweight and was deemed unwelcome. “He doesn’t fit into our plans,” Johnson said. Receiver Ray Alexander was called for delay of game after spiking the ball in an exhibition; “Ray,” Johnson coolly informed the media afterward, “isn’t with us anymore.”

  “Jimmy was a rah-rah guy and his coaches were idiots,” says Jeff Rohrer, a veteran linebacker. “I was used to being coached by Hall of Famers who had played in the NFL. But Jimmy and his guys didn’t know the game the way the guys who coached me before them did. And to compare them to [Landry assistant] Ernie Stautner? Are you kidding me? Are you friggin’ kidding me? C’mon. There was no comparison.”

  Despite mounting hostility amongst veteran Cowboys and a roster long on ineptitude, Johnson—who added fourteen new players and pledged to rid himself of as many listless holdovers as humanly possible—was convinced his team would compete. “All he cared about was winning,” says one Cowboy. “When I was with the Redskins [coach] Joe Gibbs would say, ‘OK, fellas, don’t mess with street drugs or steroids, because that’s not how we do things here.’ Jimmy, on the other hand, would say, ‘Don’t mess with street drugs or steroids, because the drug test is in a week and you don’t wanna get caught.’ It was obvious Jimmy lacked some character in his pursuit of greatness.”

  In April, after more than twenty years of marriage, Johnson came home from a jog around Valley Ranch, turned to Linda Kay, the wife who had dutifully followed him from one city to another, and said, “I want a divorce.” Johnson was not so much shedding a spouse as gaining free time to focus on the Cowboys. Winning in the NFL required 100 percent dedication. That’s why Linda Kay was gone, and why he would spend the coming years treating his two sons, Brent and Chad, like third cousins. “You knew one day Jimmy would look back at his kids and think, ‘Was it really worth missing their lives?’” says Alonzo Highsmith, his fullback at Miami. “But when he was coaching it was football first, second, third, and fourth. Nothing came fifth.”

  Dallas opened its exhibition season in mid-August with road wins against San Diego and Oakland, then traveled to Denver to face a Broncos club that had played in two of the last three Super Bowls. Johnson knew his team was overmatched, and he also knew that Dan Reeves, the Denver coach and a longtime Cowboy player and assistant, had badly wanted to replace Landry and was irked by the snub.

  In a physical contest that ignored the general let’s-take-it-easy rules governing preseason football, Denver quarterback John Elway played the entire game, completing 26 of 50 passes for 355 yards. But this was far from a blowout. With one second remaining in regulation, Elway threw an 18-yard bullet to receiver Mark Jackson to force overtime. That the Cowboys lost on a David Treadwell field goal was, to the coaches along the Dallas sideline, insignificant.

  “After that game, I think a lot of us were convinced that we had a pretty good team on our hands,” says Dave Campo, the Cowboys secondary coach. “We had taken Elway’s best punches without flinching, and we kept coming at him with a real intensity
.”

  The Cowboys wrapped up the preseason by winning their final game against Houston. Suddenly the negativity and doubt of just weeks earlier was replaced by a stirring optimism. Perhaps Johnson’s initial evaluation was wrong. Perhaps the Cowboys were more talented and driven than first advertised. They stared down Elway. They beat a Houston team projected to be Super Bowl–ready. The Dallas Cowboys were good. Really good. A winning record was a possibility. Maybe even the playoffs. “We truly came to believe in ourselves,” says Wannstedt. “We were set for the season to begin.”

  Now all the team needed was a quarterback.

  When the Cowboys selected Troy Aikman with the first pick in the 1989 NFL Draft, everyone from opposing coaches and executives to fans and journalists knew the drill.

  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.