Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  Cowboy players made paid appearances at supermarket openings and at shopping malls; at dance clubs and at roller rink birthday parties. They did radio spots, hosted TV specials, served as MCs. Jimmy Johnson wrote a “tell-all” book that told little. Tom Vanderveer, mayor of Troy, Texas, announced that the city council was considering changing the town’s name to “Troy Aikman.”

  In what surely goes down as one of the most questionable decisions of his otherwise wondrous career Aikman, along with Novacek, special teams coach Joe Avezzano, and former Cowboys Randy White and Walt Garrison, formed a country music group, The Boys. Their album, Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy, mixes horrific songs and horrific singers into one uniquely horrific package. The first single, “Oklahoma Nights,” was sung by Aikman, whose vocal stylings are reminiscent of a cat choking on a lug nut.

  Of all the events that merged to form Cowboy Mania, the one that remains most curious is the rise of Kenny Gant, a third-year defensive back from Albany State who led all nonstarters with 54 tackles during the ’92 season and tied for the team lead with 3 interceptions. Though Gant excelled on special teams and as a nickel back, he was little more than an average NFL player. “Truthfully, I just wanted to hang on,” he says. “When I was drafted I went to a Wendy’s in Albany, Georgia, to celebrate with a hamburger. I was small-scale like that.”

  What Gant did possess, however, was perfect timing.

  During practices early in the 1992 season, Gant noticed that Kevin Smith, his fellow defensive back, would celebrate a good play by bending an arm at the elbow and holding it up to his helmet. Smith termed it “the Shark Fin,” and said the defensive backs at Texas A&M, his alma mater, used it to show off. “In practice all of us started flashing the fin, just sorta goofing around,” says Gant. “But it wasn’t like there was anything to it.” That is, until the fifth game of the ’92 season, when Gant sprinted down the field on a punt, charged Seattle’s Robb Thomas, and hammered him with a forearm to the head. As Gant leapt to his feet, he bent his right arm, held it to his noggin, and swayed it back and forth while bobbing his rear end. The Texas Stadium crowd roared with delight.

  After the game Gant was surrounded by reporters, intrigued by the newest dance sensation. Gant smiled. He was a fun-loving guy who enjoyed jogging onto the practice field wearing only a jock or riding naked through the locker room in the laundry cart or hopping over a fence to sneak onto safety Bill Bates’s ranch for a quiet evening of fishing or hitting the clubs with teammates. Now, there was the Selachimorpha thing. “I just had my shark fin up,” he told the press with a chuckle. “We weren’t letting nothing get by.”

  A craze had arrived. In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, Gant’s celebrity reached a whole new level. He was now, officially, “The Shark.” There were Shark Dance posters. Shark Dance T-shirts. A local player hangout, the Cowboy Sports Café, served the Sharkbite—a blue-tinted Long Island Iced Tea. Gant would visit a shopping mall and hear people holler his name while making a fin. “I’d be in restaurants eating and I’d look up from my food and some guy or some kid would be doing the Shark Dance,” says Gant. “It’s funny how one day you’re anonymous and the next day you’re huge. I loved it.”

  A couple of months after the Super Bowl, Gant was hired by a Dallas attorney to appear at a pool party for son’s thirteenth birthday. Gant arrived in a suit and tie and performed his Shark Dance to the delight of the approximately thirty youths in attendance. He then turned to the father and asked to borrow a pair of swim trunks.

  “Kenny,” the man said, “you don’t have to…”

  The Shark insisted.

  “I had on a pair of this guy’s nut-huggers,” laughs Gant, “and I jumped right in.”

  The strangest request came from the Jewish family that hired Gant to appear at their son’s bar mitzvah. A deeply religious Pentecostal from the decidedly non-Jewish town of Lakeland, Florida, Gant grew up attending church on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, serving as a drummer in the congregation’s band, and watching in awe as many around him spoke in tongues. Brad Mitzvee? What the heck was a Brad Mitzvee?

  “Man, was that fun,” says Gant. “I helped light the candles, I wore a yarmulke, I did the Shark Dance, I line-danced. I got paid but I would have done it for free.”

  Beyond the Shark appearances and country albums and Brad Mitzvees, what best symbolized the Cowboys’ rise from contenders to superstars was the Hoopsters, the team’s offseason “charity” basketball squad. Formed in the early 1970s by wide receiver Drew Pearson, the Hoopsters’ initial mission was to travel the state of Texas promoting the Cowboys, rewarding fans for their undying support during the season and making some cash on the side. The Hoopsters would come to town, play the River Oaks Volunteer Fire Department or the Lubbock Police Department or the faculty of Atlee Parr High School and donate most of the proceeds to charity. The games would be competitive, but never crossed the line.

  Any lingering philanthropic intentions dissipated in the mid-1980s, when a linebacker named Eugene Lockhart took charge of the Hoopsters and ran the operation less like a goodwill tour and a bit more like a Hollywood agent. The Hoopsters began demanding exorbitant appearance fees for their participation. Instead of COME OUT AND SEE THE COWBOYS RAISE MONEY FOR A GOOD CAUSE! promotional signs should have read COME OUT AND SEE THE COWBOYS RAISE MONEY FOR A GOOD CAUSE—MINUS THE $30,000 WE’VE GOTTA PAY THEM TO BE HERE, THE FOOD WE’RE REQUIRED TO SUPPLY, AND THE FIRST-CLASS HOTEL SUITES THEY PROBABLY WANT, TOO. “Lockhart was not a good guy,” says Anthony “Paco” Montoya, who managed the Hoopsters and worked as a gofer for several players through the 1990s. “He was a bully who did things the wrong way.” In 1988, a basketball-loving rookie named Michael Irvin led a Hoopsters revolt, literally wrestling control of the team from Lockhart in an Odessa, Texas, hotel room. “When it was over there was lots of broken furniture,” says Montoya, “and the Hoopsters had a new leader.”

  Yet the sex-seeking, money-hungry, fame-addicted wide receiver was hardly a Saint. Irvin had no trouble putting the Hoopsters to his own use, whether that meant demanding a $10,000 personal appearance fee for a two-hour “charitable” basketball game or securing perks that would have put the Rat Pack to shame. On May 10, 1993, the Hoopsters were scheduled to play a Friday night exhibition at Baylor University that was to raise money for the resurrection of Paul Quinn College, a small, traditionally black school. As the game was set to begin, an organizer informed Irvin that he did not have the $25,000 check the Hoopsters required. Instead of staying and, say, playing for less money to entertain the 240 spectators, Irvin, Harper, Kevin Smith, Jimmie Jones, and the rest of the Cowboys bolted. Such behavior came as no surprise to Rodney Dodd, president of the Little Dribblers in Fairfield, Texas, who had presented the Hoopsters with a $5,600 check for a March 5 appearance. Less than a week before the game, Dodd was told the fee had increased to $7,000, plus expenses. “I called [Irvin] back and told him we didn’t want them,” said Dodd at the time. “To this day we’ve never seen our fifty-six hundred dollars.”

  Unlike the old Hoopsters of Pearson and Everson Walls, Irvin’s priorities were money, winning, and postgame sexual pursuits. Whether playing a bunch of beefy marines at a military base or a flabby gaggle of middle-aged teachers in a dimly let gymnasium, the Hoopsters had to win. That’s why, in a May 1991 game against the staff of a Dallas radio station, KKDA-AM, Irvin became so incensed by a questionable foul call that he allegedly grabbed the referee—an unpaid volunteer named Willie Summerling—and showered him with obscenities. When Summerling warned Irvin to dial back his antics, the player slugged him in the mouth, knocking loose a dental plate. There were two thousand spectators in attendance, many of them children.

  With the Cowboys’ on-field successes came increased Hoopster requests. They flew to Mexico City for a game, flew to Las Vegas for another. They played the Redskins in Washington, engaged in two or three mini-brawls, and left with a hard-fought 3-point triumph. “Once we played these soldiers in
Killeen and we needed an escort out of the stadium,” says Kevin Smith. “The other team wanted to fight some Cowboys to prove their manhood, and as time ran out I hit a three-pointer for the win. That was pretty darn sweet.”

  Though players generally joined the Hoopsters in the spirit of camaraderie, what proved to be the greatest perk—especially in the shadow of the ’92 season—was a dazzling postgame buffet of booze, marijuana, cocaine, and sex. Whether the Hoopsters won or lost, following each contest they headed either for the hottest nightspot in town or to their hotel, which would be transformed into Club Hoopsters. Though the Cowboys were a big deal in Dallas, they were larger-than-life in smaller towns across the state and country, where a visit from the Super Bowl champions was akin to a return of Elvis. Kids turned out to see their sports heroes. Men turned out to see their sports heroes too. But women—well, mounds of women came out to gain a firsthand physical experience. “It didn’t matter if you were a dope dealer, a Channel 5 TV reporter, a judge on the U.S. District Court,” says Newton. “You weren’t getting the women the Cowboys were.”

  If you were hot, you might get to spend the night with a player. If you were sexy, you might even end up on the Hoopsters’ private airplane. If you were two lesbians looking to put on a show, you might be allowed to fly the jet. “That’s when it really got crazy,” says Montoya, who traveled with the team. “To call those flights ‘off the hook’ doesn’t do anything justice. I don’t think there’s a word for what went on. We filled those planes with more women than we did players, and they were willing to do anything.”

  Anything?

  “Absolutely anything.”

  It was here, 30,000 feet above the ground, that Alvin Harper earned the nickname “Freaky Harp.” Though married to Jamise, his college sweetheart from the University of Tennessee, Harper never met a groupie, a stripper, a cheerleader he wouldn’t have sex with. In a feat that left teammates stunned, Harper was banned from the Men’s Club of Dallas for having sex in a phone booth. To be a Cowboy star in the 1990s and have someone demand you leave his strip joint—well, that took work.

  On the Hoopsters’ chartered airplane, there were no bouncers, no wives, no coaches. Just loose women looking to party with the Super Bowl champions. Cowboy players would have sex in the main cabin, sex in the bathrooms. Irvin, the ringleader of all things erotic, would direct various arrangements—women on women, two women on a teammate, three women on a teammate. “There was nothing Mike couldn’t think of,” says Montoya. “He had quite the imagination.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” says Clayton Holmes, a defensive back and Hoopsters guard. “If you were employed by the Cowboys, it didn’t take much to get whatever it was you craved. And we craved a lot.”

  As the Dallas players were reaping the benefits of a Super Bowl victory, Jerry Jones and the team’s brass weren’t having quite so much fun.

  The problem: Emmitt Smith—and his ego.

  Though he was publicly hailed as a quiet, humble, levelheaded cornerstone of the Cowboys’ offense, on-field success had drastically changed Smith’s demeanor and sense of self-worth.

  Coming out of the University of Florida after his junior season, Smith was an uncomplicated kid who deferred to his mother, Mary, on nearly all issues. If Mary said UF was the best school for her Emmitt, then, by God, UF was the best school for Emmitt. If Mary believed Richard Howell, a little-known agent, was the best choice, then Richard Howell it would be. Young Emmitt was blessed with neither profound intelligence nor sound judgment, but he happened to have a mother possessing both.

  Now, however, in the wake of three straight Pro Bowl appearances, two straight NFL rushing titles, and 108 yards in a Super Bowl, Smith was a new man. In February 1993, he and some business associates traveled to Atlanta to attend the Super Show, an annual sports merchandising bonanza that draws anyone who’s anyone in the world of professional athletics (for a refresher, think back to the scene in Jerry Maguire when the character played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., Rod Tidwell, is approached by a kid and asked, “Are you Hootie?”). In past years, Mary Smith’s Emmitt would have been humbled by such a celestial gathering. This time, however, as he cruised through town in his stretch limo, his Louis Vuitton handbag atop his lap, Smith gazed out the tinted window and spotted enormous billboards featuring Michael Jordan—Nike’s standard-bearer. “I need to be bigger than him,” he said.

  Those surrounding Smith laughed—until they realized he was serious. Such was the new mentality of the NFL’s rushing champ, who, according to one teammate, “began to separate from the rest of us.” Smith imagined himself not as a football player, but as lord of all things. He wanted to endorse sneakers (he became a Reebok spokesman) and write books (his autobiography, The Emmitt Zone, would be published in 1994). He fancied himself a TV personality and was euphoric when, during Super Bowl week, Howell had him booked as a guest on The Arsenio Hall Show. (Enraged at not being invited as well, Irvin refused to speak to Smith for two days.) “He had a huge ego that made him sort of a dick,” says Mike Freeman, the former New York Times NFL writer. “Teammates respected him, but they also thought he did a lot of things for personal attention.”

  Smith talked up his basketball talents—then played with the Hoopsters and stunk up the court. He bragged of his ability to drive a golf ball, and played 18 holes with Craig Neal, a former NBA journeyman who worked for Howell. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” Neal told Howell, “but Emmitt lost so many balls in the woods that I had to start chasing them. I wound up getting a poison ivy shot.”

  Coming on the heels of a banner season, Smith licked his chops over the expiration of his three-year contract. Though he was a restricted free agent, meaning Dallas could match any other offer, Smith believed he was the engine that powered the machine. While Aikman was a superb quarterback and Irvin, Harper, and Novacek were dangerous receivers, the Cowboys were nothing without No. 22 lined up in the backfield. Just about the only player Smith deemed equal to his status was Detroit’s Barry Sanders, regarded by most as the NFL’s best running back. Smith both admired and envied the Lion, whose shiftiness and stop-on-a-dime control he desired and whose status he craved. So smitten with Sanders was Smith that, midway through the ’92 season, Jerry Jones called his running back into the team’s executive offices. “Emmitt,” Jones said, “there are probably two people alive who consider you on a par with Barry Sanders, and they’re both in this room.” Jones proceeded to reach into a drawer and pull out a stack of papers. “My partners aren’t going to like this,” he said, “but I’m going to give you Barry Sanders’s contract, and I’ll give it to you as is.”

  Smith was floored.

  “We don’t need disharmony,” Jones said, licking his proverbial chops. “We don’t need to get agents involved. By giving you this contract, the Dallas Cowboys are saying to the world that Emmitt Smith is every bit the running back Barry Sanders is.”

  Smith interrupted. “Jerry,” he said, “I appreciate it. But I really have to speak with my agent first.”

  With that, Jones nodded and smiled. But his heart sank. Sanders’s contract—a five-year deal for $5.9 million—was widely regarded as one of the league’s worst. When Howell informed his client of this, Smith fumed. Screw Jerry Jones and screw the Dallas Cowboys. If they wanted to play that way, he would play that way too.

  On March 27, 1993, Ed Werder of the Dallas Morning News reported that Smith and Howell had scheduled a meeting with the Miami Dolphins. “You can never close the door on a player that good, so we’re pursuing him to an extent,” said Tom Heckert, the Dolphins’ director of pro personnel. In his piece, Werder noted that it would take a contract of “at least” $3 million per season (or about $2.5 million more than Smith made in ’92) to avoid having Dallas match. Miami was interested, said Heckert, “[but] we definitely want to make sure this isn’t a ploy [to force the Cowboys’ hand].”

  Four days later—convinced that it was, in fact, a ploy—Miami coach Don Shula canceled the meeting
. Smith was unbowed. He and Howell contacted every other team in the league, dangling before them the chance to sign a twenty-three-year-old workhorse entering his prime. Nobody bit. “We’d offer Emmitt four million a year,” one general manager told Howell, “but what’s the point? We know Jerry will match.” On May 14, Jones made what he termed “the final take-it-or-leave-it offer”—a laughable incentive-and-signing bonus-free four-year deal with annual salaries of $2 million, $2.2 million, $2.2 million, and $2.5 million. “That’s all you’ll get,” Jones told Howell. “Not a penny more.” The difference between the offer and what Smith desired ($17 million over four years) was staggering. When Smith declined, Jones went on the offense, slamming Howell to the media as a sleazy, greed-obsessed agent out to take advantage of a client. It was classic hypocrisy. Did Jones really want to get in a battle over greed? The Cowboys—a franchise valued at $165 million—had already announced a 23 percent increase in ticket prices for the upcoming season. Just a few weeks later, Jones arranged a beneath-the-table merchandising deal that would have netted him 20 percent of every Apex One–produced Cowboy garment sold by JCPenney. The agreement went squarely against the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement—greed personified, in the view of rival owners.

  Come the start of training camp on July 15, Smith was home with his family in Pensacola, 687 miles from Austin. Though Johnson was consumed with an array of nagging issues—ranging from the herniated disk that would keep Aikman sidelined for six to eight weeks (he suffered the injury lifting weights during the offseason) to reserve tight end Alfredo Roberts’s broken foot to a handful of rookie holdouts—it was Smith’s absence that caused him the most distress. While Jones was assuring the press that Smith would be back with the Cowboys by opening day, Johnson wasn’t so sure. Throughout his dual careers in oil and football, Jones maintained the belief that he could overcome all obstacles. No gusher? Let’s drill to the east. No Emmitt? Someone else can run the ball.