Normally a master of precision, Aikman was strikingly erratic. On the Buffalo sideline Bills coach Marv Levy saw an opening. The Cowboys without a sharp Aikman were good, but hardly unbeatable. This was his team’s best shot. “We came right at them,” says Jim Kelly. “And we had them on the ropes.”
Though the Cowboys held Buffalo’s offense in check, Aikman could generate little first-half action against a defense inspired by the sight of a wobbly quarterback. The Bills stuffed the line against Emmitt Smith, eliminating the effectiveness of his favorite play, the lead draw. “I remember looking across the field at their sideline and they were spazzing a little bit,” says Rob Awalt, the Buffalo tight end. “They were yelling at each other, trying to figure out what in the world was going on. I’m pretty sure they came in thinking they were going to throttle us 40–0.” Instead, at the end of the first half, the Bills led 13–6, having scored on a couple of field goals and a 4-yard run by Thurman Thomas. Dallas, meanwhile, managed only a pair of field goals, with Aikman throwing for an empty 121 yards and Smith gaining just 41.
“We were flat,” says Kenny Gant. “But as we were jogging into the locker room at halftime, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing.” A handful of Bills veterans were spewing trash talk at the Cowboys, an odd display of chutzpah considering Buffalo had been humiliated in the three preceding Super Bowls. “It was almost as if they wanted to piss us off,” says Gant.
In his five years with the team, Johnson had often reacted to halftime deficits by calling out players and intimidating his men into performing better, harder, faster, stronger. This time Johnson leaned against a table and spoke in a relaxed tone. “Look, we’re gonna win this game,” he said. “We’re gonna start hammering them with Emmitt up the middle, we’re gonna force mistakes, and they’re not going to be able to respond. I promise you.”
What Johnson could not have predicted was that the team’s savior would be the bone-crushing, trash-talking, do-rag-wearing Washington. To his fellow defensive backs, Washington was a cagey leader, smarter than the average NFL player and willing to call out coaches and team executives. To others (Aikman, his former UCLA teammate, included), Washington was a nonstop headache. “He wouldn’t shut up, and he saw himself in a light that wasn’t realistic,” says one teammate. “He was a slow, uninstinctive player whose only skill was hitting. James thought he was a leader, but to lead, people have to listen to you.” Defensive coordinator Butch Davis so reviled his veteran safety that he said no more than ten words to him throughout the entire season.
On the first play of the third quarter, Washington made a solo tackle on Bills running back Thurman Thomas at the Buffalo 34-yard line. On the next play, Washington tackled wide receiver Bill Brooks on the Bills’ 43. Then, in a flash, it happened. On first down and 10, Kelly stood six yards behind center, with Thomas lined up to his left. One day earlier, Davis and a handful of players had been watching TV when they stumbled upon an ESPN interview with Levy. As the Buffalo coach chatted away, behind him the Bills offense was walking through a play that culminated in a direct snap to Thomas. “He would line up predominantly on Kelly’s right in the shotgun, maybe seventy-five to eighty percent of the time,” Davis recalled. “Well, as we’re watching he’s on the left. We’d never seen them do that. Ever.”
Now, as Thomas stood to the left of his quarterback, Cowboy defenders knew what was about to transpire. At the snap, Thomas stepped in front of Kelly, snared the ball, and sped to the right, where—SMACK!—he was immediately pancaked by an expectant Leon Lett. The football popped free and bounced toward Washington, who had often faced ridicule from teammates for the intensity with which he practiced picking up footballs off the ground. Now here he was, lifting the ball from the turf and weaving his way 46 yards for a touchdown.
Full of vigor and cockiness minutes earlier, the yapping Bills were muted. The Cowboy sideline, meanwhile, erupted in high-fives and screams of elation. Though the score was 13–13, the game was over. “From that point on,” says Don Beebe, the Bills receiver, “we mentally tanked it.”
“I never, ever thought we gave up in the two Super Bowls I played in with the Bills,” says Awalt. “But when Thurman lost that ball, it was like, ‘Oh, shit. Here we go again.’” On Buffalo’s next series, the Bills faced a third-and-8 from their own 39 when Charles Haley and Jim Jeffcoat barreled through the offensive line and hammered Kelly for a 13-yard loss. The Cowboys took over and commenced upon a 64-yard touchdown drive behind the churning, grinding, determined legs of Emmitt Smith, who lowered his head and bounded into Bill defenders like an anvil slamming through a concrete wall. On six of the eight snaps the Cowboys ran “Power Right,” where Smith would follow linemen Kevin Gogan, Erik Williams, and Nate Newton (combined weight: 968 pounds) into daylight. Smith gained 61 yards on the series, capped off by a 15-yard scoring run. Dallas led 20–13, an advantage that held up through the end of the third quarter. “People forget that that was a heckuva game,” says Bates. “They played us very tough. It wasn’t clear that we were going to win until that last quarter, when stuff started to happen.”
“Stuff” was Washington. On the first play of the fourth quarter, the Bills were facing third-and-6 from their own 35-yard line. With four receivers lined up along the line of scrimmage, Kelly dropped back and looked toward Beebe, who crossed the field and had a step on Kevin Smith. Kelly cocked his arm and launched a bullet. The throw was artistic—a textbook spiral rotating through the air, Beebe’s hands rising in anticipation of making the catch. Then, swoosh, Washington—old, slow, a backup—stepped in, snagged the pigskin from midair, and returned it to the Buffalo 34-yard line. As he jogged toward the sideline, Washington pumped his fists in the air. “It was over,” says Awalt. “O-V-E-R. You could honestly look around and go, ‘We’re done.’ All three Super Bowl losses compounded to that moment. I had never noticed it prior to that. The guys took great pride in, ‘We’re back! We’ll piss the league off.’ But when that turnover happened it was ‘Well, we’ve lost three in a row and we just lost our fourth.’”
Nine plays later, Emmitt Smith sealed the victory with a 1-yard touchdown run. The Cowboys went on to win, 30–13—the blowout that wasn’t.
In the immediate aftermath of the game, the Buffalo locker room felt less like a gathering of defeated jocks, more like a cemetery. Though the obituary had yet to be written, the Bills were boxed and buried. Kelly had bad knees. Andre Reed’s speed was in decline. Thomas—one of the game’s greatest backs—had immortalized himself as an inconsistent big-game performer. And Marv Levy, the beloved head coach, was sixty-eight years old and, dare one say, overmatched. “Our team adopted the good-guy mentality of Coach Levy, and sometimes that worked,” says Anthony Fieldings, a Buffalo linebacker. “But at the championship level it helps to be mean, and those Cowboys were mean. They hit you while you were on your way down and made sure to get in every possible lick. I saw the Dallas players laughing and joking as they came out for the second half, and our guys were arguing about nonsense.”
Members of the Bills insisted that they would one day win a Super Bowl. As of 2008 the team has not been back. “The worst thing about losing a Super Bowl is the postgame party,” says Steve Christie, the Bills kicker. “The losers have a preplanned party, and you literally sit there in a conference room at a hotel, depressed beyond belief. You’re eating your sandwich, drinking your beer, desperate to be anywhere but there.”
Somewhat surprisingly, many Cowboys also failed to elicit euphoria from Super Bowl XXVIII. Although Bates could be found kneeled over before his locker, crying joyfully, his emotional overload was isolated. As opposed to the triumph one year earlier in Pasadena, this victory was coupled with an emptiness. “There is nothing like the first one,” says Irvin. “We all thought we were a Hollywood team, and that first Super Bowl was in Hollywood. So now you’re gonna tell me the next one is in Atlanta? Against the Bills again? When people say, ‘Was the second as good as the first?’ I laugh. It couldn’t
be. Not possible.”
Most demoralized was Washington, who in the wake of the game of his life couldn’t believe what he was being told. Despite 11 tackles, an interception and a fumble return for a touchdown, the media had voted Emmitt Smith (30 carries, 132 yards, 2 touchdowns) Super Bowl MVP. The decision begged the question of what, exactly, the writers had been watching.
After the reporters had cleared the locker room and Johnson gave a congratulatory speech, talk among Cowboy players turned to legacy. Who knew how many more Super Bowls this young, aggressive, energetic, talented team could win. Two? Three? Four? Hell, why not five? They had the perfect quarterback, the perfect running back, the perfect tight end, the perfect pair of receivers, and a ferocious defense.
“And we had the best head coach in the NFL,” says Gant. “Nobody doubted Jimmy Johnson would lead us to even greater glory.
“We were,” says Gant, “unstoppable.”
Chapter 18
DIVORCE
Great coach, humongous jerk at times. Not too many tears when Jimmy Johnson walked out the door.
—Mark Stepnoski, Cowboys center
THE ARTICLE RAN on page 2B of the February 18, 1994, Dallas Morning News—a seemingly ordinary offseason football piece on an otherwise ordinary day in Texas. Beneath the headline JOHNSON, BACK AT WORK, MAKES NO WAVES ABOUT JONES, writer Frank Luksa detailed the thought process of the Cowboys head coach, straight off of a ten-day vacation and preparing for his sixth year on the job.
Never one for the exotic or, for that matter, adventurous, Johnson spent his time away from football snorkeling and fishing (he caught a large kingfish) to his heart’s content in the Florida Keys. He gorged on all the seafood he could stuff in his (oversized) belly, downed one Heineken after another, basked in the sun, and thought of everything but the Dallas Cowboys. “For the first time in about six or seven years I didn’t read a newspaper,” he said. “I might have watched SportsCenter once or twice in two weeks. I had a fantastic, relaxing time.”
Now, back at Valley Ranch, Johnson seemed a new man. When asked by Luksa about his dealings with Jerry Jones, rumored to be (kindly speaking) strained, Johnson spoke optimistically. “Our relationship is the best now that it’s been since we’ve been with the Cowboys,” he said. “We understand each other better than ever and as I’ve said before, we have a good working relationship.”
For his part, Jones said that he and Johnson were getting along swimmingly.
It was a loving time to be a Dallas Cowboy.
The atmosphere was cheerful.
Everyone was happy.
Everything was…garbage.
Throughout the 1993 season, as fans and the media focused primarily on Emmitt Smith’s contract squabble and the dramatic triumph over the Giants and Troy Aikman’s concussion and, finally, the march to a second straight Super Bowl, a pair of oncoming tornadoes swirled. In one vortex was Jerry Jones, a man with an ego as large as the Great Pyramid of Cholula; a man who, within the past year, had told reporters he was quite certain he could coach the Cowboys were he inclined to do so; a man who resented his coach’s privacy issues and need for authority and—goddammit!—the nonstop credit he received from the local media. “Jerry’s head,” says Denne Freeman, the veteran Cowboys beat writer, “was larger than any benevolent dictator the world has ever known.” Mostly, Jones resented Johnson’s declared interest in the Jacksonville Jaguars coaching position. Where was the loyalty? The…gratitude?
“I knew as early as 1991 that I might want to make a change with Jimmy,” Jones said. “My attitude at the time—and I told this to Jimmy—was ‘You’re doing a good job, but don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.’ There were a couple of times during the 1992 season that he practically invited me to make the change. There were two times when I had to sit him down and tell him that this is how it’s going to be or else.” Well before Jones versus Johnson had begun to trickle into the mainstream media, Jones would confer with his family over how little respect he was afforded from his coach. “I’m going to fire his ass,” he’d say. “I can go out and find myself another coach.”
In the other vortex was Jimmy Johnson, a man with an ego as large as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau; a man who detested his boss’s incessant need for attention and mocked his limited, unimpressive, uninspiring knowledge of the game.
Wasn’t it Jones who, before the ’93 season, invited a twenty-seven-year-old defensive tackle named Fletcher Rudisill to training camp, sight unseen? Wasn’t it Jones who raved that Rudisill—a former starter at Hudson Valley Community College whom Jones had met in a bar—was a diamond in the rough who could prove to be another Cowboy steal? Wasn’t it Rudisill who couldn’t jog twenty feet without stopping to vomit? Wasn’t it Rudisill who was cut after two weeks? “This,” sneered Johnson to a handful of writers, “is the guy Jerry sent me.”
Why, for God’s sake, did Jerry insist on sticking his nose in the business of running a football team? Spend your damn money, put butts in the seats…and leave me the hell alone. “It was a joke,” says Larry Brown, the veteran cornerback. “Jerry placed the coaches in bad positions by pretending he didn’t want power but then doing everything to control every piece of the team. Jimmy didn’t go for that.” Johnson still regularly thought back to the 1991 postseason, when he wisely chose Steve Beuerlein over Troy Aikman as his playoff starter, then watched as Jones intruded by telling the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Aikman was—without question—the future of the franchise. So furious was Johnson that he stormed around Valley Ranch, a copy of the newspaper in hand, screaming, “Maybe I’ll just get out of here and take this staff with me to Tampa Bay! Who’s coaching this football team anyway?”
To Johnson, the deterioration of a once-cordial relationship reached critical mass on the day before the 1992 NFL Draft, when the Cowboys called the Browns and offered five draft picks in exchange for two of Cleveland’s. Later in the day, after Jones had departed from Valley Ranch, Browns coach Bill Belichick called back to sign off on the deal, and Johnson announced it to the media. Jones was furious that he was not informed, and on draft day the owner and coach exchanged words in a heated closed-door meeting. According to Sports Illustrated ’s Peter King, five minutes before the draft Jones told Johnson, “You know the ESPN camera is in the draft room today. So whenever we’re about to make a pick you look at me, like we’re talking about it.”
An irate Johnson stormed from the room and ducked into his office. “You okay?” he was asked by Bob Ackles, the director of player personnel.
“Yeah,” Johnson snapped. “He’s an asshole. Fuck him.”
“Jimmy,” Ackles said, “he owns the team.”
“Fuck him,” Johnson said.
Johnson headed for the parking lot, where he was lassoed by Wannstedt. “Don’t let him get to you like that,” Wannstedt said. “It’s not worth it.”
Though Johnson eventually returned, he stewed for the entire day.
In the follow-up to two straight Super Bowl victories, those observing the Cowboys from a distance applauded an owner willing to win at all costs. But perception was far from reality. Jones’s obsession with squeezing every last penny out of Texas Stadium (fans be damned) was legendary within the team’s offices. Allan Cariker, the team’s information systems manager, still fondly recalls how employees under the Murchison and Bright regimes were allotted free tickets for home games. “As soon as Jerry arrived he took back all the tickets and sold the right to have them for insane prices,” says Cariker. “Where was the decency in that?” Heading into the ’93 season the owner installed a new front row into the upper stadium deck and sold the seats at premium prices (thus resulting in a lawsuit from six longtime season-ticket holders who had purchased front-row seats decades earlier and now found themselves in row two). He replaced two thousand west end zone seats with “luxury” (aka: offensively expensive) Platinum Club chairs. “You’ve got loyal fans who bought seats when the team wasn’t doing well,” said John Gardner
, a twenty-eight-year-old fan who, as a result of Jones’s policies, considered discarding his season tickets. “Now, it’s like making money is the most important thing, not what the fans think.”
Such income-generating strategies were tasteless, but in Johnson’s mind hardly compared to Jones’s inability to treat people righteously. First off, there was the ongoing issue of the Dallas assistant coaches, one of the lowest-paid groups in the league (running backs coach Joe Brodsky, for example, was making $78,000). Furthermore, Johnson was still incensed with the way Jones’s stubbornness had resulted in Smith’s two-game holdout to start the ’93 season—especially as the team’s merchandise generated an NFL-high $695 million in sales. Johnson knew opposing franchises would flock after the Cowboys’ pending free agents, and he feared Jones would let one and all willingly depart. (Indeed, on March 3 the Los Angeles Rams signed Jimmie Jones, an underrated defensive tackle, to a four-year, $7.7 million deal.)
Nothing speaks more poignantly of Jones’s ode to penny-pinching than the saga of Bobby Abrams, the backup linebacker who played with Dallas for parts of the 1992 and ’93 seasons. After appearing in four games with the Cowboys in 1992, Abrams was released and signed by the Cleveland Browns. Shortly after Dallas won the Super Bowl, a team representative called Abrams and offered him either a Super Bowl ring or $65,000. “Having earned a ring with the Giants in 1990, this time I took the cash,” says Abrams. “I just didn’t feel like I was that big a part of things.”
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