Boys Will Be Boys

by Jeff Pearlman

  “I don’t understand how you can be so stupid to get yourself in that position,” says Chris Boniol, the Cowboys kicker. “What the hell are you thinking?”

  Sandy Irvin, the woman Michael still loved, learned of the drug incident from watching TV. She was hurt, scared, enraged, and—mostly—humiliated. Her marriage had been one embarrassment after another, but this was, hands down, the worst. “I’m on my way home,” Michael Irvin later recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘What am I going to say? What will I say?’ It’s one thing to have a thought that your husband is doing something. It’s a whole other thing to turn on Channels 4, 7, 10, 11 and he’s right there. So…I walked in the house—I was getting ready to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’—and all she said was, ‘Baby, don’t apologize to me. You need to go in the room and make your peace with God.’”

  Was the five-time Pro Bowler truly addicted to cocaine? Few who know him—friend or enemy—believe the question can be answered with a black-and-white reply. (Anthony Montoya, Irvin’s gofer, says, “Mike didn’t have a drug problem. He had a pussy problem.”) Irvin could spend three days gobbling up drugs as if they were Pez, then devote a month to nothing but football. Repeatedly Irvin told people that winning was the ultimate euphoria, but he also relished the feeling of a quick high, and really enjoyed the feeling of a quick high in bed with two or three women.

  The Irving police initially seemed willing to back off of Irvin and only pursue charges against Beck. Yet the receiver’s arrogance was just too much. Irvin skipped one scheduled grand jury appearance and arrived for another sporting $500 sunglasses and distributing donuts to nearby reporters. The behavior would have been egregious enough had Irvin not been wearing a black floor-length mink coat. “I remember saying to Mike, ‘You just can’t wear that sort of outfit to court,’” says Jay Ethington, one of Irvin’s attorneys. “He turned to me and said, ‘Jay, I’ve got a different audience than you.’ That’s when it dawned on me—it was all theater to him.”

  In the month following the incident at the hotel, a Dallas grand jury indicted Irvin and the “models” on two counts of drug possession (the grand jury took no action against Roberts). Irvin pleaded no contest to second-degree felony cocaine possession and was fined $10,000 and placed on four years’ probation. He was suspended for the first five games of the 1996 season. “It was around that time when I really felt Mike wasn’t in control of himself anymore,” says Kevin Smith, the Cowboys cornerback. “He just didn’t care. His attitude was, ‘To hell with it and to hell with this city. I don’t want to play football anymore.’” Indeed, Irvin would spend night after night with different women ingesting different drugs, often going long stretches without contacting his wife. Was Michael high? Was he dead? Sandy Irvin had no idea. “I would call his cell phone, and what I would do is leave a message telling him that we love him,” she said. “I knew that Satan had him out there in deep, deep dark hell.”

  In the Cowboy offices, Irvin’s downfall was striking. Yes, he had issues. But he was also a team leader. He was bighearted and open-minded, and would do anything to help a teammate. Why else would Aikman—with nothing to gain from the publicity—attend Irvin’s trial for all the public to see?

  Why? Because Irvin would have done the same. “Everything that happened in Mike’s life was self-inflicted,” says Larry Brown. “He wasn’t someone who tried to damage others. He’s like an alcoholic, in that the problem was something he wanted to handle, but couldn’t. His demon was with women and sex. I couldn’t be mad at him for that, because it wasn’t his choice. It just…was.”

  The Cowboys had planned on marketing themselves as the reigning Super Bowl champs and the dynasty of the decade, but the good vibes were dwarfed by all the bad. Nobody in the media cared about players holding charity bowling tournaments or traveling to unique vacation spots or posing for pictures with poor little Butchie Smith at the Boys & Girls Club (the requisite offseason story lines that fill the three-month dead zone between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft). Whereas Irvin was once hyped from within as the name and face of the Dallas Cowboys, now he was raw meat for the news media—yet another clichéd-but-irresistible tale of the great athlete gone bad.

  The Cowboys hardly helped themselves as an organization. As the Irvin case began to unfold, Jerry Jones decided it wise to sign free-agent linebacker Broderick Thomas, who had recently been arrested for trying to bring a semi-automatic pistol through the metal detector at Houston Intercontinental Airport. Such was the swagger of the Dallas owner, who seemed to take pride in confronting criticism with bold (read: inane) moves that spit in the face of the general public. You think we’re bad off with Irvin. Well, wait’ll you get a load of the next guy we sign! At his best, Thomas was a marginal player whom most NFL teams avoided with a 100-foot goalpost. Not Jones—he was in the business of making statements. We’re the Dallas Cowboys, and we’ll do whatever we damn well please. Noted William Bennett, the former U.S. secretary of education: “If this is America’s Team, then woe is America.”

  By the beginning of the ’96 season, the media had made sure the country was fully aware of the Cowboys’ thousand-page résumé of misdeeds. There was the White House. There was Erik Williams’s drunk-driving accident, as well as charges of sexual assault by the sixteen-year-old topless dancer. There were the drug-related suspensions of Leon Lett and Clayton Holmes. There was defensive end Shante Carver, who during the ’94 season wrecked his truck in an accident, but reported it stolen to the police. (Carver would also be suspended six games in ’96 for violating the league’s substance-abuse policy.) There was wide receiver Cory Fleming, who failed the drug-and-alcohol test administered to him immediately before Super Bowl XXX and was subsequently released. There was, of course, Irvin, who arrived at a south Dallas drug treatment center for his first day of community service accompanied by an entourage of seven hangers-on. “We should have policed ourselves,” says Chad Hennings. “When I was in the military, anyone who messed up would be pulled aside and told, ‘You’re screwing up, and it can cost lives.’ In Dallas, it wasn’t costing lives. But it was costing livelihoods.”

  The Cowboys were crumbling. Fans still filed into Texas Stadium in 1996, but the connection between Average Joe and Football Star had disintegrated. Whereas Cowboy die-hards once pulled earnestly for men like Irvin and Lett, now they felt fewer and fewer emotional connections. Drug users? Strip club patrons? Criminals? These were the Cowboys? Our Cowboys? Fans love players they can relate to. But who could relate to this?

  Without their game-breaking receiver and emotional spark plug, the Cowboys were lost. They went 2–3 to start the ’96 season, then celebrated Irvin’s return by struggling against the woeful Arizona Cardinals in a lackluster 17–3 victory. “We’re not close to being a championship team,” Darren Woodson said afterward. “If we think getting Michael back fixes everything, we’re kidding ourselves.”

  By now, it was painfully clear that Jones’s decision to run Jimmy Johnson out of Dallas had been a gargantuan mistake. Perhaps Jones was correct that any moron with a clipboard could have coached the ’92 and ’93 Cowboys to Super Bowls. But Johnson was more than a coach. He was a guru. When Switzer arrived in 1994, so did the first NFL salary cap, which limited teams to $34.6 million in player salaries. Jones was successful in many fields—salary cap management not being one of them. “Jimmy understood franchise construction better than Jerry or Barry,” says Larry Lacewell, the director of college and pro scouting. “He would have been on top of free agency, would have found a way to figure it out.”

  With Jones serving as the primary decision-maker, the Cowboys blew a third straight draft, using their first pick in 1996 to select defensive end Kavika Pittman out of McNeese State (ouch), then following with linebacker Randall Godfrey (solid), center Clay Shiver (ouch), wide receiver Stepfret Williams (ouch), defensive lineman Mike Ulufale (ouch), offensive lineman Kenneth McDaniel (ouch), linebacker Alan Campos (ouch), defensive back Wendell Davis (ouch), and r
unning back Ryan Wood (ouch). Save for Godfrey, who enjoyed a productive four-team, eleven-year NFL career, all were busts. “Jerry has done a phenomenal job promoting the franchise,” says Hennings. “But is he a football guy? Does he know the Xs and Os? Does he know personnel? It’s like the Ronald Reagan principle—you have the best people around, delegate, and stay the hell out of the way. That’s where the downfall of the Cowboys organization starts. Sometimes Jerry needs to stay out of the way.”

  Under Johnson’s reign, every Cowboy knew whom he had to answer to. Now, if Switzer called for a meeting and Sanders had a problem with the time, he’d take matters into his own hands. On multiple occasions, Sanders was told he needed to arrive at Valley Ranch for, say, a 7:30 A.M. training session. “And Deion would say, ‘Well, that ain’t gonna work for my schedule,’” says Jean-Jacques Taylor, the Morning News beat writer. “‘Let’s call 952 [Jones’s extension] and see about that.’” Sanders would connect with Jones, ask for the training to be pushed back an hour, and without fail hear the owner say, “Sure. No problem. I’ll tell Barry.”

  In the best of times, Johnson would never, ever, ever allow such behavior. Yes, he had his favorite players. Yes, he gave leeway to the stars. But nobody—not even Jones—walked all over the coach. If a meeting was scheduled for 7:30, you damn well better have arrived at 7:15.

  “When you look at the best leaders in history, whether we’re talking militarily or professional sports, there’s usually one voice,” says Dave Campo, the Dallas defensive coordinator. “Jerry never tried to coach the football team, but he felt it important to be involved in everything. That doesn’t work.”

  Less than a year after winning the Super Bowl, Switzer had been all but officially reduced to a token. On multiple occasions he would arrive at team meetings still smelling of liquor from the previous night. “To see him in front of a squad in that condition just killed me,” says Tony Casillas, the defensive lineman who had played for Switzer at Oklahoma and rejoined the Cowboys in 1996 after two seasons with the Jets. “It was time for him to move on.”

  Switzer relied on assistants to design the game plan, relied on Jones to judge, acquire, and maintain the players, relied on Rich Dalrymple, the media relations head, to keep the reporters informed. “I don’t think he cared to be the head coach anymore,” says Dale Hellestrae, the veteran lineman. “When it’s ten o’clock in the morning and it’s raining in Dallas and you’ve got to figure out where you’re going to practice and your head coach isn’t even in yet—that says something, doesn’t it?”

  Through all the drama, the biggest bombshell of 1996 came with the release of a book, Hell-Bent, written by local scribe Skip Bayless. Billed as a biography that would spill the “crazy truth” of the ’95 Cowboys, the prime rib of Bayless’s text emerged out of a six-page span in which the author suggested Aikman was gay.

  Wrote Bayless: “I had heard the rumor since 1991. An off-duty Dallas police officer who traveled with the Cowboys and worked security at their hotels first told me that ‘the word on the street’ was that Troy Aikman is gay. Over the next four years, I heard the rumor from two more police officers who worked around the team (and I know they mentioned it to team officials). One officer told me Aikman ‘was supposed to be’ having a relationship with a male member of a country-western band.”

  While Bayless attempted to ward off critics by noting that Hell-Bent featured 284 pages not dealing with Aikman’s sexual orientation, he had broken two written-in-blood journalistic tenets:

  A. Don’t out people for the sake of book sales.

  B. If you decide to ignore Rule A, know what the hell you’re talking about.

  Aikman had dated his first girlfriend for seven years, and arrived in Dallas in 1989 in the midst of another serious relationship. “I know for a fact that Troy was having sex with women who, quite frankly, he knew he would never call,” says Dale Hansen, the veteran announcer. “Skip thought it was suspicious that Troy had spoken of taking an AIDS test. Well, knowing some of the women Troy slept with, I’d have gotten an AIDS test too.”

  In short, if he was gay, Aikman was putting on one hell of an act.

  Such details mattered not to the attention-obsessed Bayless. Hell-Bent was neither righteous nor journalistic, and neither was its author. “While he was working on the book Skip would call me all excited and tell me that he got information about Troy being in the back of a car in a gay area of Melrose,” says Dean Blevins, the veteran Dallas radio host. “My reaction was, ‘Why are you telling me this? And why are you so happy about it?’” As a former muckraking columnist for Dallas’s Morning News and Times Herald, Bayless was one of the first scribes to hire an agent; one of the first scribes to be featured on billboards; one of the first scribes to negotiate for perks like a company car and stock options. It was often said the best way to torture Bayless was to remove the I key from his laptop. Frank Luksa, a local columnist who refused to speak with Bayless, nicknamed him “Baby Jesus.” The tag stuck.

  “Skip Bayless could have been one of the really great columnists,” says Dave Smith, the legendary Morning News sports editor. “But as a columnist, if you’re going to beat up on someone, it better be from your heart. You better feel that way. Skip attacked people just for the sake of doing it. His gay take on Aikman was the most unfair thing in my forty-five years in journalism.”

  When Aikman learned of Hell-Bent’s contents, he confided in an attorney, asking what the fallout would be were he to sue and/or slug the writer. “If I’ve learned one thing covering sports, it’s that if you’re young, successful, and single, the gay thing will inevitably come up,” says Randy Galloway, the veteran columnist. “Skip should have been ashamed.”

  Aikman found himself in a thankless jam. He could respond to Bayless’s book and give it credibility or ignore Bayless’s book and allow the rumors to fly. “It’s just like politics,” says Hennings. “The feces sticks to the walls.” As word spread across the country that he might be gay…could be gay…was probably gay…was definitely gay…had a boyfriend named Serge…was dating another Cowboy…loved Terms of Endearment and shopping for linens…the quarterback remained silent and fumed. Meanwhile, Bayless laughed all the way to the bank.

  Hell-Bent became one of the year’s best-selling sports books.

  Dallas rebounded from the poor start, the unyielding distractions, and a subpar year from Aikman (who compiled 12 touchdown passes and 13 interceptions) to win five of its final seven regular-season games in 1996. But the team was falling apart on the field as much as off of it. With twenty seconds remaining in a contest with the Packers at Texas Stadium on November 18, and a Dallas victory already sealed, Switzer sent Chris Boniol onto the field to attempt his NFL-record-tying seventh field goal of the game. Mike Woicik, the Cowboys’ strength and conditioning coach, thought it poor sportsmanship. “This is classless bullshit,” he told Switzer on the sideline. “Don’t do it.”

  “Fuck you!” screamed Switzer. “You do your job, I do mine.”

  “No, fuck you!” yelled Woicik. “You amateur piece of shit!”

  Back and forth it went.

  “Mike stayed on through the final games, but that was it for him,” says Kevin Smith. “The guy who was as responsible as anyone for our success was as good as gone.”

  Thanks in large part to the splendid play of Irvin, who caught 64 passes for 962 yards in eleven games, the Cowboys earned a wild-card slot in the NFC playoffs. But on December 31, three days after Dallas thrashed the Vikings 40–15 to advance to a divisional playoff clash with the Carolina Panthers, yet another atomic bomb landed atop Valley Ranch.

  According to the Dallas police, an unidentified twenty-three-year-old woman complained that, on the prior Sunday night, Irvin had held a gun to her head as Erik Williams and an unidentified man raped her. Well versed in the sordid tales of Irvin and the Cowboys, the media attacked. Dave Anderson, the normally mild-mannered New York Times columnist, even penned a piece titled THE COWBOYS SHOULD BAN IRVIN
NOW. “If [Jerry] Jones needs a reason, Irvin has provided several,” Anderson wrote. “Stupidity. Arrogance. Or, simply, having embarrassed the Cowboys and the NFL again.”

  That Irvin and Williams were later proven to be innocent was of no consequence. That the twenty-three-year-old woman, a former topless dancer named Nina “Rio” Shahravan, had concocted the entire tale was of no consequence. That the media had fumbled badly was of no consequence. The franchise was battered—in the executive offices, in the community, inside the locker room. The Cowboys traveled to Carolina, played nearly the entire game without Irvin (who was injured on Dallas’s second offensive play), and saw their Super Bowl aspirations blow up with a 26–17 defeat.

  “Troy wouldn’t want to hear this, but he lost his security blanket when Mike got hurt in that game, and his whole demeanor in the huddle changed,” says Ray Donaldson, the Cowboys center. “He was chewing out the receivers, cursing and yelling when they dropped a pass or made the wrong turn on a route, acting real nervous. And if your quarterback is like that, you’re dead.” In the visiting locker room after the game, an unambiguous tension lingered between jocks and journalists. When asked to explain the setback, Newton snapped at Mike Freeman of the New York Times, “You guys are the reason we lost this game.”

  It was, to be kind, a simplistic viewpoint.

  And that was that. The Dynasty of the 1990s was over.

  Oh, there were flashes here and there. Following Switzer’s humiliating arrest for storing a loaded revolver in his carry-on bag at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport in August, Dallas opened the 1997 season by winning three of its first four games, and talk was of a team refreshed and rejuvenated. But with talent diminished by age and free agency, Switzer’s club slumped badly, finishing with a 6–10 mark and missing the postseason for the first time since 1990.