Boys Will Be Boys (11 page)

Amazingly, a final-week victory over Atlanta would still give the 7–8 Cowboys a wild-card birth. With Aikman at the helm, the hot Cowboys surely would have beaten up on the 4–11 Falcons. With Aikman on the sideline in a sling, however, the game rested on Babe’s shoulders.

Oy.

Having not thrown a pass for most of his two seasons with the Cowboys, Laufenberg’s local claim to fame was a promo spot for his weekly radio program, during which he said, “Tune in to my show and find out why I should be the starter and Troy Aikman should be driving a bus.” It was classic Laufenberg, who compensated for limited skills with a disarming sense of humor. Once, upon cutting Laufenberg, Redskins coach Joe Gibbs told him he wanted his sons to grow up to be just like the Babe. To which Laufenberg responded, “What, out of work?”

The Atlanta game was brutal. Coming off three days of rain, Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium’s surface was a pig trough. Though teammates said all the right things, they knew victory was unlikely. “Babe,” says Awalt, “wasn’t really an NFL quarterback.” In his pregame speech, Falcons coach Jerry Glanville told his players that the Cowboys had dozens of cases of champagne on ice waiting in their locker room. So what if it was untrue? “Those fuckers already think they have this thing won!” Glanville screamed. “What the fuck kind of bullshit is that? Are you gonna let them get away with that?”

Blitzed mercilessly, Laufenberg finished 10-of-24 passing for 129 yards, with 3 sacks and 2 interceptions. The Falcons won, 26–7.

In the locker room after the game, Johnson was in a foul mood. Though his team could still—if you believed in miracles—clinch a playoff berth with a Rams upset victory over New Orleans on Monday night, Johnson prided himself as a realist. “The Saints can get ready to play Chicago,” he snapped in his postgame news conference. “It’s over.”

Indeed, it was. The following evening New Orleans beat Los Angeles 20–17, assuring Steve Walsh his first playoff appearance.

Before long, though, even the hypercompetitive Johnson was able to appreciate what the Cowboys had accomplished. A team that had won a single game one year ago was now a playoff contender. Smith ran for 937 yards and 11 touchdowns. Aikman threw for 2,579 yards. The defense ranked tenth in the league.

“When we started this season, I don’t think anybody had it in their minds that we were headed for the playoffs,” said Johnson, who became the first man with a losing record to be named the NFL’s Coach of the Year. “Now when we go into next season, it’s going to be the goal for every individual that not only are we going to be in the playoffs, we’re going to be successful in them.”

B
Y THE TIME
members of the Dallas Cowboys began reporting to training camp in July 1991, it was as clear as Governor Ann Richards’s white mane that this was Jimmy Johnson’s football team—no ifs, ands, or buts.

Of the eighty-five players on the field at Austin’s St. Edward’s University, a mere thirteen had worked under Tom Landry. As opening day crept closer, it looked as if that number just might drop to twelve.

Whither, Michael Irvin?

At this point in his NFL coaching career, Johnson no longer exercised blind loyalty toward his former University of Miami pupils. In private, he willingly admitted that such biased leanings had been a mistake; that bringing in overmatched ex-Hurricanes like Daniel Stubbs and Randy Shannon had damaged the team and his credibility. The greatest harm had been done the previous September, when Johnson sent second-and fifth-round draft picks to the Houston Oilers for
fullback Alonzo Highsmith. Cowboy players watched in disbelief as Highsmith, a once-mighty Miami star now lacking the speed and power of his younger incarnation, started in front of Daryl “Moose” Johnston, the fullback with battering-ram shoulders and an Amtrak motor. “That was an absolute shame,” says Rob Awalt, the Cowboy tight end. “Alonzo was running one-legged. Clearly Jimmy was playing him out of loyalty, not merit. It was a joke.”

By the start of 1991, Johnson had come to his senses. Many of the Miami imports were gone, replaced by bigger, stronger, faster,
better
alternatives. Shockingly, it looked like the next to be set free was going to be Irvin.

When he was selected by Dallas with the eleventh pick in the 1988 NFL Draft, many personnel experts considered it another example of Tom Landry’s Cowboys losing their way. Sure, Irvin had been a productive player at Miami. But (like Emmitt Smith two years later) Irvin was slow. There was also the issue of attitude. With rare exception, the NFL of the 1980s was a recluse’s paradise: Shut up, put on your helmet, play hard, go home—no mess, no fuss, no pizzazz. That was not Irvin. On his first day as a freshman at the University of Miami in 1984, he was standing in a cafeteria line when a senior offensive lineman named Mike Moore cut in front of him. Instead of humbly accepting the slight as most freshmen would have, Irvin popped Moore in the head. “It was shocking,” says Highsmith. “Mike didn’t take no crap.”

Irvin was the by-product of an upbringing that called for quick lips, creative thinking and—more than anything—hardheadedness. The third youngest of Walter and Pearl Irvin’s seventeen children (Pearl had six from her first marriage, Walter had two from a previous relationship, and the remaining nine they had together), Michael was deemed “special” well before entering the world. While attending Primitive Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one Sunday morning in early 1966, Pearl felt someone reach out and grab her pregnant belly. Suddenly, a jolt shot through her womb. “My whole stomach went to jumping,” Pearl later recalled. “Michael leaped for joy in
my stomach.” Pearl looked around but failed to spot anyone. It was, she swore, a sign. “I said, ‘This child is going to be blessed among all of my children.’”

From the time he arrived on March 5, 1966, Michael was treated royally. He was uncommonly strong and eternally hungry. He would eat cornflakes out of mixing bowls, and if money was tight, use water instead of milk. When the refrigerator housed neither peanut butter nor jelly nor cheese, he gladly made sandwiches of bread and ketchup or bread and mayonnaise.

Growing up in a modest three-bedroom brick house on 27th Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, Michael was poorer than poor—the Irvins were a food stamps–and–Salvation Army type of family. In elementary school he would wear black hightops purchased at the neighborhood thrift store. When his son outgrew the shoes, Walter cut the tops off and Michael would walk around with exposed toes (classmates would mockingly call them “cat heads”). “I don’t know if Michael ever realized how poor we really were,” says Rene, one of his sisters. “When you’re in the middle of it, you just go along and live your life the best you can.”

In one room of the family home slept Walter and Pearl; in another, the ten sisters; in another, Michael and his six brothers. Michael didn’t have his own bed until college. “I’m gonna buy you a house one day,” Irvin would tell his mother. “A big, big house. I guarantee it.” Had any one of the sixteen others made such a boast, Pearl would have laughed them off. Michael, she believed.

Though Irvin was a mama’s boy, he took after his father in looks, flamboyance, and determination. From Monday through Saturday Walter woke up at 4:30
A.M.
and departed for some unknown destination to work as a roofer. He would be caked in mud and tar when he returned home after dark. Though exhausted, Walter made certain to play with his children before dragging his body into bed. He was an eleventh-grade dropout who spent his weekends as a Baptist preacher and insisted all his offspring attend college. “You have to understand where I came from,” Irvin says. “I watched my father break his back to feed all his kids. He worked from sunup to sundown.”

As a young teenager Irvin spent his summer days alongside his father. Both had large hands and powerful shoulders. Michael, though, possessed an ungodly athleticism his father lacked. At Piper High School, he starred in basketball, track, and football. He ran faster, threw farther, and lifted more than any other student. Willie Irvin, his older brother, forced Michael to run five miles per day in exchange for a daily trip to Burger King. “We saw that he was special,” Willie says. “I didn’t want him to waste it.”

Not that Michael was a saint. During his sophomore year at Piper, he was suspended for punching a female student during a dispute. Already dissatisfied with Piper’s athletic and academic opportunities, Walter tranferred his son to St. Thomas Aquinas, a private Catholic school known as the alma mater of tennis star Chris Evert. It was a seminal decision—Michael emerged as the best wide receiver in the state (he caught 59 passes for 987 yards and 12 touchdowns as a senior in 1983–84), as well as a student who grasped concepts with newfound aplomb. “I realized there were people willing to help me,” Irvin said. “I was around kids who had plans. I said, ‘Man, this is what I’ve been missing.’”

During Irvin’s first year at St. Thomas, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Having grown up in a household fortified by the idea that hope and faith conquer all, the Irvin children believed—no,
knew
—Walter would overcome. He didn’t. “Toward the end I’d take my father to the doctor for visits,” Irvin said. “He talked about being your own man, having passion and fire for what you believe. He said being a man is having responsibilities, being a man is taking care of your family.

“One time I heard him say, ‘I don’t know if I can take this anymore.’ That was the biggest blow to me, hearing him say that. It’s like he was quitting.” On a fall afternoon during his senior year, Michael arrived home to find the sidewalk in front of his house lined with automobiles. When he walked inside, Pearl hugged her child tightly. Just hours earlier Walter had told his son, “Michael, I’m going home on the morning train.” Now Walter Irvin’s train had left the station. He was dead at age fifty-three. Michael fled the house and ran five miles to
the St. Thomas Aquinas campus, where he cried in a priest’s arms. Then he returned to his family and renewed the promise he had made long ago. “I will take care of you,” he told his mother. “You won’t have to worry.”

Though he was recruited strenuously by Syracuse, Louisiana State, and Michigan State, Irvin chose to attend the University of Miami and stay near his family. After redshirting his freshman season, he pieced together the best three-year run in school history, setting career receiving records for catches (143), yards (2,423), and touchdowns (26). To many, what stood out most was his brashness. Irvin accented big plays with spikes and dances and taunts. In his final regular-season collegiate game, a 20–16 win over South Carolina, he caught a 46-yard touchdown pass from Steve Walsh and spent the final 15 yards brandishing the ball in front of the defender. “Mike’s enthusiasm and flash was very real,” says Walsh. “It wasn’t an act or done for show. It’s exactly who he was—a guy who loved playing football.”

On the day of the 1988 draft, shortly after NFL commissioner Pete Roselle announced that the Cowboys had selected “
Marcia
Irvin,” Irvin looked into the TV cameras and said, “Go tell [Cowboys quarterback] Danny White I’m going to put him in the Pro Bowl!” Upon entering Valley Ranch for the first time, Irvin spotted a life-sized cardboard cutout of Landry—arms folded, fedora tilted to shade his eyes. Without flinching, Irvin draped his arm around the cardboard coach and loudly excalimed, “He’s my new daddy!”

Dallas players and officials used to the hangdog status of the franchise were immediately taken aback. Who did this kid think he was? How dare he speak in such a boatsful manner. Yet the Michael Irvin who took the field was (if possible) even brasher than the one who barked his way through press conferences and interview sessions.

In one of his first training camp scrimmages, Irvin wrestled with a veteran San Diego defensive back named Elvis Patterson and nearly tossed the Charger over a fence—old-school, don’t-fuck-with-a-’Cane style. In his first preseason game as a professional, Irvin burst past Raiders cornerback Terry McDaniel while shouting, “Gotcha, bitch!”
Shortly thereafter he was lined up against Mike Haynes, the future Hall of Famer. “I’m in awe,” recalls Irvin, “so I decide I’ve gotta smack him across the helmet real hard, just to establish myself.” SMACK! Haynes’s head snapped back. “Rookie,” he screamed, “do that again and I will fuckin’ kill you.” Irvin was unmoved. He was bold, loud, and obnoxious. Wrote Bernie Miklasz in the
Sporting News
: “He arrived with a diamond earring, a gold rope chain, indefatigable vocal cords, great hands and the kind of charisma the comatose Cowboys had been missing for years.”

But Irvin didn’t back it up. As a rookie he caught a pedestrian 32 passes for 654 yards and 5 touchdowns. “When Michael first came to the league he dropped a ton of passes,” says Kelvin Edwards, a Dallas receiver from 1987 to ’89. “I wasn’t impressed.”

Though his sophomore season, now under Johnson, began with great promise (Irvin caught 26 passes through his first six games), the good times came to a halt on October 15, 1989, when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in a loss to the 49ers at Texas Stadium. While the injury clichés of “He’s a fighter” and “If anyone can beat this, it’s Michael” were immediately invoked, Johnson wasn’t so sure. Why, back in 1988 Johnson had been dumbfounded when the Cowboys took Irvin in the first round. To visiting scouts, he would halfheartedly brag of a “big horse who makes plays and loves to win.” Translation: Irvin was slow and in need of work.

Now, with a bum knee, Johnson knew Irvin would be even
slower.
Wasn’t the name of the NFL speed? Weren’t the new Cowboys being built on burst? “Even I was scared,” said Irvin. “For the first time in my life I wasn’t sure of my knee, I wasn’t sure of my ability, I wasn’t sure I could do the things I used to do.” When Irvin finally came back for the fifth game of the 1990 season, he was apprehensive and inconsistent. Raiders owner Al Davis called with a trade offer, and Jones and Johnson listened. There were better options out there—collegiate speedsters waiting to be plucked…free agents…anyone.

Johnson resisted, and Irvin’s twelve-game totals (20 catches, 413 yards, 5 touchdowns) dazzled nobody.

Michael Irvin? Who needed Michael Irvin?

Fortunately for the long-term success of the Cowboys, the answer to that question came in one four-letter word: Norv.

Not that people were jumping for joy on February 1, 1991, when the Cowboys announced that thirty-eight-year-old Norval “Norv” Turner would be taking over as the team’s offensive coordinator. A former quarterback at the University of Oregon who had never played in the NFL, Turner’s name elicited all the excitement of a T.J. Maxx clearance rack. Turner had spent more than half a decade as an assistant with the Los Angeles Rams, which meant he was a key decision-maker for a franchise that had gone 32–31 over the last four seasons.
Whoopee!

If anything, Turner’s arrival was greeted skeptically. Yes, David Shula was a bland thinker who for the good of the franchise had to be minimized (he was demoted to receivers coach and resigned three weeks later to take a similar position with the Cincinnati Bengals). But why rip one man’s lack of hands-on experience and find a substitute with even less?

What Irvin, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and the rest of Dallas’s offensive players quickly learned, however, was that in Turner, the Cowboys had unearthed a visionary. Unlike Johnson, who too often measured worth in 40-yard dashes and 350-pound bench presses, Turner viewed the football field as a chessboard. How can I best attack your defense, and what are the pieces I need to do so? If I send two receivers and a tight end
here,
what are you going to do
there
? His entire system was based on speed—not foot speed, but the amount of time it took for a play to unfold. Quick quarterback drops, five-step slants, throwing to spots—that was Turner’s modus operandi. “It was obvious as soon as he got there that Norv was already the best offensive coach in the league,” says Lorenzo Graham, a Dallas running back. “I had never seen a coach like him. He only had about six basic plays he’d run, but he always called them at the perfect time.”

In Turner’s early days, the media focused on his fantastic relationship with Aikman, a welcome departure from the strained Shula
partnership. But what really set him apart—and Dallas on a new course—was his instant appreciation of Irvin. Where Johnson and Shula saw slow, Turner saw precise. Where Johnson and Shula saw injury-prone, Turner saw untapped potential. “Norv loved the way Mike used his body to catch the ball,” says Tim Daniel, a Cowboys receiver. “His body was the shield between the pigskin and defensive backs.” Turner was blown away by Irvin’s belief that he would, without fail, catch every ball thrown his way. “Other guys have better numbers and skill, and people in the league like to evaluate a player on numbers,” said Turner. “But Michael believes he is a great football player, so that’s what he makes himself.”