Boys Will Be Boys (34 page)

To players like Newton, Harper, Irvin, Fleming, Haley, and Lett (among others), the White House was an oasis. To the White House cleaning ladies, it was the worst gig in the neighborhood. For $75 a week, the two women hired to straighten up were subjected to a cornucopia of used condoms, discarded bras, sex toys, and crusty carpet stains. “They used to find all kinds of crazy, crazy shit,” says a friend of one of the women. “You can’t even imagine…”

If Newton, Harper, and Irvin were the mayors, the governor was Haley, who considered the White House a home away from home. Players would escort women through the front door, direct them to
ward the rear bedroom, then—wham, bam—enjoy and discard them with a sort of automated efficiency. Supposedly happily married to Karen, whom he met while both were undergrads at James Madison University, Haley regularly brought his various flings to the House and fired away. “Charles was banging this girl who lived in the apartment under me,” says Joe Fishback, a defensive back in 1993 and ’94. “You could literally hear them doing it.”

The first member of the media to write of the White House was the
Miami Herald
’s Dan Le Batard, who merely mentioned it in passing in a larger piece about partying in the NFL. “The reality is that many teams throughout the league had places like the White House,” says Le Batard. “But the Cowboys were the biggest, baddest, best, and anything they did was vastly more magnetized.” Upon reading Le Batard’s story, the Dallas media went to work. In truth, many were well aware of the White House and its going-ons, but chose to ignore the story in the name of player-press relations. “Everyone knew about it, but what are you going to do, run a story about the guys cheating on their wives with hookers?” says Rob Geiger, a reporter for KRLD radio in Dallas. “The writers understood not to write about it, the radio and TV guys understood not to talk about it, because we’d be vilified by the fans and locked out by the team.”

It was a gargantuan lapse in news judgment. The White House had everything one craves in a story—sex, drugs, fame, football.

When word of the White House finally broke, Jones and Switzer confessed to being shocked (shocked!) that a place of such ill repute existed. The Cowboys, after all, were a wholesome operation, made up of loyal, family-oriented men like, um, Jones and, uh, Switzer who would, eh, never, ah, dream of…cheating, uh, on, eh, a female. “Jerry Jones was chasing and fucking the same women Michael Irvin was,” says Anthony Montoya, the gofer for Cowboy players. “He was out there just as bad as anyone else. I have no beef with that, because if you can get the pussy at that age, more power to you; I’m happy for you. But Jerry saying he didn’t know about the White House is a fucking lie. A
big fucking lie. I’d get calls from the team saying, ‘Can you get X player. We hear he’s out at the White House.’

“And usually,” says Montoya, “they were right.”

More than ever, the Cowboys missed Jimmy Johnson. Perhaps not his on-field coaching abilities so much as his discipline. His knowledge. His common sense. His authoritativeness.

Had the Cowboys partied under their former coach? Sure. Had they drank and drugged and chased women? Sure. “But you always knew you had to answer to Jimmy,” says Darren Woodson. “Under Barry it was pretty much do whatever the hell felt good.”

In the aftermath of the Lett-Holmes bombshell, the Cowboys began to show cracks. Though they defeated the Eagles 34–12 on November 6 to improve to 8–1, they followed the victory by getting demolished by the 49ers, 38–20, at Texas Stadium. Leading up to the game, Sanders devoted his time to incessant locker room yapping, claiming he was wronged by the 49ers and would seek revenge. In a team meeting he stood up and said, “Just line me up on Jerry Rice and y’all play zone or whatever you wanna do.”

Oops.
Despite being 13
¹
/2-point favorites at home, the Cowboys were embarrassed. San Francisco scored 17 points in the first five minutes. Two plays into the game, the 49ers led 7–0 on an 81-yard catch-and-run by Jerry Rice (Rice finished with 5 catches for 161 yards, laughing at Sanders all the way). A couple of plays later San Francisco was up 14–0 after a fumble recovery and 38-yard touchdown return by defensive back Merton Hanks. On the Dallas sideline, eyes stared downward. On the 49ers sideline, chins were held high. Irvin was limited to a season-low 4 catches for 37 yards. Aikman was forced from the game with a bruised knee following a brutal sack by Dana Stubblefield. Switzer looked, as always, confused. “San Francisco beat us like we stole something,” says safety Greg Briggs. “I mean, it was ugly.”

At 8–2, the Cowboys were the
worst best
team in football. They
won in spite of themselves; in spite of the off-the-field distractions that mounted like a LEGO tower. “We weren’t very good,” says Woodson, “but we somehow kept winning.” Following the 49ers debacle, Dallas defeated Oakland and Kansas City, then lost to the lowly Redskins, 24–17, at Texas Stadium on December 3 to fall to 10–3.

Yet within the intricacies of a relatively meaningless setback (at 3–9, Washington was no longer a threat to capture the NFC East) came a defining, disturbing moment. During the game’s third quarter, in what spectators viewed as an otherwise insignificant sequence of events, wide receiver Kevin Williams sprinted 8 yards, turned left, and caught…
nothing.
For what had to have been the twentieth time that season, Williams ran the wrong route. Aikman—usually cool, calm, reserved—was tired of it. He was having an erratic day (29 of 48, 285 yards, one late touchdown), and Williams’s absentmindedness wasn’t helping. “Kevin, get this fucking right!” the quarterback barked. “It’s not
that
hard!”

For 99 percent of the Cowboys, the exchange was no big deal. Quarterbacks yell at receivers—it’s part of the job description. “Signal callers are supposed to have balls,” says Newton. “Troy had big ones.” Yet for one Cowboy assistant coach, the incident reeked of wrongheadedness. Of arrogance. Of…
racism.

Not that John “Boo” Blake should have had much say on Aikman’s relations with African-Americans or, for that matter, anything. The team’s thirty-four-year-old defensive line coach, Blake, who is black, was known to be neither wise nor particularly useful. He did, however, have the ear of Switzer, who had recruited Blake to Oklahoma as a nose tackle out of Tulsa’s Charles Page High School, then brought him back as a graduate assistant. While working under Switzer at OU, Blake was mockingly nicknamed “Back ’Em Up Boo,” in that his primary task seemed to be scooting players off the sideline during games. Blake was actually hired by the Cowboys in 1993, when Johnson was in need of an assistant, but he gained true power under Switzer. “John wanted to be one of the guys more than he wanted to be
a coach,” says Tony Casillas, who knew Blake dating back to his collegiate days at Oklahoma. “He talked out of both sides of his mouth, and you can’t do that and expect to have players trust you. Instead of just doing his job, he had an agenda.”

As the other coaches would congregate among themselves, Blake sat with the black athletes, talking shop and taking mental notes to relay to his boss. Like several of the team’s veterans, Blake had his own small crew—Sanders and Kevin Williams chief among them. Though Williams took Aikman’s tongue-lashing during the Redskins game in stride, Sanders did not. “Why is it that Troy only screams at the brothers?” Sanders asked Blake. “I never see him yell at a white guy.”

Following the game Blake told Switzer that the Cowboys’ African-Americans were tired of Aikman’s redneck ways. It was a charge Blake had made before, but never so vociferously. So what if Aikman had blown his top at Mark Stepnoski, Kevin Gogan, Dale Hellestrae—
white
offensive linemen—in the past? So what if Aikman considered Irvin to be a brother? (“I am as black as anybody you could ever see,” Irvin had said. “I am a black man with a black scarf on and I’m wearing black shades. I am as black as they come. And I know [Aikman] loves me.”)

“You have to remember that ninety percent of the team is black,” Haley said. “If he’s going to yell at someone for making a mistake, it’s probably going to be a black guy who made the mistake.”

Two days after the game Switzer summoned Aikman to his office for a meeting. By this point, the coach-quarterback dialogue had reached a new low. In Aikman’s mind, Switzer was an unadulterated, overmatched buffoon. From Erik Williams’s car accident to Lett and Holmes to the White House to undisciplined practices to sloppy game plans, what was going right? In Switzer’s mind, Aikman was an arrogant player doing his all to undermine the team.

“Troy,” Switzer said, “it’s been brought to my attention that some of the black players don’t think you’re being fair. They think you’re taking a lot out on them, but that you never yell at the white guys.”

Aikman was dumbfounded.

“I just think you might be wise to apologize to Kevin for yelling at him,” Switzer said. “Why not go do it? It’ll help your cause a good deal.”

His cause?
Aikman’s cause was winning football games, not resolving inane conflicts with inept wide receivers and do-nothing, big-mouthed assistant coaches.

When word spread through the locker room of what had transpired, most players—black and white—were appalled. “That was just stupid,” says Woodson, the African-American safety. “Troy was not racist. He didn’t care if you were black, purple, yellow, orange, or green. He wanted to win football games, and he would yell at you whether you were Nate Newton [black] or Mark Stepnoski [white]. There were certain players who confided in John Blake and listened to what he had to say. I was not one of them.”

“It was bullshit,” says Kevin Smith, another African-American defensive back. “When you hear that Troy was disliked, that comes straight from Blake and Deion.”

Though Aikman begrudgingly spoke privately to Kevin Williams, the damage was done. He stormed out of the facility and called Dale Hansen, the Cowboy announcer. “Boy, was he furious,” says Hansen. “Beyond furious.” Thanks to Sanders, Blake, and Switzer, a once-harmonious locker room was coming undone. A black-white divide had formed among certain players. From this point on, Aikman’s relationship with Switzer was over. Throughout the year, he had been convinced that Switzer was bad-mouthing him to Blake and Skip Bayless, the local columnist who, after the season, would publish
Hell-Bent,
a scathing Cowboy biography.

“Troy was able to overlook a lot of things,” says Hansen. “But when the Kevin Williams incident took place, Troy pulled me aside and said, ‘I’ll never trust that sonofabitch Switzer again.’”

Surely, the season could turn no stranger. By early December, Dallas was the drunk-driving, drug-using, hooker-seeking, White House-
frequenting, racism-accusing leader of the NFC East; a 10–3 Super Bowl favorite with a magnetism for turmoil reminiscent of the ’77 New York Yankees.

On December 10, they traveled to Philadelphia to play the 8–5 Eagles, a mediocre team that had just lost to the lowly Seattle Seahawks.

This was a game the Cowboys should have won.

This was a game the Cowboys blew.

Well, not the Cowboys, per se, but Switzer. The contest encapsulated not merely Dallas’s season, but—in the eyes of many—Switzer’s NFL career. “Boneheaded coaching,” says Hansen, “by a boneheaded coach.”

Dallas jumped out to a commanding 17–6 lead, but the league’s twelfth-ranked defense allowed Philadelphia to battle back. Behind quarterback Rodney Peete, Aikman’s former backup, the Eagles cut the deficit to 17–14. With eleven minutes, fourteen seconds remaining and Dallas on the Eagles’ 2-yard line, Emmitt Smith took the handoff from Aikman and charged toward the game-sealing score. Instead of playing hero yet again, however, Smith had the ball knocked from his left arm by linebacker Kurt Gouveia—Smith’s seventh fumble in fourteen games. Philadelphia recovered, and a couple of possessions later Gary Anderson’s field goal tied the contest. “I still thought we were going to win,” says Woodson. “It was the confidence that came with being a Cowboy.”

On their next drive, Dallas faced a fourth-and-short from its own 29-yard line, the teams still deadlocked at 17. In the world of PlayStation, it’s a no-brainer: You ram the ball down the Eagles’ throats. In the NFL, however, you punt. You don’t think about punting. You don’t debate punting. “You punt the ball,” says Randy Galloway, the famed columnist. “Every single time.”

Switzer did not punt. With a stiff wind blowing in the Eagles’ favor, offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese called “Load Left.” As 66,198 fans screamed through the frigid wind, Smith took the handoff, stepped left, and—
BAM!
He was stopped for no gain by Gouveia. The stadium erupted. The Cowboys offense began to move off the field. The Eagles pumped their fists. The…

Wait.

Upon further review the referees determined that the two-minute time-out had been reached before the snap. The play didn’t count. Dallas would have another chance to punt. Surely, John Jett could at least knock the Eagles out of field goal range with, say, a solid 30-yard boot. “Once you don’t make it that first time,” says Galloway, “you change tactics.”

Undeterred, Switzer not only again went for the first down, but called for another Smith run. “You’re just hoping Troy is gonna say, ‘This isn’t right,’” said Daryl Johnston, the fullback. “Call a time-out. Explain your point. ‘Hey, we’ll do this but give us a different play.’” But Aikman and Switzer did not have a relationship. Smith again grabbed the ball from Aikman’s right hand, headed toward the line, and—BAM! BAM!—was met by linebacker Bill Romanowski and lineman Daniel Stubbs, who stopped him for no gain.

Four plays later, Anderson kicked a 42-yard field goal.

Eagles: 20

Cowboys: 17

Switzer: Humiliated.

“If it was fourth-and-one I would have punted,” Switzer maintains to this day. “But it was fourth-and–three inches. I believed in my guys—period.”

In Fox’s New York studio, Jimmy Johnson was stunned. “I don’t care if it’s high school football, college football, or what have you,” he said. “In a tie game, you punt the football.” Switzer defended himself by saying, “If we punt they’re going to get a shot at a field goal anyway,” which only exacerbated Johnson. “Obviously, people will say the decision to go for it on fourth down was dumb,” he said. “But his explanation for not punting the football was dumber.”