The Real Troy Aikman
The NFL’s most famous quarterback is not who you think he is. Just ask him.
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But what the public rarely sees is the part of his personality that is so fiercely competitive that he sometimes bewilders other players and coaches. When it comes to football, his pursuit of perfection is almost pathological. During the season, he lives in a kind of self-imposed exile. He makes few public appearances. He does not carouse. Each night he reads his playbook, watches the first few minutes of Jay Leno, and then goes to bed. “You learn pretty quickly with Troy that it’s better to go out with him during the off-season,” says a Dallas model who has dated him. “Once the season begins, something happens. The nuts and bolts of his brain tighten down.”
Even at minor practices, he operates at full throttle, and he does not hide his disgust for teammates who make sloppy mental mistakes. A few years ago, when former Cowboys receiver Kevin Williams kept running the wrong pattern at a practice, Aikman threw down his helmet and cussed him out. When Williams ran the same wrong pattern during a game, Aikman went into another rage once he got to the sidelines, screaming and pointing his finger at him.
Aikman is so competitive that he once got into an argument with another close college friend, Doug Kline, over the rules the dealer must follow in a game of blackjack. Convinced he was right, Aikman threw his chips down and started calling casinos in Las Vegas. “I thought our friendship was about to come to an end,” Kline says. When the usually unflappable Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen once asked Aikman in a TV interview if he had played as hard as he could have against the San Francisco 49ers—thinking he was giving the quarterback a chance to rebut a column written by a Dallas sportswriter—Aikman turned and gave Hansen such a hostile look that Hansen began leaning backward, afraid he was going to get hit. “I felt the air go out of me,” Hansen recalls. “I saw that stare, and I thought, ‘Holy shit!’”
GROWING UP IN THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SUBURB OF CERRITOS, Aikman was so certain that he would become a professional baseball player that he began practicing his autograph when he was still in elementary school. But he was really a football prodigy: In the third grade he could accurately throw 30 yards, and by the ninth grade, he could stand flat-footed and throw 65 yards. What made him special, however, was his intensity. He played with such grim-faced concentration that a high school coach started calling him Iceman.
His schoolboy career took place in Henryetta, Oklahoma. After years as a welder and construction foreman, Kenneth Aikman bought a 172-acre farm near the tiny town and moved the family there in a kind of reverse Grapes of Wrath migration. The elder Aikman was a rough-hewn, hardworking man so physically tough that he did not take a break even after he cut off the tip of his finger while working one afternoon. As hard as he was on himself, he was doubly so on Troy and his two older sisters. “He would get angry with the kids over everything,” says someone close to the family. “Troy praises his father’s toughness now, but life at home was rarely pleasant for him.”
Kenneth Aikman was not the type to throw a football with his son or to engage him in long talks. In one of the few interviews he has given, he admitted to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1993 that he hadn’t shown Troy affection “more than maybe once or twice.” Instead, he put him to work on the farm, forcing him to carry buckets of slop for the pigs in the morning and haul hay into the fields after football practice. “Troy never got in trouble,” says Daren Lesley, his best friend from Henryetta. “He didn’t drink, and he didn’t stay out late.” Maybe he knew better than to rebel. “My father was not a man you wanted to mess with,” says Troy, who does not talk at length about him. (Kenneth Aikman is separated from Troy’s mother, Charlyn, a gentle, unpretentious woman who was the society editor for the Henryetta newspaper, the Daily Freelance.) But it is obvious that he had a great influence on his son’s football prowess. Troy admits that, in the eighth grade, he had no plans to play football until his father pulled up to the house one afternoon and told him tryouts were beginning. “Deep down,” Troy admits, “I wanted to prove that I was as tough as he was.”
After leading the embarrassingly named Henryetta Fighting Hens to the playoffs for the first time in years, Aikman caught the attention of Barry Switzer, then the head coach at the University of Oklahoma. In part because Switzer didn’t want Aikman to go to a rival school, he offered him a scholarship the day they met, promising to change OU’s famed wishbone offense to accommodate his cannon of an arm. But after Aikman broke his ankle during his sophomore year, Switzer reverted to the wishbone with another quarterback and won the national championship.
Essentially forgotten, Aikman transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles, where his big-city teammates teasingly called him Bocephus (the nickname of one of his favorite country singers, Hank Williams, Jr.). Yet he quickly proved himself to be the best passing quarterback in college football. His teammates were amazed by his emotional investment in every game: After UCLA was beaten by its archrival, Southern Cal, in the last game of his senior year, a distressed Aikman flew back to Oklahoma and hardly slept for two weeks.
When he came to the Cowboys in 1989 as a heralded first-round draft choice, he suffered through a miserable 1-11 season. But he developed a reputation around the league for having a kind of magnificent gory courage. He was once hit so hard in the head that he felt a ringing in his ears for days. When he broke one of his fingers in the middle of a game, he refused to go to the sidelines; instead, thinking it might be only jammed, he asked one of the offensive linemen to yank at it in the hope that the bone would pop back into place. He was indeed as tough as his father.
But Aikman didn’t become one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks until head coach Jimmy Johnson and his staff altered the Cowboys’ offense a couple of years later to showcase Aikman’s strengths. He was neither a great scrambler who could escape predicaments nor a long-ball artist who won games with glamorous sixty-yard bombs, but he could scan a defense, make quick reads, and then fire away with pinpoint precision. He brought to the field the intelligence to throw a ball exactly where it needed to be. “He can be so zeroed in it’s scary,” said Washington Redskins head coach Norv Turner, formerly a Cowboys assistant coach.
In 1993, at age 26, Aikman was named the Super Bowl’s most valuable player. Suddenly he was the embodiment of the American dream. When he appeared on the cover of GQ, the headline read “God’s Quarterback.” Several sportswriters began calling him the new Mickey Mantle. Mantle, too, had been raised in rural Oklahoma, the son of a tough blue-collar laborer. In the fifties the most glamorous job in sports was center fielder for the New York Yankees: Mantle’s position. In the nineties the most glamorous job in sports is quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys: Aikman’s position.
AIKMAN IS LIKE MANTLE IN ANOTHER WAY. Just as Mantle sometimes scorned the constant adulation of the fans, Aikman is an elusive hero, difficult to understand, clearly driven by something other than fame. On the night of that first Super Bowl victory, he delayed attending a party with his teammates, instead ordering beer from room service and sitting alone in his hotel room for a couple of hours. “I kept thinking back to the time when I was a teenager—how I thought that all my problems in my life would be solved the moment I turned sixteen and was able to get a car,” he recalls. “Well, here I was at the top of professional football, and I found myself thinking, ‘Now what? Now what?’”
“Why would you feel that way?” I ask.
For several seconds, Aikman just stares at me. He appears dumbfounded that I would even ask such an absurd question. “Well, isn’t that what it’s all about?” he asks. “To keep raising the bar for yourself?”
It is precisely this attitude that makes Aikman such a fierce player—but it is also his curse, and he knows it. “I’ve always known that the lows have been lower for me than the highs have been high,” he confesses. After a loss, he does not answer the phone, even when close friends or family are calling to console him. He lies in bed and replays each offensive play in his mind. He has trouble falling asleep, and when he does, he is plagued by strange dreams.
I ask him about the meaning of his dream in which he misses the entire game because he cannot get his shoes on.
“To be honest, I don’t know what it means,” he says, “but I have it all the time.”
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