The Real Troy Aikman
The NFL’s most famous quarterback is not who you think he is. Just ask him.
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In a telephone conversation a few days later, I tell Aikman that I have learned that Mantle also had a reoccurring dream. He was also in his uniform, late for a game, racing in a taxi to get to Yankee Stadium. When he arrived at the ballpark, he could hear the announcer saying, “And now batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle.” But he could not find a way in. The front gate was locked. Mantle ran around the stadium, but all the other gates were locked too. He tried to get through a hole in the fence, but failed again. “Mantle started panicking,” I tell Aikman. “He had to get to the field. It was his turn to bat. His teammates were waiting for him. But all the gates were locked. And then Mantle wakes up.”
Aikman says nothing.
“A reporter asked Mantle what the dream meant,” I continue, “and he said it meant that he had not lived up to his potential and that he was desperate to get back to the field and show what he could do. He had that dream all his life, even after he retired.”
There is another long silence. “That’s interesting,” Aikman says, and then he says nothing more.
HE KNOWS HIS PLACE IN FOOTBALL history is assured. He won a second Super Bowl under Johnson and then a third under Switzer, who coached the Cowboys for four years after Johnson was fired for no particular reason other than a personality conflict with Jerry Jones. Although Aikman will not be led into any detailed discussion of his feelings about Switzer, his closest friends say he was so unhappy during that third Super Bowl season that he barely enjoyed it. He was dismayed that the easygoing Switzer allowed players to miss curfews and skip practices at training camp.
What’s more, Switzer and his loyalists had little love for Aikman, in large part because Aikman never would publicly endorse him as a good coach. Hoping to get even, one of Switzer’s assistants spread a baseless story to reporters that Aikman was a racist because he criticized his black teammates more than he did his white teammates. (Aikman’s black teammates quickly came to his defense.) Though they had not a shred of evidence, a couple of Switzer allies spread the Aikman-is-gay rumor to a writer doing a book on the Cowboys, which, when published, so devastated him that he talked to lawyers about filing a lawsuit. “Here was Troy, trying to present the right image, refusing to get involved with groupies, not playing the role of the big swinging stud like other players, smart enough to stay away from potential paternity lawsuits, and for his efforts, the poor guy gets called ‘gay,’” says Mickey Spagnola, a respected Dallas sportswriter who has covered the Cowboys for a decade. “And you know with that kind of vicious rumor, once it starts, it never ends.” (For his part, Aikman no longer discusses the subject, saying it’s pointless to rehash “a bunch of stupid gossip.”)
According to several sources, Aikman and Switzer barely spoke during the 1996 and 1997 seasons, as the Cowboys, still one of the most talented teams in the NFL, began to fall apart. The change in Aikman last season was startling. He became so disgusted during one mistake-ridden practice that he walked off the field. On the sidelines he often stood at a distance from his teammates, his body language suggesting total frustration. His completion percentage and quarterback rating were at their lowest marks since 1990. He became short with the media and with his fans, some of whom believed he should have been able to singlehandedly lift the team, even if Switzer was so ineffective as a coach that a New York Times writer described him as “a thick slab of tooled leather.”
By the end of the season, Aikman was considering retirement. A lot of people couldn’t comprehend why a quarterback at the height of his career would want to walk away from football. But they didn’t understand his need for excellence. They didn’t understand how the lows were so much lower than the highs were high. They didn’t understand that when they peered down at Aikman on the sidelines, with his stoic face and his steely blue eyes and hair that looked golden in the sunlight, they were looking at a young man close to despair. “Look,” he tells me, “the only way for me to enjoy the game is to be consumed by it, to compete at a level where I know, at the end of that game, that my teammates and I did our absolute best.” Ultimately he decided that he could not leave. He could not be stuck alone in the locker room. He had to get back on the field.
Earlier this year Switzer was fired, and a much different kind of coach was hired to replace him: Chan Gailey, a former assistant coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Aikman’s off-season had not exactly been pleasant: A mole on his left shoulder was found to be malignant (it was successfully removed), and part of the 12,000-square-foot, $3.2 million home that he was building in Plano went up in flames. In stories about the fire, the newspapers printed Aikman’s address, which led to hundreds of fans driving by the house; one woman slept outside in her car for a week. But at training camp Gailey set about changing the offense to give Aikman more weapons, to let him roll out more and fire farther downfield, and the quarterback seemed almost giddy. He was a new man.
He even found a new girlfriend. He has always been picky about women, many of whom he knew could never see past his riches or his fame. A friend once said that Aikman’s idea of the perfect woman was someone who looks like Cindy Crawford yet acts in a small-town way like his mother. By all accounts, his girlfriend—a woman who works in the Cowboys’ office—fits the description. When I saw him out one night with her at a restaurant, he held his arm around her as a nervous teenage boy would, sort of clutching at her to keep her from escaping.
In the first game of the season, Aikman connected for 22 of 32 passes against the Arizona Cardinals, throwing for 256 yards and two touchdowns. He was so excited that he leapt into the air and pumped his fists—a rare display of unrestrained jubilation. However, in the second game, against Denver, he broke his collarbone diving to pick up a couple of extra yards, and he was sidelined for more than a month.
Hardly a season goes by without Aikman experiencing a close-to-disastrous injury caused by his obsession to get something out of every play. He has had six concussions since he has been in the NFL. Because of his bad back, he can’t bend over and touch his toes. Arthritis in his neck makes it difficult for him to turn his head without also slightly turning his shoulders. He plays on knees that, according to one medical source, “would have ninety percent of the quarterbacks in this league sidelined.” He knows that the injuries have shortened his career and that one more could end it for good. He also knows that the star players who’ve surrounded him—Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, Daryl Johnston—don’t have many years left, either. “The window is closing,” he says.
“He and his teammates have played so many great games together,” Charlyn Aikman says, “and I think Troy would love nothing more than for all of them to make one more great stand.”
In late October Aikman returned to the practice field. Over and over he worked on his five-step dropback, then his seven-step dropback—the same routines he had been practicing since his high school days in Henryetta. He made certain he planted his last step exactly right so that he could instantly reverse the movement of his body and fire one of his famous passes. One afternoon at practice, as a receiver broke toward midfield, an Aikman spiral whistled toward him from thirty yards away on a seemingly impossible flat arc, the football coming so fast that its nose didn’t drop. When it hit the receiver’s hands, the sound was like a rifle shot. “Oh, yeah,” said offensive lineman Nate Newton. “Troy’s psyched.” After each practice, Aikman would run three or four miles, lift weights, and watch game films. Then he’d head home, read his playbook, watch Leno’s monologue, and go to bed.
Finally, on November 2, he made his comeback against the Philadelphia Eagles, throwing two touchdown passes in a 34—0 victory. The window is still open, at least for now.
IN OUR LAST CONVERSATION, I CAN’T help but ask him if he is still having that same dream about the shoes.
“Yeah, sometimes I do,” he says. He pauses and then tells me that he is also having another dream, about playing again in the Super Bowl. “I see myself running out onto the field, where there’s all that color and pageantry. You know what it’s like. Those blimps above the stadium, the jet fighter planes flying past, a star like Garth Brooks singing the National Anthem.”
Aikman then tells me that he sees himself at the line of scrimmage, calling out signals, feeling the snap of leather against his hand, backpedaling as bodies crash into one another around him, helmets smashing, commotion everywhere. And then one of his receivers shakes free, and he cocks and fires.
Only later do I realize that the daydream doesn’t include Aikman being carried off on the shoulders of his teammates. He didn’t mention whether the Cowboys win or lose the game. All that matters was that he got back on the field.
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