Boys Will Be Boys by Jeff Pearlman

on the offensive. “This kid is different,” Switzer said. “He will be a first-round draft choice, and he needs to be in your offense.”
    Aikman wound up enrolling at UCLA, where he sat out the required year before emerging as one of the nation’s most explosive quarterbacks. In his two seasons as a starter for the Bruins, Aikman compiled 41 touchdown passes and only 17 interceptions. Donahue insisted on short, precise, 10-to-15-yard outs, and Aikman delivered. As a senior he won the Davey O’Brien Award as the nation’s top quarterback, a first for UCLA. “His talent was otherworldly,” says Jerry Rhome, an offensive assistant with the Cowboys. “Tom Landry, Gil Brandt, and I worked him out at UCLA, and it was the greatest workout I’ve ever seen. He was as smooth as glass, and as strong as a bear. It was just, ‘Wow!’”

Chapter 6
WOULD THE MOTHER WHO LEFT HER 11 KIDS AT TEXAS STADIUM PLEASE COME AND GET THEM!
    Grown men crying.
    —Jerry Fowler, Cowboys assistant equipment manager, on his memory of the ’89 season
    T HE OPTIMISM WAS palpable.
    The mood was euphoric.
    The Dallas Cowboys were back.
    Emphasize that—the Dallas Cowboys were BACK!
    Back from 3–13. Back from a tumultuous offseason. Back from the hell of discarding Tom Landry.
    Back.
    For the first time in years, there was a genuine belief the Cowboys could compete in the National Football League. Their new coach brought with him an attitude; a swagger; a need for victory. Fourteen new players appeared on the roster. Bitter has-beens were shown the door. Aikman and Walsh arrived with stellar pedigrees. HerschelWalker was one of the game’s best runners. Dallas had gone 3–1 in the preseason, highlighting speed and power in one convincing display after another. “With each exhibition win we started to think we were pretty strong,” says Walsh. “We’d defy expectations.”
    FOOTBALL IS REBORN IN BIG D! screamed the headline from Mike Rabun’s United Press International story.
    Pfft!
    On September 10, 1989, the Cowboys trumpeted their rebirth by traveling to New Orleans and getting beaten. No, scratch that. Not beaten—stomped. Squashed. Humiliated in every sense of the word.
    Saints 28. Cowboys 0.
    “And,” says Dave Campo, the Dallas assistant, “it should have been worse.”
    Much worse.
    Before 66,977 fans, the Saints became the first of many teams to pummel Aikman, who threw for 180 yards while being sacked three times, intercepted twice, and pressured incessantly. “I taught Troy an important lesson,” recalls Tom Rafferty, the Cowboys’ veteran center. “When someone on your team yells, ‘Look out!’ you’d darn well better duck.”
    Just how horrific was Dallas? The Cowboys set a franchise record for fewest rushing yards in a game (20), and possessed the ball for less than fifteen total minutes. Trailing 7–0 early in the second quarter, Johnson blew his team’s only real scoring opportunity by attempting a fake field goal on fourth-and-9 from New Orleans’s 30-yard line. Holder Mike Saxon, who was supposed to pick up the ball and run for the yardage, was bottled up by the Saints’ defenders. His 4-yard pass to kicker Roger Ruzek was both feeble and ugly. “It did not work,” a humiliated Johnson said afterward. “Obviously.”
    When the game mercifully came to an end, a shell-shocked Johnson and his equally shell-shocked coaches retreated to the visitors’ locker room and sat silently. Of the thirteen members of the staff, only four were holdovers from the Landry Era. Most of the others had comefrom the University of Miami, where ass-whuppings were administered, not received. “That might be when I first realized that I had been fooling myself during the preseason,” says Johnson. “Truthfully, the teams I coached at Miami would have beaten my Cowboys.” Inside the subdued quarters, Johnson snapped himself out of the malaise to remind his players that the season was a long one; that half the league’s teams