Troy's Triumph

Women appear on his doorstep, uninvited, and are furious when he turns them away. They send him suggestive photographs and letters. At car shows, they slip into the ladies' room, remove their panties, and then stop and ask him to sign them. Sometimes, a woman just pulls up her shirt and asks him to sign her torso. Once, a woman dropped her napkin at his feet. Gallantly, he handed it to her. She leaned over and ran her tongue across his cheek.

"That was unbelievable," Troy remembers. He was stunned, not only because the woman offended his sense of dignity but his sense of hers, too. He doesn't like aggressive women or women who pursue him because he's famous. (When the press printed the latter fact, women started beginning their letters with, "I'm not writing to you because you're famous.") But he is famous, one of the most famous athletes in the world. He's recognized in Germany and Jamaica and lots of other places that are not exactly hotbeds of his sport.

"He reminds me of a rock star," says one old friend. Adds another, "Going out with Troy these days is like going out with Elvis." But Troy Aikman, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback, isn't Elvis. He's just a big, muscular, boyishly handsome, country-boy football player (6'4", 220 pounds, with strawberry-blond hair and a cowlick, and freckled skin that reddens in the sun) who left the tiny Oklahoma ranching town of Henryetta and went on to become the MVP of Super Bowl XXVII, and who is arguably the best quarterback in the NFL today. (Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan, men not given to effusive praise, are uncharacteristically enthusiastic about Aikman. Ditka once made his own quarterback, Jim Harbaugh, study a video of Aikman as an example of a picture-perfect passer. Harbaugh was not pleased.)

All Aikman did in Super Bowl XXVII was lead the Cowboys to one of the most lopsided Super Bowl wins in history, a 52-17 drubbing of the Buffalo Bills, by completing 22 of 30 passes for four touchdowns and no interceptions. In fact, in the playoffs, Aikman completed 61 of 89 passes for 795 yards, eight TDs and no interceptions. His Super Bowl performance was the kind of career dream-game that has eluded great quarterbacks like Jim Kelly and John Elway. Only Joe Montana, in Super Bowl XXIII, completed more TD passes (five), and Montana's heroics in that game were the culmination of a career in its twilight (he was 34). Aikman's heroics came shortly after his 26th birthday.

"It's what I was drafted for," Aikman said at the time. And then, in wonder, he added, "This is the way it's supposed to end. Guys spend their whole career waiting to have it end like this."

After that game, Aikman's life was changed forever. ("I'm going to Disney World," he shouted with typical naïveté, as if that would be the only way his life would change.) His agent, Leigh Steinberg, immediately announced that Aikman would command more than a million dollars a year in endorsements. All three network morning news shows (Good Morning America, Today and CBS This Morning) demanded he appear to the exclusion of the others. Aikman settled the controversy in his usual amiable style by appearing the morning after the Super Bowl on all three shows. It was the kind of behavior people in Dallas had come to expect from Aikman, a man so nice and--in his own word--"normal" that he told the media before his playoff game against San Francisco that he hoped 49ers QB Steve Young had a great game because he was a good guy, but that Dallas would win anyway.

In Dallas, he is tirelessly philanthropic and civic-minded. His Troy Aikman Foundation hosts a celebrity golf tournament each year to benefit disadvantaged children. He is active in causes to wipe out cancer and drug use among youngsters and to find shelter for homeless children. He is contemplating starting a charity to provide senior citizens with a "quality" old age because he feels they are too often neglected by society. He endowed a scholarship for nonathletes at his high school in Henryetta and another at his alma mater, UCLA. He's a firm believer, he has said, that professional athletes should realize how lucky they are and give something back to society. In the next breath he says, "But people make too much of my charities."

In Dallas, Aikman has a reputation for leading a low-key life. He avoids his fans by eating pizza in his house five times a week. Sometimes he has friends over for a barbecue. Mostly, they are teammates or old friends from college--people he can trust and feel comfortable with. "It takes a while for someone to gain my trust," he says. "Loyalty and trust are important to me." Some of his friends are just ordinary people, like "the gal who managed my first apartment and a buddy who works for the electric company. I don't have to prove anything with them. They don't judge me. If I didn't play football, we'd still be close."

Aikman complains that he often goes months without a date. He finally hired a woman to cook his meals because he has no steady girlfriend. Even after the Super Bowl, while his teammates were celebrating with their wives and girlfriends, he was alone in his room until he finally thought of a girl to call. This may be because he has an old-fashioned, almost chivalric attitude toward women. It has to do with his upbringing. He claims that his mother "is the most important person in my life" and that his two older sisters helped shape his attitude toward women. "They helped me understand their emotional swings, their bad-hair days," he says. "I learned they're just different." Which may be why, in high school, he was not embarrassed to take a typing course with 38 girls.

About the only complaint heard in Dallas about Aikman is that he often appears aloof, humorless or even arrogant in public. He claims that's merely a defense mechanism against people he doesn't know. "I'm quiet in public, but I'm not shy," he explains. "Shy people have a problem expressing themselves. They're afraid to. I'm not."

The morning after the Super Bowl, Aikman began taping the three morning news shows at 3:30 A.M. He did not return to his New York hotel room until late in the morning. He tried to sleep, but his phone was ringing off the hook. People called to congratulate him, radio stations from all over the world wanted to interview him and fans prowled the hotel corridors looking for him.

Aikman says the whole experience was surreal. He was alone in a city he never much liked and too frightened to leave his room. "I felt trapped," he recalls. "I like to control my life. Control and order are important to me. I wish there were a switch I could flip where no one knows me, and when I want to be noticed I could turn it on."

But there is no switch. After the Super Bowl, people's perception of Aikman would take precedence over who he actually was. He had begun to learn this earlier, when he appeared on an Oprah Winfrey Show about celebrity dating. Her producers told him to wear jeans and cowboy boots, his usual attire. When he arrived, he was embarrassed to see all the other men in suits and ties. He felt like a "fool, a hick. I'm tired of having to dress like that just to confirm someone's opinion of me." But he does tend to dress in jeans and cowboy boots, dip tobacco, drive a pickup truck and listen to country-and-western. So now he makes a point, when being interviewed, of not wearing jeans and boots and of arriving in his sleek white BMW, not his truck, so people won't think he's "a hick who rides my horse everywhere." He adds: "New Yorkers would say I was a country guy, but someone from Montana would think I was pure city." After all, Aikman was born in Cerritos, California, home of metalheads and surf dudes. He moved to Henryetta when he was 12.

The price of his Super Bowl fame really hit home for Aikman a few days after the game, when he played in the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. According to his prearranged plan, he left the game after the third period to catch a flight back to Dallas. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself the subject of intense criticism for leaving early. People in Dallas and throughout the country wondered if maybe Aikman wasn't so amiable and humble a country boy after all. Aikman was stunned. "It's not fair," he maintains. "People expected me to change, so they intentionally looked for it."

Although Aikman thought the unqualified adulation after the Super Bowl would last only "until my next interception," he didn't expect his honeymoon with fans to end so abruptly. But criticism was nothing new for the young man who was the Cowboys' number-one draft choice out of UCLA in 1989. He was given an $11 million contract and promptly labeled the Cowboys' "redeemer" by Jerry Jones, the Arkansas millionaire who'd bought the team from Bum Bright. "Troy will restore the Cowboys' image because he has a winning aura," said Jones.

Aikman started 11 games that year and lost them all. The Cowboys stumbled to their worst record in history, 1-15. Criticism of Aikman was so intense, he admits, "I didn't want to leave my house." Fans called in on talk radio to complain that they were making $5 an hour while Aikman was making millions and not producing. "Yeah, I heard it all," he says. "People think Dallas is a sports town, but it isn't. It's a winners' town." Which was why Dallas fans unrealistically thought Aikman would immediately return the Cowboys to the glory they had enjoyed when they were directed by another shy, humble QB hero, Roger Staubach. It was during Staubach's reign that the Cowboys billed themselves as America's Team, and most of America bought it.

In contrast, in Aikman's first season, he threw for only nine touchdowns while being intercepted 18 times. His quarterback rating was a meager 55.7, one of the lowest in the NFL. He even broke his index finger and missed five games. The Dallas press, particularly Skip Bayless of the old Dallas Times Herald, was merciless in its criticism of Aikman. Bayless said Aikman couldn't throw a long pass, was too unemotional to lead the team, wasn't very smart and would never lead the Cowboys to the Super Bowl. "And I like Troy Aikman a lot," Bayless added. "He's a wonderful person."

What should have made Bayless' criticisms particularly hurtful to Aikman was the implication that Bayless got them from the Cowboys' coaches and players, who were afraid to go on record with them. (It has taken Aikman a long time to get his teammates' confidence. As late as November 1992, one player said, "Troy is a piece of the puzzle, but he's not the guy. It's pretty obvious this is Emmitt's team." He was referring to running back Emmitt Smith, who was voted team MVP by the players in November 1992. The team's kicker finished second and Aikman a distant third. When asked about this, Aikman looks down at his feet and says, "It didn't bother me." Then, after a pause, adds, "But I didn't agree.")

Aikman's feelings were further bruised by his belief that his coach, Jimmy Johnson, an Arkansas buddy of Jones', had never given him a vote of confidence. Johnson, formerly of the University of Miami, had promised Aikman he would be the team's QB. Then he drafted Steve Walsh, the Miami QB who had won 23 out of 24 games for Johnson and a national championship. Johnson said the QB job was up for grabs. Neither Walsh nor Aikman was very happy. Onlookers felt Johnson had betrayed Aikman and they expected the coach to have an emotional attachment to Walsh. "I can't blame him," says Aikman. "He tried to remove himself from us both at practice. But, I don't know, maybe he had Steve over for dinner every night. Jimmy was distant. I didn't know where the players stood on it, either. There was politicking going on in the locker room."

Walsh was also peeved. "Watch," he said, "I'll be typecast as the smart one and Troy will be the one with the athletic ability. I happen to be a decent athlete and Troy happens to be pretty bright."

"Yeah," says Aikman today, his face reddening. "I'm not as dumb as you think. Man, that annoys me to this day."

Johnson, it was said, liked his quarterbacks to be loud and cocky, like the Bills' Jim Kelly. These were traits completely foreign to Aikman's nature and background. Despite Johnson's perfect blow-dried hair, he is not a blow-dried man. He has a reputation for fiery outbursts, which confused the controlled, placid Aikman. Aikman did not know how to respond, so he simply turned quiet and brooded. This annoyed Johnson even more. He understood the give-and-take of a screaming match more than he did Aikman's head-hanging silences.

"I didn't care," Aikman says. "I wasn't going to change my personality. I withhold my emotions. I couldn't care less about being flamboyant."

These personality conflicts resulted in a strained relationship between the coach and his quarterback that first year. Some even think it has lingered to this day. When asked about a friend's comment that "Troy doesn't trust Jimmy as far as he can throw him," Aikman just shrugs, says nothing and blushes.

Although Aikman did start most of the games in 1989, it was Walsh who led the team to its only victory when Aikman was injured. By the next season, however, Walsh was gone, traded to New Orleans. Johnson said, "I am able to embrace Troy as my guy now." That was the beginning of the Cowboys' and Aikman's emergence from NFL doormats to Super Bowl champions in only four years. They improved (continued on page 152)Troy Aikman(continued from page 114) to 7-8 behind Aikman in 1990, and then in 1991 to 11-5 and the team's first playoff appearance since 1985. Aikman missed the team's final four regular-season games and one playoff game with a sprained knee. Quarterback Steve Beuerlein led the team to five straight victories and Johnson and Aikman again became embroiled in a controversy. When reporters questioned an apparently healthy Aikman at the end of the season, he said he was ready to play. Johnson said he wasn't, and Beuerlein would continue to start. Aikman again felt Johnson had lost confidence in him.

No one should have been surprised, then, by Johnson's reaction to Aikman's recent back surgery. At first, the Cowboys' staff dismissed Aikman's complaints of back pain--leaving their star quarterback to seek medical attention on his own. When a herniated disk was discovered and treated surgically, Johnson was quick to imply that Aikman would not be the starting QB unless he showed up on time--and well--to camp. Was he playing more mind games with Aikman, or simply covering himself in case Aikman was actually unable to play? Of course, Aikman seems adept at regaining Johnson's confidence, as he did this past year when he started every game in the Cowboys' 16-3 season. His quarterback rating was third best in the NFL, and his QB rating during the playoffs was the best in NFL history. Aikman's relentless improvement over the years has mirrored his team's improvement. He had the good fortune to grow with his young teammates, to the point where they are on the threshold of becoming a perennial power. Aikman's current relationship with Johnson can best be described as peaceful coexistence based on continued success.

When Aikman was 13, his father asked him if he was going to sign up for junior football. He knew what his father meant. "He was a tough old country boy who loved football," says Aikman. "He liked the roughness of it. I knew what he wanted, so I signed up. If he hadn't asked, I might never have played."

Aikman laughs when he is asked if it ever dawned on him to go against his father's wishes. "I never rebelled against my father," he says. "Never."

Aikman's disciplined upbringing may explain why he was haunted by fears not common to boys his age. Even today, he talks about those fears with the naïveté of a child.

"Getting old scares me," he says, giggling. "I remember when my father turned 40, he wouldn't open his gifts for two weeks. He took it hard. I thought it was foolish. I told him he should feel fortunate to live to be as old as he was." Aikman does not see the awkwardness of what he is saying. His young life has been so filled with the sorts of success that most people only dream of that he can't imagine his later life equaling it.

"Look," he says, "when you're a kid you look forward to getting older. When you're 16 you get a car. At 18 you're an adult. At 21 you're a full-blown adult. But after that, what? I mean, what's left? Twenty-five was perfect for me. But 35? I hope I'm still playing. I have this fear--what will I get into after football?"

His biggest fear, he says, is death. "When I was nine, I used to have nightmares about death. I was in a major state of depression. I'd walk around thinking, One day I'm going to die! Now don't get me wrong, I'm a religious person and I think this next life will be wonderful, but still--it bothers me."

This may explain why, even today, he sleeps with a Bible beside his bed and why, in college, he joined the Fellowship of Christian Athletes until their "hypocritical attitude turned me off." (In high school, he became an avid churchgoer, even though his parents weren't.)

"In my senior year of high school I got rebaptized," he says. "It was a total immersion, in a dunking tank." He blushes with embarrassment. But he is not embarrassed by the dichotomy of his Christian faith and his fear of death. When it is pointed out that a man with faith shouldn't fear death, he seems confused, as if his faith were merely a goodluck charm to ward off death. It is a child's view of faith. In many ways, Troy Aikman is childlike. Even his fears are those of a child who wants to ward off the woes of adulthood.

By the time Aikman graduated from high school, he was a small-town guy who liked to cruise Main Street in a pickup truck. At night he practiced his autograph for the day when he would be somebody. He was also an all-state quarterback, and though he claims he wasn't heavily recruited, two colleges wanted him desperately: the University of Oklahoma, with its legendary coach, Barry Switzer, and Oklahoma State, coached by none other than Jimmy Johnson. Aikman rebuffed Johnson because, even then, there was something about Johnson that turned him off. He found it hard to understand how Johnson could promise him that he would start for four years "when he hadn't even seen me play at that level." Switzer led Aikman to believe that by his sophomore year Oklahoma would abandon its wishbone offense for a pro-style passing attack. After two dispiriting seasons at Oklahoma, Aikman realized Switzer had no intention of fulfilling his promise. When Aikman broke his leg in the fourth game of his sophomore year (ironically, against Johnson's new team, Miami) and running quarterback Jamelle Holieway replaced him, Aikman saw the handwriting on the wall. He had never been very happy at OU anyway.

Aikman transferred to UCLA, where his coach, Terry Donahue, would become one of his closest friends. Players at UCLA never received any special treatment. "There were too many famous people in Los Angeles," explains Aikman, for anyone to worship college football players.

Aikman led the Bruins to two successive bowl victories, the Aloha Bowl in 1988 and the Cotton Bowl in 1989, and became the third-highest-rated QB in NCAA history, the number-one draft choice of the Cowboys and a millionaire in 1989.

He was 22, a golden boy, the Cowboys' "redeemer." He was on the verge of the kind of celebrity he could only have dreamed about as a boy in Henryetta. Despite his fame, Aikman still sees himself as just a kid from a small town.

"I had become a country boy," he says. "In big cities like L.A. and Dallas, I missed the slow pace, the open spaces. If I had stayed in Henryetta, I might have lived the rest of my life there." Fame hasn't altered his perspective. "I still understand myself in terms of the big picture," he says. "Football isn't everything. I know that. And I'm very content with who I am."

Aikman likes to think of himself as a reluctant celebrity, one who has been forced, against his nature and background, to confront the perks and pitfalls of fame. He still has the trappings of a country boy: the reddish hair, freckles, boots, pickup truck, chewing tobacco, country-and-western music. He still claims he's shy around women, and then he blushes. He still has his small-town manners. He is prompt for interviews, unlike many other celebrities. He's cordial with strangers but a little removed, cautious, the way small-town people are. He still has a small-town person's aspirations for happiness (a trip to Disney World, for example). But there is another side of him, too, one that has little to do with Henryetta.

His sisters say he is good at tuning out people who irritate him. He admits he can be rude to strangers in public. And though he appears promptly for interviews, he balks at giving reporters the time they need.

Despite his supposed shyness, Aikman thinks nothing of telling someone who knows a beautiful actress, "Give her a big hello from me." This time he doesn't blush but grins that seductive grin peculiar to famous athletes who think the world is their oyster.

As for Disney World, well, Disney World paid Aikman in excess of $60,000 to tell the world he was going to Orlando after the Super Bowl.

If Aikman had never left Henryetta, he might have become a grown-up Tom Sawyer, with all the innocence that suggests. But he did leave. He went to the big city, where he learned things Tom Sawyer never would have learned. He learned to be suspicious, disdainful and wise in the ways of the world. This bothers Aikman to this day. It goes against his nature, which is why he is constantly trying to reinforce the image of himself as a Henryetta boy grown large. That's why Aikman makes a point of returning to Henryetta whenever possible. He went back last year to be honored in a parade down Main Street. Already, the townspeople had named a street after him, Troy Aikman Avenue. (Local kids are constantly stealing the street sign to hang up in their rooms.)

"It was neat," he says. "You know, after the Super Bowl, the parade in Dallas was nice, but the Henryetta parade was special. The people there treated me the same as they always have. The way they treat everyone, with respect. That's why I go back. To reassess my values. The people in Henryetta, their values--I want to phrase this right--life to them is so simple." Simple in a way it no longer is for Troy Aikman.

"'People think Dallas is a sports town, but it isn't. It's a winners' town,' says Aikman."