Boys Will Be Boys (17 page)

Jones stood facing the rear, unaware as to why the airplane suddenly went silent. When he turned his head, he understood. There was Jimmy Johnson, eyes the color of maraschino cherries, breathing down his neck. “I didn’t think he was setting up to jump me, because I’m quiet, I’m not causing a scene—I’m just standing there looking,” says Jones. “So when I saw him, I stood straight up so he could get by. I figured he was going to the bathroom or walking the plane or something.” Jones pressed his body toward his seat to make room for Johnson to pass. He held the position for two seconds…three seconds…four seconds…five seconds. Nothing.

Johnson looked into Jones’s eyes and yelled, “Where’s your fucking seat?”

Quiet by nature, the linebacker stammered, “Uh, Charles had to use it because they were playing cards.”

“You know what?” said Johnson. “You’re the weakest fucking middle linebacker I’ve ever come across. You play an entire game at
middle linebacker and you make one fucking tackle? Find your damn seat!”

Jones paused.

“Find your goddamned seat,” Johnson said, “before you don’t have a fuckin’ job.”

Gulp.

Jones stumbled around before falling into Haley’s lap. From three rows up, Frank Cornish, the backup center, laughed softly. Johnson’s head spun like an owl tracking a vole. “Stop smiling!” he hollered.

“Coach,” said Cornish, “I’m not smiling. Nothing’s funny.”

Johnson shuffled back to the front of the plane, slurring angrily. As the players whispered,
“What an asshole”
and
“What’s up his ass?”
he reappeared. Cornish, who had stood to use the bathroom, saw Johnson scowling at him again. “Coach,” he said, “we’re all disappointed that we lost. Nobody is taking it for granted.”

Johnson’s lower lip quivered. “Frank, are you challenging me?” he said. “No,” responded Cornish. “Not at all.”

The center quickly exited, stage left, into the bathroom.

A former sixth-round draft choice, Cornish was a solid, dependable, eminently disposable reserve. If Johnson felt the itch, he would cut him in a second. “I never liked that about Jimmy,” says Robert Jones. “Think about the guys I was with when he jumped on me—Charles Haley was a star, Thomas Everett was the starting safety, Kevin Smith was a shutdown corner, Tony Tolbert was a great defensive end. He chose me and he chose Frank because we were guys he could pick on and not worry about. He never messed with his bread-and-butter guys, because he was a bully. Bullies only pick on the guys they can mess with.”

In a final dose of brutality, Johnson—again retreating to the front—walked past fullback Tommie Agee, who was sitting on the armrest of his seat because Emmitt Smith was cramping and needed to stretch his legs. “Tommie,” he said, “what are you doing out of your seat?”

Agee tried to explain, but his coach didn’t want to hear it. “Sit down!” he said. “Sit the fuck down!”

And then Johnson left to drink another Heineken.

In the rear of the plane the players were outraged. Here were the Dallas Cowboys, 11–3 and manhandling the NFC East. They had the league’s best record, best running back, best quarterback, best possession receiver, and one of its best defenses. And their coach felt the need to treat them like four-year-olds. “Fuck this!” said Irvin. “I know we lost, but he shouldn’t have come back here like that.” Haley patted Jones on the shoulder. “Man, that was so wrong,” he said. “I took your seat and he didn’t say nothing to me.” Players were fed up with Johnson’s insensitivity.

The following day, the Cowboys were scheduled to gather at noon for a meeting at Valley Ranch. Horton was sitting alone outside the weight room when Johnson approached. “Ray,” he said, “how are the guys?”

An elder statesman who knew this would be his final season, Horton lacked the insecurity to sugarcoat an answer. “Coach,” he said, “they’re really pissed at you.”

Johnson failed to flinch. “That’s fine,” he said, “as long as they play for me.”

Moments later Johnson entered the team meeting, stood before the room, and made an announcement. Horton knew what was coming—Johnson would apologize and the organization would move on.
Right?

“I know some guys are mad at me,” Johnson said, “but I just want to win.”

And that was that.

“Typical Jimmy,” says Horton. “He was single-minded and he was hard, and all he cared about—I mean, the only thing—was winning football games. It’s probably not the healthiest way to be, but it made him a successful coach.”

In the ensuing days, players bitched about Johnson to one another.
They whined and moaned and questioned the decency of a man who would treat “family” (as Johnson often referred to his players) in such a disrespectful manner. But there was little they could do. He was the boss, they were the employees. Anyone who wanted to quit a team heading for the playoffs was more than welcome to do so.

On the following Sunday, the Cowboys traveled to Atlanta and trounced the Falcons, 41–17. Still fuming at their coach, players took it out on the overmatched Falcons. Aikman completed 18 of 21 passes for 239 yards and 3 TDs, and Emmitt Smith added 174 rushing yards and his NFL-high seventeenth and eighteenth touchdown runs. With the victory, Dallas clinched both the NFC East title and a first-round playoff bye. Shortly after the game, CPC/Environment, the company responsible for those cheesy commemorative coins recognizing everyone from JFK to MLK to the 1986 New York Mets, announced that it would be issuing “a limited edition of 5,000 pure silver commemorative medallions honoring the Cowboys!” (With each one-troy ounce pure silver medallion individually numbered!)

Were the Cowboys back on top? The coins sold out in less than a day.

Ever nervous of a letdown, Johnson deemed it vital to destroy any potential pre-playoff complacency. The Cowboy players averaged a league-low 25.3 years of age. They were pups among men, and the coach didn’t want a postseason berth to swell their heads.

What he needed was a scapegoat.

What he had was Curvin Richards.

Growing up in the Trinidadian town of Laventille Village, Richards hated running.
Hated
it. As his friends spent their days playing soccer, darting up and down a grassy patch of earth, young Curvin sat back and watched. Or slept. Or stayed home. When he was nine, his father, Kevin, was hired as a welder in the United States, and the family relocated to Houston. It was here, at LaPorte High School, that Richards discovered his calling.

Though he might have found soccer to be dull, Richards was smitten with the pigskin. “There’s almost something magical about being on a football field,” he said. “Running with the ball.” Upon graduating from LaPorte with 1,159 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns as a senior, Richards enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. After three seasons he ranked only behind Cowboy great Tony Dorsett on the school’s all-time rushing list. When Richards declared early for the 1991 NFL Draft, the Cowboys gladly used their fourth-round pick on a 5-foot, 10-inch, 190-pound power back with untapped potential. “He’s a great, great tailback,” said Syracuse coach Dick MacPherson. “Curvin Richards is what everybody looks for when they need a running back.”

But Richards had one fatal flaw—mindlessness. Before the opening game of his first season with Dallas, veterans told the rookies that the team’s charter flight to Cleveland was departing from Dallas Love Field Airport, not Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. The lone plebe not to double-check, Richards missed the plane. Later in the year, a veteran Cowboy posted a sign in the locker room reading GO TO KROGER’S BEFORE NOV. 20 FOR YOUR FREE TURKEY! It was the oldest clubhouse trick in the book—and Richards eagerly darted to the supermarket. “Curvin was a fuckup,” says center Mark Stepnoski, his teammate both at Pitt and in Dallas. “If a guy is going to screw up repeatedly, why would you trust him to do anything?” Richards would arrive late to practices and forget little things like, oh, his helmet. In team meetings he refused to take notes, an inexplicable stubbornness that infuriated running backs coach Joe Brodsky.

What especially irked Johnson was Richards’s inability to hold on to the football. As a rookie he only received two carries, so fumbles were a nonissue. But during the 1992 season Richards was a disaster. He fumbled 3 times in 52 rushing attempts—compared with Emmitt Smith’s 2 fumbles in 432 chances. His slippery hands especially stood out in practice, where three days rarely passed without Richards coughing it up. Johnson could tolerate a bad week. He could tolerate occa
sional distractions. He could even tolerate failure (well, at least to some degree). He could not tolerate fumbling.

“It’s a shame, because physically Curvin was a carbon copy of Emmitt Smith,” says Tony Jordan, a running back who spent two years in the NFL and attended training camp with Dallas in 1992. “But culturally Curvin was a little different. He had a laid-back approach that didn’t lend itself to the intensity of pro football.”

To eradicate the fumbleitis, Johnson would insert Richards into rushing drills and implore defenders to imagine themselves as pigeons and Richards the world’s last bread crumb. “We’d do this drill where nobody was there to block the safeties,” says safety Darren Woodson. “It was the toughest drill on the running backs, because a hole would open up and the safeties would just kill whoever was coming through. We knew it was a running drill, and they would put Curvin Richards in and Jimmy would say to us, ‘Come down hard and smack the shit out of him.’ Then he’d turn to Curvin and say, ‘Make sure you hold on to the ball.’” Sometimes Richards held on. Oftentimes he didn’t. “When that happened,” says Woodson, “you are talking about the wrath of God coming down.
‘Goddammit! Motherfucker! What the hell!
’”

Dallas’s final game of the season was a home contest against the lowly Chicago Bears. With 10:59 remaining in the fourth quarter, Dallas held a 27–0 lead that had the 63,101 fans dancing in the aisles. Needing 109 yards to surpass Pittsburgh’s Barry Foster for the league rushing lead, Emmitt Smith clinched the crown with a 31-yard touchdown scamper early in the third quarter. Defensive tackle Russell Maryland scored his first career touchdown when he snagged a bobbled pitchout, rumbled 26 yards into the end zone, and celebrated with a belly flop. It was a good day. A great day. A celebratory day.

Until Curvin Richards entered the game.

In 13 carries, Richards fumbled twice. His first was returned 42 yards by Chicago lineman Chris Zorich. “Man, Jimmy was
mad,
” says wide receiver Tim Daniel. “I was standing right there when he turned to Curvin and said, point blank, ‘If you fumble again, your ass is cut and you’ll never carry the ball for the Dallas Cowboys again.’”
Then Richards fumbled again. Johnson yanked him. As he jogged toward the sideline, Richards surely expected to be browbeaten by Johnson. Instead, the coach said the worst thing possible: absolutely nothing.

The Cowboys held on to win, 27–14, and entered the locker room with a franchise-best 13–3 record; an NFC East title; a bye week—and a coach
again
on the brink of a meltdown. Two weeks after the airplane incident, Johnson was even angrier. In his postgame press conference, he struggled to look directly at the assembled reporters, muttering, “The team is to be congratulated on winning thirteen games. [But] I was not happy with the sloppy play.” Johnson furiously chewed out his players, pinpointing each miscue as if it had occurred in the final minutes of a deadlocked Super Bowl.

“This is crazy,” Tony Wise, the offensive line coach, said. “Whether anybody around here believes it or not, we beat a pretty good football team today.” Aikman was equally disturbed. “What really concerned me is that he didn’t congratulate us at all,” he said. “That was really hard on a lot of guys. There was a lot of bitterness.”

After addressing (and undressing) the team, Johnson headed straight for Jerry Jones’s suite to let his owner have it. With a quarter remaining in the game, Jones had escorted Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, onto the sideline. When Johnson spotted the smiling owner and prince (as well as Bandar’s
six
bodyguards), he flipped. “What the fuck are these guys doing here?” he yelled at Jones. “In the middle of a game that we’re blowing?”

After Johnson calmed down, he told Jones that Richards had to be cut. The owner insisted they sleep on it, but the following morning the coach’s mind was unchanged. In the history of the NFL postseason, teams won scoring a lot and scoring a little. They won with good defense and adequate defense. They won with clutch kickers and nervous kickers. They
never
won turning over the football.

When the Cowboys informed the league of the transaction, Joel Bussert, the NFL’s senior director of player personnel, was shocked. “Jimmy,” he said, “I just want to make sure you know that you’ll have to
pay this guy full playoff money and that you can’t replace him now on the postseason roster.”

“Fine,” said Johnson. “I just want Richards away from us.”

Upon learning of his fate from Johnson, the low-key Richards nodded his head, cleaned out his locker, and quietly departed Valley Ranch. His teammates were saddened, but hardly surprised. “Jimmy gave Curvin plenty of warnings,” says James Washington. “What else was he supposed to do?”

The Cowboys were heading to the playoffs—one man down.

W
HEN FANS LOOK
back at the Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s, they tend to think of the glamour boys—Aikman, Emmitt, Irvin, Haley. Even Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones.

Truth be told, one of the most important—and overlooked—Cowboys also happened to be the only
real
Cowboy.

That’s right. Along with emerging from relative obscurity to become Aikman’s most reliable target, Jay Novacek was a true, honest-to-goodness cowboy. During offseasons he lived in a brick cabin on 3,500 acres in Gothenburg, Nebraska. The closest paved road was seven miles away. To reach the nearest city (Omaha) took three and a half hours by car. Among his closest friends, Novacek counted the 150 head of cattle roaming across his property. He wore a hat that read, simply, REDNECK.

“All he wanted,” says Lin Elliott, the Cowboys’ kicker, “was to go dove hunting.”

Raised in a cornucopia of midwestern towns, young Jay watched
and learned from his father, Pat, who coached high school football in such outposts as Martin, South Dakota, and Wyoming, Iowa. Pat was a quiet man who abhorred flashiness and stressed the virtues of hard work and precision. If Pat Novacek’s receiver ran a 15-yard route, it damn well better have been
exactly
15 yards. The father also taught the son about self-sufficiency. As the Novaceks sat down for dinner each night, they knew that the meat on their plates had been shot, killed, and skinned by dear ol’ dad.

When Jay was in seventh grade, his family settled into Gothenburg and he settled into becoming an elite youth basketball and football player. Though he was an all-state signal caller at Gothenburg High, Jay was ignored by his dream college, the University of Oklahoma. Instead he signed with the University of Wyoming. When Nebraska coach Tom Osborne called the following day, Jay easily could have snubbed his prior commitment in favor of the mighty Cornhuskers. But that wouldn’t have been the Novacek way. “He had given Wyoming his word,” said Pat.

In four years of college, Novacek rose from obscurity to stardom. As a senior all-American he averaged 22.5 yards on 33 receptions. In track and field, he won the 1984 Western Athletic Conference decathlon title and was invited to the U.S. Olympic Trials.

Convinced they had stumbled upon a raw Kellen Winslow prototype, the St. Louis Cardinals used a sixth-round pick in the 1985 draft to select Novacek, turned him into a wide receiver/tight end hybrid—then barely used him. In five seasons, Novacek never exceeded 38 receptions or 4 touchdowns. “It was stupidity,” says Cliff Stoudt, a former Cardinals quarterback. “Gene Stallings was our coach, and I used to think, ‘If this guy’s such a brilliant leader, how can he keep our best player off the field?’”

The Cardinals let Novacek walk after the 1989 season, and Dallas was the only team to offer a contract. Though Jones and Johnson would have you believe they saw magic in the 6-foot-4, 231-pounder, truth is Novacek was a low-risk shot in the dark who couldn’t have been any worse than the incumbent, Steve Folsom.

“No one else wanted me,” says Novacek. “I was a nobody. But when I arrived in Dallas, I found a team with a cockiness and drive I’d never seen before. There was this belief that the Super Bowl was inevitable. I loved that.”

With the Cardinals, Novacek went through signal callers like Prince goes through backup singers. From Stoudt to Gary Hogeboom to Timm Rosenbach to Tom Tupa, St. Louis offered defenses a buffet of mediocre, lead-footed stiffs.

Then Novacek found Aikman.

The chemistry was undeniable. Both fans of country music, cowboy boots, pickup trucks, cold beer, and spotlight avoidance, the quarterback and tight end felt an immediate kinship. Aikman supplied Novacek with the one thing he craved—a quarterback robotic in his ability to pinpoint exact locations, time after time. “Early on when I was playing with Troy he’d come out of a break and the linemen and linebackers would be blocking the visual path between he and me,” Novacek says. “All of a sudden I’d see this hand rise up and throw the ball my way. It’d get to me every time. I’d say, ‘Did you even see me?’ He’d say, ‘No, but I knew you’d be there.’ I’ll take that sort of trust over a Super Bowl title any day.”

Aikman was even more euphoric. Here was a new breed of tight end. Sure, Novacek was far from a bruising blocker. But he utilized angles and body leverage to keep pass rushers at bay. Most important, he was uncoverable. Too fast for linebackers and too big for defensive backs, Novacek ran the 8-to-10-yard buttonhook with unrivaled effectiveness. “I called Jay ‘Superman,’” says Vinson Smith, the Cowboys linebacker. “He might have been the best athlete on the team. You looked at him and thought, ‘No way.’ Then you’d cover him and he’d catch everything.”

In 1990 and ’91 Novacek caught 59 passes, and in 1992 his 68 receptions set a team record for the position. Where other offensive coordinators deemed Novacek undersized, Norv Turner salivated at the never-ending matchup problems. No longer did a tight end have to be burly, slow, and excessively rugged.

Following a bye week, on January 10, 1993, the Cowboys would open the playoffs by hosting—of all teams—the loathed Philadelphia Eagles, the one franchise Johnson preferred
not
to play. Although the Cowboy coach knew his team was far superior to the Eagles, there was something about Philly that brought out the yips. Back when Aikman was a first-and second-year quarterback, the Eagles took pleasure in beating him senseless. One couldn’t help but wonder whether such poundings stuck with Aikman, especially after Philadelphia sacked him 11 times in a 1991 contest.

Though the Eagles under second-year coach Rich Kotite were less intimidating than the snarling, growling Buddy Ryan incarnation, they were still an 11–5 club with a swarming, cheap shot–taking, trash-talking defense. As if this point needed to be reinforced, Philadelphia safety Andre Waters—aka “Dirty Waters”—placed Emmitt Smith atop his I-will-hit-you-late-and-below-the-knees list, telling the media, “Two of us are going to walk onto the field, but only one of us is going to walk off.”

Instead of shuddering, the Cowboys clipped the safety’s words and added them to a locker room bulletin board layered with articles about the Eagles. Philadelphia had talked much trash over the years, and perhaps the words once had an impact. But these were the new Cowboys. The
better
Cowboys. Even if the Eagles could contain Smith, pressure Aikman, and blanket Irvin with cornerback Eric Allen, they lacked anyone with the skills to stick Novacek. He would make a difference—Turner was quite certain of it.

As the Eagles sprinted into Texas Stadium before the start of the game, they were greeted by venomous spewings that laid to rest the gentlemanly reputation Landry had once established. Fans heckled Waters, insulting his mother, his father, his ugly face, and his upright style of running. They screamed and yelled and shouted and hollered—and relished one of the biggest routs in either team’s playoff history.

Before a sellout crowd of 63,721 (many of whom paid in excess of $1,000 for scalped tickets), the Cowboys opened up a 7–3 lead on Aik
man’s touchdown pass to Derek Tennell, and late in the second quarter extended the lead to 14–3 when the quarterback hit Novacek with a 6-yard bullet across the middle of the end zone. Though he caught only 3 balls for 36 yards, Novacek was an obsession for Philadelphia’s defenders. They shadowed him with a linebacker; had the strong safety cheat up—and were meticulously shredded by Smith (114 rushing yards), Irvin (6 catches, 88 yards), and Aikman (200 passing yards, 2 touchdowns). The Cowboys jumped out to a 34–3 lead and laughed all the way to the final whistle, winning 34–10.

“There was a lot of talking before this game,” said Cowboys linebacker Ken Norton, Jr. “We did our talking on the field. I don’t think they have too much they can say right now.” The greatest joy for Dallas came in mocking Waters, who spent the afternoon flailing at opposing receivers and missing tackles. During a stop in play, Waters jogged up to Smith and whispered, “I’m gonna break your fuckin’ leg.”

Smith laughed. “Whatever,” he said. “Whatever.”

After the game, an eager media throng gathered around the safety’s locker, anxious for an assessment.

For one of the few times in his thirty years, Waters had nothing to say.

In general society, eleven years can be an eternity. It’s the difference between a seventeen-year-old kid and a twenty-eight-year-old man—high school and college graduations, marriage, home ownership, children, mortgages, investments, loans.

In sports, however, eleven years passes like the flicking of a light switch.

Such was the feeling in Dallas when it came to the Cowboys, the 49ers, and “The Catch.” Though eleven long years had passed since Joe Montana avoided the rush, rolled right, and found Dwight Clark skying through the back of the end zone for the NFC Championship, the pain remained as raw in Dallas as vinegar atop a paper cut. The Cowboys
should have played in their sixth Super Bowl in 1982. It was there for the taking. Right there. Just stop Montana one last time and…

Sigh.

With the rout of Philadelphia, the Cowboys were rewarded with a trip to San Francisco, where the 49ers once again stood in the way of a Super Bowl berth. But whereas the ’81 49ers were out-of-nowhere upstarts featuring a blossoming quarterback (Montana) and dozens of no-names, the team Dallas now prepared for stood as an undisputed dynasty. These were the high-flying Niners of Steve Young, Ricky Watters, Brent Jones, John Taylor, and, of course, the incomparable Jerry Rice. With a 14–2 regular-season record, then a 20–13 win over Washington in the Divisional Playoffs, Coach George Seifert’s club was the smart-money pick to win its fifth Vince Lombardi Trophy. The Niners were 4-point favorites over Dallas, and with good reason.

Jimmy Johnson made a career out of talking the talk and walking the walk, but any confidence he projected in the week leading up to the game served only to mask a harrowing reality: He wasn’t quite sure his team could win. “They were better than us,” says Johnson. “And not only slightly better. They had more talent, they were more experienced, and they were more complete. We were the youngest team in the league and they had four Super Bowl trophies.”

Johnson feared the 49ers’ talent, but he was truly petrified by the field. Even at the start of the season, Candlestick Park was a below-average NFL playground, what with its surface being battered for eighty-one games every year by baseball’s San Francisco Giants. Now, after five months of abuse, Candlestick was the Everglades. “[The field] was abominable,” wrote Brian Hewitt of the
Chicago Sun-Times
following the Redskins game. “Footing was a rumor. And every time anybody made a cut, the movement produced a large divot. By the end of the game it looked like a Civil War battlefield.” The NFL flew in grounds consultant George Toma to resod the field, a Herculean task akin to seeding the Sahara. He and twenty-six coworkers replaced the grass in the middle of the field, and at one end repaired the gridiron from sideline to sideline. “This,” Toma said, “is hands down the worst
field I’ve ever seen.” Making matters worse, the weekend forecast called for torrential rains.

“I’m not gonna lie—we were nervous,” says Kevin Gogan, the veteran offensive lineman. “I knew they had a great team, but I was mainly worried about not falling on my ass in a puddle.”

As soon as it was determined that Dallas and San Francisco would meet for the NFC Championship on January 17, 1993, members of the media began predicting how badly Jerry Rice would burn Larry Brown and Kevin “Pup” Smith, the Cowboys’ young cornerbacks.

While the mild-manned Brown responded to such a slight with a shrug, Smith took it personally. A first-year player with a mere seven starts to his résumé, Smith genuinely believed he could manhandle the legendary Rice. “Kevin didn’t back down,” says Darren Woodson, the Dallas safety. “He and Michael Irvin would go at it in practice with these knock-down, drag-out, one-on-one drills that convinced Kevin he could play with anybody.”

Beneath a pewter late-afternoon sky (but no raindrops), the two teams took the field for warm-ups with unusual intensity and emotion. While the 49ers tended to be significantly more low-key than Dallas, San Francisco’s players were screaming, pointing, jumping up and down, barking like starved dogs. The team’s star running back, Ricky Watters, jogged toward the Cowboys and began taunting—“Y’all are nothing! Y’all gonna get your asses kicked!” Kevin Smith decided he’d heard enough. Upon spotting Rice, he laughed aloud and screamed, “Gonna be a long day for you, motherfucker!” The receiver did a double take. He was Jerry Rice, dammit. Who the hell was Biff Smith? Or was it Pete Smith? “Jimmy used to say that cockiness borders on confidence, because if you’re unwilling to take chances you won’t get to where you want to go,” says Jim Jeffcoat. “He wanted players who believed they could beat anyone in the league on any given day. That was Pup.”

Technically, Smith
wasn’t
up to the challenge: Rice had one of his better
statistical
games of the season, catching 8 passes for 123 yards and
a touchdown. But in a sport of emotion and heart and physicality, numbers have limited reach. Beginning with the 49ers’ first offensive series, Smith was in Rice’s face and head all day, talking nonstop trash, kicking him in the calves, elbowing his ribs, knocking his shoulder pads. “All that shit I saw on TV is bullshit!” Smith yelled. “If you’re the best in the league, I’m gonna have a
looooong
damn career.” This was Rice’s eighth year in the NFL, and no other cornerback—not Darrell Green, not Mike Haynes, not Rod Woodson, not Deron Cherry—had ever treated him with such disrespect. Though the press had spent much of the week hyping Charles Haley’s revenge against his old franchise, it was the rookie defensive back who provided the jolt. After one too many “motherfuckers,” Haley pulled Smith aside and said, “Man, that’s Jerry Rice. You can’t talk to him like that.”

“Fuck you!” Smith yelled. “Who the fuck are you playing with? You might as well go put on your little gold helmet, you little fucking pussy!”