Boys Will Be Boys (26 page)

Looking closely at the two teams, the boast was, from a pure football vantage point, logical. Playing in the subpar NFC West, San Francisco struggled to finish with a 10–6 record, wrapping up the regular season with embarrassing losses to Houston and Philadelphia. Though they still featured superstars like quarterback Steve Young and receiver Jerry Rice, the 49ers were thin in the secondary and offensive line. In the year since the teams had last played for the conference title, there was a profound separation. This time Dallas, which would host the game at Texas Stadium, was the more prepared, more confident, more talented operation. With a Super Bowl defense comes a swagger. And the Cowboys had plenty of it.

Somewhat surprisingly, Johnson’s words did not go over well with
his team. For veteran Cowboys, Johnson’s shtick had worn thin. His tough-love, I won’t-treat-all-of-y’all-the-same mojo worked wonders with young, naïve players just entering the league. But as the Cowboys grew together, they came to tune out Johnson’s chest-thumping rhetoric. “I majored in physical education, not psychology,” Newton told the
Boston Globe,
“so all I know is he put our asses in the frying pan now.”

“Jimmy really depended on the dangling carrot principle,” says Kevin Smith. “Let me just give them enough to be happy, and dangle a little more. Because if you give a player too much he’s not going to work out as much, he’s not going to do the offseason things he needed to do, he’s not going to do what he must. You don’t get it as a kid. But the more stable you are financially, the less you’re going to just follow along.”

While the 49ers came to Dallas carrying a grudge from the previous season’s setback, they also found themselves caught up in an unhelpful sideshow. That’s because Jerry Rice had neither forgiven Kevin Smith nor forgotten the unyielding trash talk spewed at him in the January 17, 1993, game. Rice was normally impenetrable, yet something in Smith brought out his inner Biff Tannen.

Hence, three days before the game Kevin Smith was more than happy to answer reporters’ questions about his rift with Rice. “It’s all Jerry,” Smith said slyly. “I was just playing him tough last year, and he comes along at the end of the game and flashes me the middle finger. I don’t know why, but he did.” The quotation was an instant goat getter. Upon spotting Rice before the start of the game, Smith approached and reached out his hand. “Good luck,” he said. “Let’s have a good game.”

Rice muttered a slur, again flashed the finger, and jogged past. “Truthfully, I was just messing with the man,” says Smith. “I knew he probably wouldn’t shake my hand. But I thought I’d try and make a home in his head again.”

There was a scuffle between the teams. At the coin toss, San Francisco’s captains refused to acknowledge Dallas’s players.

The game was on.

(Pause)

And then it was done.

In what had been hyped as the “Game of the Year,” the Cowboys trounced San Francisco, 38–21. The biggest—rather, most noteworthy—play of the game came on the first series, when Kevin Smith clipped Rice’s leg during an out route, and the receiver responded by throwing a punch and shouting, “Fuck you, bitch!” Penalty, unsportsmanlike conduct—15 yards. That the legendary receiver was held to 6 catches for 83 yards only added to Smith’s glee. “Ah,” he says. “To get under the skin of an opponent, then see it work. Nothing’s better.”

Unlike the previous year’s contest, Dallas made certain there would be no dramatic ending. The Cowboys scored four touchdowns in their first five possessions, roaring to a 28–7 halftime lead. When Aikman left the game with a concussion early in the second half (asked to name the site of the upcoming Super Bowl, a woozy Aikman responded, “Henryetta, Oklahoma”), Bernie Kosar stepped in and zipped a 42-yard touchdown pass to Alvin Harper.

“We have not often been this humiliated,” 49er coach George Seifert said afterward. “It hurts.”

Once again, Dallas was going to the Super Bowl.

Once again, Dallas would face Buffalo.

But a cakewalk, this would not be.

B
ILL
B
ATES WAS
garbage.

How else to describe a rookie free agent who possessed everything required to play safety in the National Football League—save for speed, athleticism, and pedigree? As a senior at the University of Tennessee in 1983, Bates was named second-team All-Southeastern Conference, but his claim to fame came in a game two years earlier, when he was brutally run over by Georgia tailback Herschel Walker. That was the lasting impression Bates left on NFL scouts: solid collegiate player; can’t stick with the big boys.

When the 1983 NFL Draft began and ended with nary a sniff in his direction, Bates wondered whether he had a future in the game he
loved. On the following day Dallas scout Bob Ford contacted Bates and invited him to try out, telling him, “If there were thirteen rounds in the draft instead of twelve, you’d be the thirteenth pick of the Dallas Cowboys.”

Bates was ecstatic.
Me! Really?
“Ever since I was a boy my dream was to play for Dallas,” says Bates. “And when you’re given the chance to pursue a dream, I believe you have to go for it.”

What Bates didn’t realize at the time was that the Cowboys were telling literally every semi-talented undrafted collegiate player that he would have been the team’s thirteenth-round selection. When he arrived at camp in Thousand Oaks, California, Bates was surrounded by dozens upon dozens of thirteenth-round picks.

The one-legged nose tackle? Thirteenth-rounder!

The legally blind kicker? Thirteenth-rounder!

The pack-a-day smoker from Anne Arundel Community College? Thirteenth-rounder!

But it didn’t take long for Tom Landry to see that, in the unathletic rookie with the southern twang and Grover nose, he had something. Bates was the type of player who annoyed the hell out of complacent veterans, most of whom cringed at the gosh-golly-gee rookie pouring his heart and soul into every play. Bates was a square peg in the Cowboys’ round hole of a locker room—squeaky clean, authentically Christian, loyal to his wife, Denise, and 100 percent intense even in the waning seconds of a blowout. Before long teammates mockingly nicknamed him “Master,” prompting the rigid Landry to tell reporters earnestly, “Wow, those guys must really respect Bill.” (Writer’s tip: Place Bates’s nickname before his last name and say it aloud.)

With the 1989 upheaval, Bates—who thrived as a safety and special teams standout for six years under Landry—assumed that his days in Dallas were numbered. He barely survived Johnson’s first season, and in 1990 was relegated primarily to special teams. As other thirty-something contemporaries gradually vanished from the NFL, however, Bates excelled. He was, in many ways, reborn. On kickoffs and punts, Bates would dart down the field like a bull after a red cloth, charging
through blockers, battering over bigger players, single-minded in his determination to destroy the ball carrier. “I remember coming to the sideline once,” says Kenny Gant. “Bill had broken his wrist and the trainers told him, ‘Game’s over.’ Bill said, ‘No, tape it up.’ As a young guy coming in, I never saw a player who cared less about his body.”

Having survived the depressing late-Landry years, Bates was elated when, in 1992, the Cowboys played like Super Bowl contenders. Sadly, in the fifth game of the season Bates tore his ACL trying to make a play on special teams. He planned to stand along the Rose Bowl sideline for Super Bowl XXVII, but the idea of watching his team play without him on the world’s largest stage was too much to bear. As soon as all his healthy teammates left the locker room, Bates turned to a trainer and pleaded, “There’s a lot of tape left here. You can still tape me!”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the trainer replied. Bates sighed—the sideline it was.

Thanks to the rigid rehabilitation regimen of Cowboys strength coach Mike Woicik, Bates returned bigger, stronger, and faster in 1993, leading the club with 25 special team tackles. Having previously topped out at 4.6 seconds in the 40, Bates now ran a 4.58. The improvement was unheard of, especially for a thirty-two-year-old. “Three weeks ago I would have given you ten-to-one odds that Bill Bates wouldn’t have a chance to make the team,” Johnson said during training camp. “But it really is incredible what he’s done.”

When the Cowboys beat San Francisco to advance to Super Bowl XXVIII, nobody was more gleeful than Bates. “That was very, very meaningful to me,” says Bates. “I felt like everything I’d worked for and overcame over the years was finally paying off.”

Equally elated for another shot at glory was James Washington, like Bates a veteran safety who appreciated what it meant to play in such a big game. With the emergence of second-year safety Darren Woodson during the ’93 season, Washington had been reduced to a nickel back. He was twenty-nine years old and certain his time in Dallas was nearing an end. “In the first Super Bowl I was driven by win
ning that ring,” says Washington. “But I understood in the second that this was my opportunity to put my name on the market and scream, ‘This guy can still play!’” On the Wednesday before the game, Johnson pulled Washington aside and told him he was going to start. First off, the coach liked his veteran poise. But more important, Johnson needed to utilize his three safeties—Washington, Woodson, and Thomas Everett—to stop the Bills’ no-huddle, multireceiver offensive sets. If Woodson was the young up-and-comer and Everett the savvy professor, it fell on Washington to do what he did best: smack the daylight out of people. “I’m not trying to kill nobody, but I’m trying to limit my threats,” says Washington. “When I’m saying I want to tear up your vertebrae, I literally want to jeopardize you at that point in time. I attack you like you stole my mama’s purse.”

Unlike past Super Bowls, the NFL decided, this year’s game, to be held in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, would be played just one week after the conference championships. As a result, neither the Cowboys nor the Bills would party with the same vigor as they had in the lead-up to Super Bowl XXVII. Sure, there were shindigs and ladies and large doses of fruity alcohol. But the nightlife in Atlanta was relatively tame. For the Cowboys, who were accustomed to living like rock stars, the subdued atmosphere was a bit unusual. For the Bills, who in 1992 held a clinic entitled “The Super Bowl: How Not to Approach One,” it was a blessing. “They were much more prepared for what we had to offer the second time,” says Woodson. “We thought we’d walk all over them, but then it was sort of like, ‘Uh-oh.’”

Unlike the previous year, when the Rose Bowl served as a classic Hollywood setting, the whole Georgia Dome scene was just, well, off. Super Bowls are not meant to be played indoors on artificial turf beneath bright lights in a relatively nondescript southern city. Even with 72,813 fans in attendance (most of whom once again supported the Cowboys), the joint lacked buzz…spark…greatness. It felt like a big game, not THE big game.

To Bates, however, this mattered little.

In the moments before kickoff, the captains of the Bills and Cow
boys met at midfield, where legendary quarterback Joe Namath was on hand to conduct the coin toss. Standing alongside Michael Irvin, Kevin Gogan, Ken Norton, Jim Jeffcoat, and Eddie Murray, Bates watched the silver dollar rise from Namath’s palm and disappear in the Georgia Dome lights. “Tails!” he shouted—a call Bates had debated for hours with his wife. When the coin indeed landed on its tail, Bates was giddy. “We want the ball!” he squealed for all to hear. “We want the ball! We want the ball!”

“That was really embarrassing,” he says now. “But that was everything pent up—missing the previous game, coming from nothing, joy, energy, excitement.”

Yet while certain veterans like Bates and Washington were anxious to make the day memorable, the Cowboys seemed to approach the game with a casualness befitting the venue. Having battered the Bills so decisively in Pasadena the year before, Dallas’s players assumed they would do so again. “There were no ifs, ands, or buts about the Super Bowl. I knew we would win,” says Kevin Smith. “We all did.” So did the prognosticators, 95 percent of whom predicted the Cowboys—favored by a whopping 10
¹
/2 points—in a blowout. Even
Sports Illustrated
’s Paul Zimmerman, who had picked the Bills to win the three previous Super Bowls, changed his tune.

Such outlooks infuriated the Bills, who with each Super Bowl letdown grew increasingly defensive. On Media Day, Buffalo linebacker Cornelius Bennett was asked by a reporter whether he thought his team could win. “What kind of fucking question is that?” Bennett railed. “No, we’re going to fucking lose. Excuse my language, but don’t ask me that kind of question. Hell yeah, I think we’re going to win. You think we came here just to lose the thing? You think we came to the previous three Super Bowls to lose? No, OK, so don’t ask me that damn question. That’s fucking stupid. I’m pissed off about you asking me that, all right? So print that. I didn’t fucking come here to lose, I never come to the Super Bowl to lose, I don’t fucking play this game to lose.”

Like their star linebacker, the Bills were fired up. The Cowboys,
on the other hand, were bad. Really bad. Still feeling the effects of his concussion, Aikman looked Ken O’Brien–like in his inability to leave the pocket or throw the ball away. He misfired low to Jay Novacek on an early 4-yard dump-off, and two plays later missed a wide-open Kevin Williams crossing the middle. Because the Cowboys had done their best to conceal the severity of his injury, the 134.8 million viewers watching the Super Bowl assumed Aikman was off his game. What they didn’t know was that he was still suffering from headaches, nausea, dizziness, and disconcerting memory lapses. “It was scary,” said Leigh Steinberg, Aikman’s agent, who spent the night of the concussion in the hospital with his client. “We sat there, he and I alone in the dark, and his head was kind of in a cloud. He kept asking me the same questions over and over.”

Normally a master of precision, Aikman was strikingly erratic. On the Buffalo sideline Bills coach Marv Levy saw an opening. The Cowboys without a sharp Aikman were good, but hardly unbeatable. This was his team’s best shot. “We came right at them,” says Jim Kelly. “And we had them on the ropes.”

Though the Cowboys held Buffalo’s offense in check, Aikman could generate little first-half action against a defense inspired by the sight of a wobbly quarterback. The Bills stuffed the line against Emmitt Smith, eliminating the effectiveness of his favorite play, the lead draw. “I remember looking across the field at their sideline and they were spazzing a little bit,” says Rob Awalt, the Buffalo tight end. “They were yelling at each other, trying to figure out what in the world was going on. I’m pretty sure they came in thinking they were going to throttle us 40–0.” Instead, at the end of the first half, the Bills led 13–6, having scored on a couple of field goals and a 4-yard run by Thurman Thomas. Dallas, meanwhile, managed only a pair of field goals, with Aikman throwing for an empty 121 yards and Smith gaining just 41.

“We were flat,” says Kenny Gant. “But as we were jogging into the locker room at halftime, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing.” A handful of Bills veterans were spewing trash talk at the Cow
boys, an odd display of chutzpah considering Buffalo had been humiliated in the three preceding Super Bowls. “It was almost as if they wanted to piss us off,” says Gant.

In his five years with the team, Johnson had often reacted to halftime deficits by calling out players and intimidating his men into performing better, harder, faster, stronger. This time Johnson leaned against a table and spoke in a relaxed tone. “Look, we’re gonna win this game,” he said. “We’re gonna start hammering them with Emmitt up the middle, we’re gonna force mistakes, and they’re not going to be able to respond. I promise you.”

What Johnson could not have predicted was that the team’s savior would be the bone-crushing, trash-talking, do-rag-wearing Washington. To his fellow defensive backs, Washington was a cagey leader, smarter than the average NFL player and willing to call out coaches and team executives. To others (Aikman, his former UCLA teammate, included), Washington was a nonstop headache. “He wouldn’t shut up, and he saw himself in a light that wasn’t realistic,” says one teammate. “He was a slow, uninstinctive player whose only skill was hitting. James thought he was a leader, but to lead, people have to listen to you.” Defensive coordinator Butch Davis so reviled his veteran safety that he said no more than ten words to him throughout the entire season.

On the first play of the third quarter, Washington made a solo tackle on Bills running back Thurman Thomas at the Buffalo 34-yard line. On the next play, Washington tackled wide receiver Bill Brooks on the Bills’ 43. Then, in a flash,
it
happened. On first down and 10, Kelly stood six yards behind center, with Thomas lined up to his left. One day earlier, Davis and a handful of players had been watching TV when they stumbled upon an ESPN interview with Levy. As the Buffalo coach chatted away, behind him the Bills offense was walking through a play that culminated in a direct snap to Thomas. “He would line up predominantly on Kelly’s right in the shotgun, maybe seventy-five to eighty percent of the time,” Davis recalled. “Well, as we’re watching he’s on the left. We’d never seen them do that. Ever.”

Now, as Thomas stood to the left of his quarterback, Cowboy
defenders knew what was about to transpire. At the snap, Thomas stepped in front of Kelly, snared the ball, and sped to the right, where—
SMACK!
—he was immediately pancaked by an expectant Leon Lett. The football popped free and bounced toward Washington, who had often faced ridicule from teammates for the intensity with which he practiced picking up footballs off the ground. Now here he was, lifting the ball from the turf and weaving his way 46 yards for a touchdown.

Full of vigor and cockiness minutes earlier, the yapping Bills were muted. The Cowboy sideline, meanwhile, erupted in high-fives and screams of elation. Though the score was 13–13, the game was over. “From that point on,” says Don Beebe, the Bills receiver, “we mentally tanked it.”

“I never, ever thought we gave up in the two Super Bowls I played in with the Bills,” says Awalt. “But when Thurman lost that ball, it was like, ‘Oh, shit. Here we go again.’” On Buffalo’s next series, the Bills faced a third-and-8 from their own 39 when Charles Haley and Jim Jeffcoat barreled through the offensive line and hammered Kelly for a 13-yard loss. The Cowboys took over and commenced upon a 64-yard touchdown drive behind the churning, grinding, determined legs of Emmitt Smith, who lowered his head and bounded into Bill defenders like an anvil slamming through a concrete wall. On six of the eight snaps the Cowboys ran “Power Right,” where Smith would follow linemen Kevin Gogan, Erik Williams, and Nate Newton (combined weight: 968 pounds) into daylight. Smith gained 61 yards on the series, capped off by a 15-yard scoring run. Dallas led 20–13, an advantage that held up through the end of the third quarter. “People forget that that was a heckuva game,” says Bates. “They played us very tough. It wasn’t clear that we were going to win until that last quarter, when stuff started to happen.”