Two days after his 50th birthday, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman pulls out of a Starbucks in an upscale shopping mall in Dallas’s Highland Park, heads towards today’s Cowboys practice, and talks about his GQ cover shoot from 1993. It was the summer after he’d won his first Super Bowl, and shortly after he suffered the back injury that helped cause him career-ending pain.
“When we were doing the shoot, I couldn’t move,” he says, “I was in back spasms. They propped me up against the wall.”
Aikman’s dressed head-to-toe in black athletic gear, his statuesque 6-foot-4 frame entirely too massive for the driver’s seat of his dark gray Range Rover. On the 23-year-old GQ cover, Aikman wears a boxy, double-breasted suit with a comically big pocket square. You can't see it looking at the photo, but Aikman was in a full sweat because of the pain, nearly 20 miles from where we are now, at the Cowboys’ old practice home in Valley Ranch.
“When I got done, I couldn’t get the clothes off because I was in such bad spasms,” says Aikman, gearing the Range towards the Dallas Cowboys’ new facility in Frisco, Texas.
Troy Aikman sat at his locker after the shoot ended, clothes still on, thinking, Shit, I’m going to spend the night in here. He was the reigning Super Bowl MVP at twenty-six; he was the hero that had delivered America’s Team to their first championship in fifteen years; he was, as GQ dubbed him on its cover, “God’s Quarterback.” And he couldn’t get his pants off.
“Every time I see that cover,” Aikman says now, “I think about it.”
Two teammates came in and got him undressed. He would go on to get an MRI and discover he had a herniated disk. Surgery came days later. He’d play eight more years, the last of which would require shots to deal with the debilitating back pain. He’d win two more Super Bowls in the next three seasons. That shoot, in June of 1993, was the beginning and the end of Troy Aikman’s football career.
Dak Prescott was born in July.
Now the 23-year-old rookie quarterback has taken over the reins of the Cowboys franchise, improbably leading the 2016 team to a 13-3 record, an NFC East title, and a top seed in the playoffs. A fourth-round draft pick out of Mississippi State overlooked by almost everyone, Prescott has seized the opportunity that came in the wake of Tony Romo’s preseason back injury, dazzling while his predecessor—the guy who, at one point, seemed like he could be Aikman’s heir-apparent—carried a clipboard. In a press conference held November 15, a healthy 36-year-old Romo graciously ceded his starterdom to the younger Prescott.
Aikman was once that young prince. The first overall pick in the 1989 NFL Draft, and the first pick of a new Cowboys era under the recently consummated ownership of Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones, his team went 1-15 in his rookie year. He didn’t play in the Cowboys’ lone win and was among the lowest-rated starting quarterbacks in the NFL. In 1990, the Cowboys drafted running back Emmitt Smith and went 7-9. In 1991, they went 11-5. In the 1992-1993 season, they won the Super Bowl. Aikman threw for 273 yards, four touchdowns and no interceptions in that win. They repeated in the 1993-1994 season; won again in 1995-1996. And sure, it wasn’t that simple (it forgets the coaching genius of Jimmy Johnson; the importance of lesser known players like Mark Stepnoski, Daryl Johnston, and Jay Novacek; the particular brand of off-the-field impropriety that ultimately added to the '90s Cowboys legend). But memory draws its pictures with straight lines, making all points seem more directly connected than they really are. If Dak Prescott leads the Cowboys back to football’s promised land next month, then the revisionist lens of sports history won’t remember him as having taken over for Romo. Prescott will have taken the crown from Troy Aikman, current reigning savior.
In the Range Rover, which is spotlessly clean in a way that makes you think Troy Aikman’s linen closet is probably extremely organized, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback talks about his brief stint as a youth girls basketball coach.
“I coached the girls as an assistant coach in a couple of sports, and I was way too competitive for that,” says Aikman, talking about his daughters, Jordan and Alexa (now 15 and 14, respectively). “I had the girls running sprints one day. One girl, she was playing grab-ass in the back of the line. She was probably six. I said, ‘If you want to goof around, there’s a playground over there.”
See, Troy Aikman doesn’t have a problem with playing. He just doesn’t want you doing it at practice. He explained this to the six-year-old.
“She just kinda looked at me,” he laughs.
Today, Aikman’s hair is as blond and full as it was on the GQ cover, just shorter and not as perfectly coiffed. But the signs of age creep: his ears are bigger; his eyes, still big and blue, droop slightly; creases sit at their corners, and around his mouth, too. In profile, Aikman’s nose looks slightly flattened, like maybe it took too many hits. He’s polite, gentle(ish) and much more thoughtful than he was ever given credit for. But, as his brief coaching career shows, he’s still intense, still competitive. On Thanksgiving morning, he’ll go to Flywheel and lose to Mark Cuban’s brother, but makes sure to note that the guy wasn’t really adding all of the proper resistance. “It’s all housewives during the week. You ask about my competitiveness. Well, I beat them,” he jokes—I think. He started playing golf after he retired, and obsessed to the point that he got down to a 3-handicap. Joe Buck, his partner in the Fox booth and frequent golf buddy, adds, “He doesn’t like to play in club events, because he knows people will, for the rest of their lives, go, ‘I beat Troy Aikman.’ He doesn’t like that.”
From the 1991-1992 season through the 1996-1997 season, a stretch that saw the Dallas Cowboys win three Super Bowls, Troy Aikman rarely got beat. He was one of the so-called “triplets”—the other two being Hall of Famers Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith—who led the team to 74 wins in the 101 games he started over that stretch. He missed only nine games in those six years, his relentless competitive drive pushing him to play through injury. Read about Aikman’s prime—or, better yet, watch it—and you’ll see: he got pounded, in a way quarterbacks now don’t.
“It's a different game, clearly, than when I played. You can’t touch a quarterback,” he says. “Even a slight little graze with a hand against the head. If they put [out] a reel of hits that I took that were legal, these guys would be suspended. It’s crazy.”
The most notorious of his licks came in the 1994 NFC championship game against the 49ers, when Troy took a knee to the head so hard he had to be told by his agent multiple times in the hospital after the game that, yes, he’d played well, and, yes, they’d won, and, yes, that meant they were going to a second consecutive Super Bowl. He led his team to a championship victory the following week.
He was the quarterback the NFL built in a lab: the handsome leader of “America’s Team”; unceasingly competitive; tough to an extreme whose medical consequences we did not yet understand; boring enough to stay out of the news, but media-savvy enough to deliver a perfectly hard-nosed quote. (For instance, he told me: “Football is a tough game. It’s a tough game for tough people. And, as a kid, going out and practicing in Oklahoma in two-a-days and it’s 100 degrees, and you’re tired and sore, and you’re getting hit, and you got to get back up and you go through the really tough times. You’re not unraveling baseballs in the dugout and spitting sunflower seeds. You’re not telling jokes. Football’s hard and it’s tough.”)
Aikman’s resolve is borne out of a tough dad. His family moved from California to Oklahoma when he was 12 (he’s from California, but read any profile from his playing days and there is the too-easy characterization of Troy Aikman as truck-drivin’, tobacco-spittin’ simple hillbilly) and he stayed behind to play on his little league’s all-star team. The day he arrived in Oklahoma, he found his dad building his family’s house. He told Troy to get up on top to roof it. Troy did, and then spent his career trying to prove to his dad he was tough, too.
“I don’t even know if he knows that there’s a part of me that wanted to prove that I was as tough as he was. But it certainly helped me in my athletic career,” he says. “He loved football. He didn’t make a lot of baseball and basketball games. But he didn’t miss many football games.”
But where Aikman could not save himself from his own motivation in the past, there was something about lining up a six-year-old for a wind sprint that seemed to be a bridge too far.
“I knew my girls would see me in an entirely different light and I just didn’t want that,” he says, noting that if there’s anything to know about his life, it's that it's all about his two girls. “I just want to be Dad.”
Having “retired” into his Fox role in 2001, Aikman has now been a color commentator for sixteen seasons. He played for twelve. On the first weekend of February, he will broadcast his fifth Super Bowl. He played in three. And though he struggled with the nature of this gig at the beginning—being tangential to the game that consumed him; lacking a scoreboard on which to measure his merit—he seems genuinely content to be the former athlete calling games from the sideline. His relationship with who he used to be is a healthy one.
“It was great time and great moments of my life,” he says, as he nears One Cowboys Way, the address of the Cowboys’ facility. “But I’m fifteen years removed from it. It’s like talking about my Little League days. Time’s gone by.”
Aikman parks his Range Rover outside the $1.5 billion, 91-acre property whose rightful title is “The Star in Frisco, Dallas Cowboys World Headquarters.” He’s here for production meetings with Cowboys’ players and coaches for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day game on Fox. He walks up a grassy hill in front of the parking lot, and across the concrete leading to the looming structure, its floor-to-ceiling glass gleaming under a clear blue sky. As he does, a man with a Texas-sized waistline glimpses Aikman. The shockwave when you recognize an old friend spreads across his face. “Troy!”
“Hey, how’s it going?” Troy cordially replies to the man he doesn’t know.
Last season, Miller Lite aired a commercial starring Troy Aikman. He stops into a convenience store to buy a 12-pack. He puts it on the counter to checkout when a Cowboys fan, behind him in line (and wearing a #8 Aikman jersey), stops him and says, “Excuse me. Huge fan, man. The touchdowns, and the wins, and the...[mimics throwing a Miller Lite Tall Boy like a football]...passes.” Troy turns around and politely tells him, “I don’t like to dwell in the past, but thank you.” Just then his cell phone goes off. “Aikman! Touchdown! Unbelievable!” goes the ringtone, three times. Troy turns back to his fan and deadpans, “I dwell in the past.”
Troy Aikman not only won’t dwell in the past—at least, not with me—but it’s also the only time during our conversations that I see him start to sound the slightest bit annoyed.
“You just come off as old when you start talking about that,” he says when I ask about the glory days. “I know there’s a group of fans that those were their years. And those were my years! Hell. They’re meaningful to me, but I think that… I don’t think anybody really wants to hear about 25 years ago. I don’t.”
Is it a pain in the ass when people like me come in and ask about it?
“If you do anything with the Cowboys, there’s an interest in it. And there are people who constantly want to write books about our teams in the ‘90s. They want to interview me. I say, ‘Look, I’ve done it a million times. I’m just not interested. What’s left to tell?'” And here he starts to get a little more worked up. “Write your book, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit down and spend all this time talking about it.” But despite what Aikman says, people do want to hear about 25 years ago. That commercial gets Aikman wrong, but it nails the guy in line behind him. And the guy who greets him outside The Star.
Later that afternoon, in the back of a nondescript movie theatre in Grapevine, Texas, as Aikman leaves an event and heads for his parked car, people will spill out behind him. One by one, they come up, wide-eyed and mostly speechless, shoving memorabilia in his hands for a signature; or sidling close for pictures, before scurrying away to text their friends. “That was badass, huh?” notes a cop who I’m pretty sure was supposed to be his security, before pulling out his phone to show a nearby woman the picture he took with Troy Aikman.
Dallas hasn’t won a Super Bowl since Troy Aikman brought one home in 1995. So, as far as NFL championships go, time hasn’t gone by. 1995 is yesterday, frozen in amber until another comes along to replace it. And with each step closer, the shadow of Troy Aikman looms larger.
Outside of his car, you get a sense for how truly massive Troy Aikman is. His hands are huge; his back and shoulders test the stretch limits of an Under Armour shirt designed to stretch. Even his teeth are big. Walking behind him is what water-skiing behind an ocean liner must be like.
He has a black backpack (matching his all-black outfit) slung over his right shoulder, which any middle schooler with a mom would know is crazy for a guy who had to retire because of chronic back pain. But when asked if he feels better now than he did at twenty-six, he says, “Oh yeah.” He says he’s been back pain free for a decade, thanks to a new trainer and workout.
“It’s a brutal game. I consider myself to be one of the really, really fortunate ones, to have gotten out of the game as healthy as I did,” he says. “If somebody said, ‘What do you feel? Do you wake up stiff?’ No. I feel great. I don’t feel anything. I don’t think there’s many that could say they played ten-plus years in the NFL that don’t have something that’s really bothering them.”
Did you ever imagine feeling this good at 50?
“Whoever thought they were going to get to 50?” he says. “I remember when I was a kid, [thinking] that, ‘Man, when the year 2000 [comes], I’ll be 34 years old.’ And then 2000 hits, and you’re like, ‘Shit.’”
The front door of The Star opens into a cavernous, sunlit foyer with marble floors and floor-to-ceiling glass windows and looks out onto two pristine outdoor practice fields (in between which Jerry Jones sometimes lands his helicopter). It’s so bright, you actually might not immediately hate a visitor wearing his sunglasses inside. Troy Aikman passes his tiled name in the floor—”#8; Troy Aikman; 1989-2000.”
He takes a right out of the facility’s blinding foyer and through a corridor lined with both fans—the building is open to the public—and Dallas’s five Lombardi trophies (or replicas, at least; the real ones are in Jerry Jones’s office). Opposite the trophies are the Cowboys’ corresponding Super Bowl rings. Aikman owns three of them, but keeps them in a safe.
Troy continues past a glass display case showcasing his pre-draft scouting report. Compiled by Jim Garrett, father of current Cowboys head coach and former Aikman backup quarterback Jason Garrett. It is effusive, littered with exclamation points and typed in all caps so you can imagine a red-faced Texas football coach screaming it at you: “HE HAS THE EASIEST THROWING MOTION I HAVE EVER SEEN!”; “IT IS AS PERFECT AS SAM SNEAD’S GOLF SWING.”; “THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN, BUT, HE MIGHT FALL VICTIM TO HIS OWN IDEALS FOR PERFECTION!”; “HE IS VERY SPECIAL, BUT, HE IS NOT ‘CLARK KENT.’”; “HE IS READY ‘RIGHT NOW’ TO PLAY AND STAR IN THE NFL!”
It’s from October 7, 1988, six months before Aikman was drafted. Going into the final game of that season, the Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers were both 3-12. If the Cowboys won, and the Packers lost, Green Bay would land the first pick—and told Aikman they’d draft him. But he didn’t want to play in the cold, so he went to their final game in Arizona against the Cardinals, and rooted for them to win. It worked. The Packers won, the Cowboys lost, and Aikman got his wish to play somewhere warm. He’d go on to win three Super Bowls. It's a thin margin between the thing you become and the thing you could've been. Aikman knows what’s on the line for Prescott.
“As good as this has been this year, however it shapes up, when they get into the post-season, that’s when it all counts,” he’d tell me later. “If you don’t win, now you’ve got that following [you]. Peyton [Manning] had that. The first three times he’s in the postseason they didn’t win. He was 0-3 at the start of his career. So then it’s like, ‘Oh, you can’t win.’ And you get tagged with that.”
Passing through this Cowboys facility, the glories of his old job—trophies, rings, scouting reports, all encased in glass—equal parts shrine and eulogy, cast shadows over his walk to his current one. Down on the indoor practice field, his team is helmed by a precocious twenty-three-year old who’d sent him a Happy 50th text two days earlier.
“That’s what happens,” Aikman replied to Prescott. “One day, you’re the Cowboys rookie quarterback, and the next day, you’re half a hundred.”
The next evening, twilight of Thanksgiving Day. Inside AT&T Stadium, the Cowboys have just defeated the Washington Redskins 31-26—their tenth straight win—to move to 10-1 on the season. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman are in their booth on the 50-yard-line, standing behind a 15-20-foot open-air window looking down onto the field, on the desk in front of them nine different monitors and a surface littered with cards full of team information and statistics. Above them is the “Ring of Honor,” which wraps around the stadium between the lower and upper concourses. It’s reserved for history’s most revered Cowboy legends: Roger Staubach, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman. They have finished their broadcast and everywhere there are remnants of a finished telecast: empty plastic water bottles and paper coffee cups, about five different types of Blue Diamond almonds containers in front of Aikman, a mostly empty plate of cookies in the back of the room. There are wires, of every color, strewn across the floor and up the wall, crawling across the ceiling, connected to cameras, lights, and monitors, a messy teenage techie’s chaotic bedroom.
Dak Prescott was sensational, throwing for 195 yards, completing 17 of 24 passes for one touchdown, and running for one more. He impressed both Buck and Aikman who, with about ten minutes left in the third quarter, have the following exchange:
Buck: “Your former backup [and now Cowboys coach] Jason Garrett said that Dak Prescott plays like you did in your eighth year. Which I thought was a shot at you.”
Aikman: “Well he said seventh year.”
Buck: “Okay. Seventh. Whatever.”
Aikman: “But I still think it was a shot at me.”
Buck: “He’s saying that Dak Prescott has figured it out way before you did.”
Aikman: [laughs] “No question about that. I didn’t win a game as a rookie and I threw 18 interceptions!”
Troy and Joe wait to do one last postgame hit for Fox, standing at attention under bright lights, the field at their backs. Aikman is hot and frustrated; this shot wasn’t planned, he doesn’t like waiting. A fan outside yells “Troy!” up at him, trying to get his attention. On the monitor next to him, which he can’t see, facing away, a smiling Dak Prescott is in the locker room, exchanging hugs with Jerry Jones and, believe it or not, longtime Cowboys fan Chris Christie.
“Probably the most enjoyable time for me was when the game had ended and we had won,” Aikman had told me in the car the day before.
Zac Easter knew what was happening to him, and wrote it all down. Then he shot himself.
Aikman and Buck finish their shot, and everyone streams out—Buck; the stat guys; the woman who did Troy’s make-up—until, at some point, Aikman is one of a lingering few left inside. To get to the elevator to get out, Aikman has to walk through glass doors that open into one of the many fancy sports-bar-looking clubs set off the concourse of the glossy mall that is the Cowboys stadium. Fans mill around, sensing that Aikman is inside. They stand or sit at hi-tops, watching the screens showing Jason Garrett’s press conference and Cowboys highlights. Four young boys hover next to a picked-over buffet, leftover hot dogs and tortilla chips nearby, but no parents in sight. They all wear Cowboys jerseys. The youngest’s face is a chocolate bloodbath, the mostly mutilated cookie in his hand the likely culprit. The oldest-looking among them, wearing a Witten jersey and with one of those middle-school, spiked-at-the-front, Abercrombie-era haircuts, asks me, “When is Mr. Troy is coming out?”
I don’t know.
He says, “I’ve been a Cowboys fan my whole life.”
How long is that?
“11 years.”
I ask the only obvious question, the reductive one that compares two things that aren’t really comparable but, for Cowboys fans, might forever be side-by-side.
So who do you like better: Dak or Aikman?
“Aikman!” the 11-year-old says, somewhat incredulously.
“He’s the one who started this whole thing.”
