troy aikman mother

Photographs by Scogin Mayo

IN HIS DREAM HE IS IN THE LOCKER ROOM, and he realizes he is all lone. From a distance he can hear the roar of the crowd filling Texas Stadium. The sound builds every bit it travels down the long tunnel and seeps in underneath the door. Sweat pours downwards his face. The game is about to begin.

He apace laces up his pants, and so struggles to pull his jersey over his shoulder pads. The crowd'southward roar grows louder. Whistles are blowing. "Bustle," he tells himself. "Hurry." He finds his helmet. He pulls on his sweatbands around his wrists. All that's left are his shoes.

But something is terribly wrong. He tries to put his right human foot into his right shoe and his left pes into his left shoe, but they will not fit. He loosens his laces and jams his feet in again. Nonetheless, they will not fit.

His hands are trembling. A cry lodges in his throat. He cannot get his shoes on. The get-go quarter starts, then the second—and he remains hunched over on the locker room bench, trying to get his shoes on his feet. Tears sting his eyes. His breath comes in little gasps. The third quarter starts, and so the fourth. Finally, the game ends.

And that is when Troy Aikman bolts upright in his bed.

THE Almost FAMOUS QUARTERBACK IN AMERICA FIXES HIS BLUE optics straight on mine and says, "My life is non what y'all think information technology is."

"Information technology'south not?"

A thin smile crosses his face, and for several seconds he says zip. He is dressed in a dark tailored suit as he sits behind his gigantic desk-bound at Aikman Enterprises, a suite of offices a couple of blocks from the Dallas Cowboys preparation centre. Scattered around the room are the accoutrements of 1 of the most successful careers in pro sports. On a credenza is the bronzed Davey O'Brien award given to him for the 1988 season, when he was named the best quarterback in college football game. On a conference table is the about valuable thespian honour he received afterward the 1993 Super Bowl. In cabinets and on bookshelves are more trophies, game balls given to him past Cowboys coaches, and old helmets he wore in of import games.

"I don't think I can fully explain what happens when you take on the role of quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys," he finally says. "Sometimes, I can't even explain it to myself."

He is, according to a marketing survey conducted a few years agone, one of the five most recognizable athletes in the country. He will earn $6.two million this year from the Cowboys, and he will make hundreds of thousands of dollars more endorsing products every bit varied every bit Coca-Cola and Brut cologne. In one Brut commercial Aikman plays a game of pickup football game in a park with some friends, simply instead of striking the open receiver, he allows himself to be sacked past a young woman playing for the other squad. After the tackle, he gets in the huddle and says, "Aforementioned play," shooting a seductive glance at the woman and flashing his famous one-half-grin, in which the right side of his lips curls slightly up. The commercial has aired nationwide for more than than a twelvemonth, and Brut executives have no plans to pull it. Why should they? With his clenched jaw, steely blue eyes, and blond pilus glinting in the sunlight, 32-year-sometime Troy Aikman looks like a rugged Hollywood actor who has been hired to play a quarterback.

He receives more than twenty,000 pieces of fan mail each year, some from people who've written him every month since he was drafted by the Cowboys nearly ten years ago. (His mother looks through all the letters and sorts out requests for him to appear in public, give speeches, sign autographs, play in clemency golf tournaments, and invest in restaurants.) Fans swarm him nearly every time he appears in public. When he goes to dinner, women ask him to autograph their underwear or their breasts. They endeavor to find out where he lives so that they can break into his domicile or spring his backyard fence and swim in his puddle. In one case, when he went to a land and western club to meet the ring Shenandoah, so many women began pushing their fashion toward him that he had to get out later thirty minutes. Land music singer Lorrie Morgan, who has dated Aikman, wrote in her autobiography that she wanted to marry him "more than anything in my life."

He seems also perfect, too handsome, too heroic—which is why, maybe, rumors about him grow. Depending on the week, he's either (ane) dating a famous actress or a land music star, (2) gay, or (3) asexual. He allegedly sleeps with a Bible at his bedside because of an overwhelming fright of death. It is said he is so obsessed with neatness that he arranges his clothes in the closet by color and style, refuses to exit a scrap of paper on the flooring, and puts his toaster back in the kitchen cabinet when he's done with it. He is reportedly so alone that he looks for girlfriends in America Online'south chat rooms. He is supposedly looking for state to build a Graceland-style mansion so that he tin can hide from broad-eyed fans. True story: In September MSNBC went on full alarm afterward its senior producers heard that Aikman had been killed in a car crash. The network was plainly fix to give him the Princess Di treatment.

What does it mean to exist Troy Aikman? Does anyone really know? When he's interviewed, he is always articulate, speaks in consummate sentences, and never says "um" or "uh." But he edits himself as he goes, avoiding controversy, stripping out personal color, striking anything that might be taken the incorrect manner. He is always cautious with writers who come up effectually hoping to exercise what he calls "the real Troy Aikman story." One time, many years agone, he reluctantly allowed a reporter to tail him. When another reporter later asked to exercise the same thing, Aikman told him to hang out with the kickoff reporter.

It is an art, the style he withholds. He says he is not inclined to write an autobiography, regardless how much of an advance he might get, because publishers will want him to include "negative, tabloid information" about his more flamboyant teammates and coaches like Barry Switzer, whom he is said to despise for mishandling what could accept been the greatest dynasty in NFL history. He does not whisper a discussion of public criticism about the Cowboys' unpredictable owner, Jerry Jones, who told a national TV audience that Aikman "looks good in the shower." What he plans to do, he says, is write inspirational books for children almost his career—the kind of books about sports stars he one time read as a boy. His showtime kids' book, Things Modify, which came out in 1995 and has sold 250,000 copies, exhorts his immature readers to have "big dreams" and to turn "defeats into victory." The recently published coffee-table book Aikman: Mind, Body, and Soul consists more often than not of photographs and a few bland quotes. "Ultimately and optimally," he says on one page, "you would similar to be able to do what we've done in the by, to run the ball and throw it."

"You know, I am not also open up of a person," Aikman tells me, giving me another unflinching look. "I don't actually empathize why someone holding a notepad and pen thinks he can ask me anything and and then is offended when I don't answer."

He has agreed to give me an hour. But mayhap because it'south a week when he is non playing, the 60 minutes turns into two hours. Then at that place are more than conversations over the phone. Forth the way, to my astonishment, he begins to talk about his dreams.

"IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND TROY, and then you lot take to empathise his demand for excellence," says Tom Whitenight, a college teammate who remains one of Aikman's closest friends. "I know all dandy athletes are driven to succeed, but I promise yous, Troy's bulldoze is… different."

"Different" hardly suffices. Yes, in many respects, Aikman acts similar your typical American guy. When he gets upwards in the morning, he eats oatmeal. He listens to country music. He sends goofy e-mails to his buddies. He plays golf on his days off and drinks beer when he's finished. He bought a recliner for his new house and plans to put it in front of his big-screen Television receiver. He talks well-nigh getting married anytime and having iv children. And he has a gentle, caring side. He makes many unpublicized visits to ill kids, and final yr he was named the NFL'south Man of the Year for his charitable work (the Troy Aikman Foundation builds high-tech interactive playrooms at children's hospitals around the country).

But what the public rarely sees is the role of his personality that is and so fiercely competitive that he sometimes bewilders other players and coaches. When information technology comes to football, his pursuit of perfection is almost pathological. During the season, he lives in a kind of cocky-imposed exile. He makes few public appearances. He does not carouse. Each nighttime he reads his playbook, watches the first few minutes of Jay Leno, and and then goes to bed. "You acquire pretty apace with Troy that it'south better to get out with him during the off-flavor," says a Dallas model who has dated him. "Once the flavor begins, something happens. The basics and bolts of his brain tighten down."

Even at minor practices, he operates at full throttle, and he does non hide his disgust for teammates who make sloppy mental mistakes. A few years ago, when sometime Cowboys receiver Kevin Williams kept running the incorrect pattern at a exercise, Aikman threw downwardly his helmet and cussed him out. When Williams ran the aforementioned wrong pattern during a game, Aikman went into another rage once he got to the sidelines, screaming and pointing his finger at him.

Aikman is so competitive that he in one case got into an argument with another shut higher friend, Doug Kline, over the rules the dealer must follow in a game of blackjack. Convinced he was right, Aikman threw his fries down and started calling casinos in Las Vegas. "I thought our friendship was about to come up to an end," Kline says. When the usually unflappable Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen once asked Aikman in a TV interview if he had played as hard every bit he could have against the San Francisco 49ers—thinking he was giving the quarterback a chance to rebut a column written by a Dallas sportswriter—Aikman turned and gave Hansen such a hostile look that Hansen began leaning backward, afraid he was going to get hit. "I felt the air exit of me," Hansen recalls. "I saw that stare, and I thought, 'Holy shit!'"

GROWING UP IN THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SUBURB OF CERRITOS, Aikman was so sure that he would become a professional baseball game player that he began practicing his autograph when he was still in elementary school. Just he was really a football prodigy: In the third grade he could accurately throw 30 yards, and by the 9th grade, he could stand flat-footed and throw 65 yards. What fabricated him special, however, was his intensity. He played with such grim-faced concentration that a high school coach started calling him Iceman.

His schoolboy career took identify in Henryetta, Oklahoma. After years equally a welder and construction foreman, Kenneth Aikman bought a 172-acre subcontract most the tiny town and moved the family there in a kind of reverse Grapes of Wrath migration. The elder Aikman was a rough-hewn, hardworking man so physically tough that he did not take a break even later he cut off the tip of his finger while working one afternoon. As hard as he was on himself, he was doubly so on Troy and his two older sisters. "He would become aroused with the kids over everything," says someone shut to the family. "Troy praises his father's toughness now, only life at home was rarely pleasant for him."

Kenneth Aikman was not the blazon to throw a football with his son or to appoint him in long talks. In 1 of the few interviews he has given, he admitted to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1993 that he hadn't shown Troy affection "more than maybe once or twice." Instead, he put him to work on the farm, forcing him to carry buckets of slop for the pigs in the morning and haul hay into the fields afterwards football do. "Troy never got in trouble," says Daren Lesley, his best friend from Henryetta. "He didn't drink, and he didn't stay out late." Maybe he knew meliorate than to rebel. "My father was not a man you wanted to mess with," says Troy, who does not talk at length virtually him. (Kenneth Aikman is separated from Troy'southward mother, Charlyn, a gentle, unpretentious adult female who was the guild editor for the Henryetta newspaper, the Daily Freelance.) But it is obvious that he had a peachy influence on his son'south football game prowess. Troy admits that, in the eighth grade, he had no plans to play football until his father pulled upwards to the house i afternoon and told him tryouts were first. "Deep down," Troy admits, "I wanted to prove that I was equally tough as he was."

After leading the embarrassingly named Henryetta Fighting Hens to the playoffs for the first time in years, Aikman caught the attention of Barry Switzer, then the head motorbus at the University of Oklahoma. In part considering Switzer didn't want Aikman to go to a rival school, he offered him a scholarship the day they met, promising to change OU's famed wishbone offense to suit his cannon of an arm. Merely afterward Aikman broke his ankle during his sophomore year, Switzer reverted to the wishbone with another quarterback and won the national championship.

Substantially forgotten, Aikman transferred to the Academy of California at Los Angeles, where his big-city teammates teasingly called him Bocephus (the nickname of ane of his favorite state singers, Hank Williams, Jr.). Withal he quickly proved himself to be the all-time passing quarterback in higher football. His teammates were amazed by his emotional investment in every game: Later UCLA was beaten past its archrival, Southern Cal, in the last game of his senior year, a distressed Aikman flew back to Oklahoma and inappreciably slept for two weeks.

When he came to the Cowboys in 1989 equally a heralded first-circular draft choice, he suffered through a miserable 1-xi season. Only he adult a reputation around the league for having a kind of magnificent gory courage. He was once striking then hard in the head that he felt a ringing in his ears for days. When he broke one of his fingers in the eye of a game, he refused to go to the sidelines; instead, thinking it might be only jammed, he asked i of the offensive linemen to yank at it in the promise that the os would pop back into place. He was indeed as tough as his father.

But Aikman didn't become one of the NFL's top quarterbacks until head double-decker Jimmy Johnson and his staff altered the Cowboys' offense a couple of years afterward to showcase Aikman'due south strengths. He was neither a great scrambler who could escape predicaments nor a long-brawl creative person who won games with glamorous lx-m bombs, simply he could scan a defence force, brand quick reads, and then fire away with pinpoint precision. He brought to the field the intelligence to throw a brawl exactly where it needed to be. "He tin be so zeroed in information technology'southward scary," said Washington Redskins head coach Norv Turner, formerly a Cowboys assistant omnibus.

In 1993, at age 26, Aikman was named the Super Bowl's about valuable role player. Suddenly he was the embodiment of the American dream. When he appeared on the cover of GQ, the headline read "God's Quarterback." Several sportswriters began calling him the new Mickey Pall. Drapery, too, had been raised in rural Oklahoma, the son of a tough blue-collar laborer. In the fifties the most glamorous chore in sports was center fielder for the New York Yankees: Pall's position. In the nineties the most glamorous job in sports is quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys: Aikman's position.

AIKMAN IS Similar MANTLE IN ANOTHER Style. Just as Mantle sometimes scorned the constant applause of the fans, Aikman is an elusive hero, hard to sympathize, clearly driven by something other than fame. On the night of that kickoff Super Bowl victory, he delayed attending a party with his teammates, instead ordering beer from room service and sitting alone in his hotel room for a couple of hours. "I kept thinking dorsum to the time when I was a teenager—how I thought that all my problems in my life would be solved the moment I turned sixteen and was able to get a car," he recalls. "Well, hither I was at the pinnacle of professional person football, and I constitute myself thinking, 'Now what? At present what?'"

"Why would you feel that way?" I inquire.

For several seconds, Aikman just stares at me. He appears dumbfounded that I would even ask such an cool question. "Well, isn't that what it's all about?" he asks. "To keep raising the bar for yourself?"

Information technology is precisely this attitude that makes Aikman such a fierce player—only it is also his curse, and he knows information technology. "I've e'er known that the lows have been lower for me than the highs have been high," he confesses. After a loss, he does non answer the phone, even when close friends or family are calling to console him. He lies in bed and replays each offensive play in his mind. He has trouble falling asleep, and when he does, he is plagued by strange dreams.

I inquire him about the meaning of his dream in which he misses the entire game because he cannot become his shoes on.

"To be honest, I don't know what information technology means," he says, "but I accept it all the time."

In a telephone chat a few days later, I tell Aikman that I have learned that Mantle also had a reoccurring dream. He was too in his compatible, belatedly for a game, racing in a taxi to get to Yankee Stadium. When he arrived at the ballpark, he could hear the announcer saying, "And now batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle." But he could not observe a fashion in. The forepart gate was locked. Curtain ran effectually the stadium, just all the other gates were locked also. He tried to get through a hole in the argue, but failed again. "Pall started panicking," I tell Aikman. "He had to get to the field. It was his turn to bat. His teammates were waiting for him. But all the gates were locked. And then Mantle wakes upwardly."

Aikman says nothing.

"A reporter asked Curtain what the dream meant," I go along, "and he said it meant that he had non lived up to his potential and that he was desperate to get dorsum to the field and bear witness what he could practise. He had that dream all his life, even after he retired."

There is another long silence. "That'south interesting," Aikman says, and and then he says goose egg more than.

HE KNOWS HIS PLACE IN FOOTBALL history is assured. He won a second Super Bowl under Johnson so a tertiary under Switzer, who coached the Cowboys for four years after Johnson was fired for no particular reason other than a personality conflict with Jerry Jones. Although Aikman volition not exist led into any detailed discussion of his feelings about Switzer, his closest friends say he was so unhappy during that third Super Bowl flavour that he barely enjoyed it. He was dismayed that the easygoing Switzer immune players to miss curfews and skip practices at preparation military camp.

What's more than, Switzer and his loyalists had little love for Aikman, in large part considering Aikman never would publicly endorse him as a good coach. Hoping to get even, one of Switzer'southward administration spread a baseless story to reporters that Aikman was a racist because he criticized his blackness teammates more than he did his white teammates. (Aikman'south black teammates quickly came to his defense.) Though they had not a shred of show, a couple of Switzer allies spread the Aikman-is-gay rumor to a writer doing a book on the Cowboys, which, when published, so devastated him that he talked to lawyers almost filing a lawsuit. "Here was Troy, trying to present the right image, refusing to get involved with groupies, not playing the function of the big swinging stud like other players, smart plenty to stay away from potential paternity lawsuits, and for his efforts, the poor guy gets called 'gay,'" says Mickey Spagnola, a respected Dallas sportswriter who has covered the Cowboys for a decade. "And you know with that kind of vicious rumor, once it starts, it never ends." (For his part, Aikman no longer discusses the subject field, saying it's pointless to rehash "a bunch of stupid gossip.")

According to several sources, Aikman and Switzer barely spoke during the 1996 and 1997 seasons, as the Cowboys, notwithstanding one of the nearly talented teams in the NFL, began to fall apart. The change in Aikman last flavour was startling. He became so disgusted during one mistake-ridden practise that he walked off the field. On the sidelines he ofttimes stood at a distance from his teammates, his body language suggesting full frustration. His completion percent and quarterback rating were at their lowest marks since 1990. He became short with the media and with his fans, some of whom believed he should have been able to singlehandedly lift the team, even if Switzer was so ineffective as a passenger vehicle that a New York Times writer described him as "a thick slab of tooled leather."

By the end of the season, Aikman was because retirement. A lot of people couldn't cover why a quarterback at the height of his career would want to walk away from football. But they didn't understand his need for excellence. They didn't understand how the lows were so much lower than the highs were high. They didn't sympathise that when they peered down at Aikman on the sidelines, with his stoic confront and his steely bluish eyes and hair that looked golden in the sunlight, they were looking at a young homo close to despair. "Look," he tells me, "the only style for me to enjoy the game is to be consumed past it, to compete at a level where I know, at the end of that game, that my teammates and I did our absolute all-time." Ultimately he decided that he could not leave. He could not be stuck solitary in the locker room. He had to get back on the field.

Earlier this year Switzer was fired, and a much unlike kind of coach was hired to replace him: Chan Gailey, a former assistant coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Aikman's off-season had non exactly been pleasant: A mole on his left shoulder was found to be malignant (it was successfully removed), and office of the 12,000-square-foot, $iii.two million habitation that he was building in Plano went up in flames. In stories well-nigh the fire, the newspapers printed Aikman's address, which led to hundreds of fans driving past the firm; one woman slept outside in her machine for a calendar week. Merely at training camp Gailey ready well-nigh changing the offense to requite Aikman more than weapons, to let him roll out more than and fire farther downfield, and the quarterback seemed almost lightheaded. He was a new man.

He fifty-fifty found a new girlfriend. He has ever been picky near women, many of whom he knew could never see past his riches or his fame. A friend once said that Aikman's thought of the perfect woman was someone who looks like Cindy Crawford all the same acts in a pocket-sized-town way like his mother. By all accounts, his girlfriend—a woman who works in the Cowboys' office—fits the description. When I saw him out one nighttime with her at a restaurant, he held his arm around her every bit a nervous teenage boy would, sort of clutching at her to keep her from escaping.

In the start game of the flavour, Aikman connected for 22 of 32 passes against the Arizona Cardinals, throwing for 256 yards and ii touchdowns. He was and so excited that he leapt into the air and pumped his fists—a rare display of unrestrained jubilation. Yet, in the second game, against Denver, he broke his collarbone diving to pick up a couple of extra yards, and he was sidelined for more than a calendar month.

Inappreciably a season goes past without Aikman experiencing a close-to-disastrous injury caused past his obsession to go something out of every play. He has had six concussions since he has been in the NFL. Considering of his bad dorsum, he tin't curve over and touch his toes. Arthritis in his neck makes it hard for him to turn his head without besides slightly turning his shoulders. He plays on knees that, according to ane medical source, "would have 90 percent of the quarterbacks in this league sidelined." He knows that the injuries have shortened his career and that i more than could end it for good. He also knows that the star players who've surrounded him—Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, Daryl Johnston—don't have many years left, either. "The window is endmost," he says.

"He and his teammates have played and then many smashing games together," Charlyn Aikman says, "and I think Troy would love nothing more than than for all of them to brand one more corking stand."

In belatedly October Aikman returned to the practice field. Over and over he worked on his 5-step dropback, then his vii-step dropback—the same routines he had been practicing since his high schoolhouse days in Henryetta. He made certain he planted his last step exactly right then that he could instantly reverse the movement of his body and fire one of his famous passes. One afternoon at practice, as a receiver bankrupt toward midfield, an Aikman spiral whistled toward him from thirty yards away on a seemingly impossible apartment arc, the football coming so fast that its nose didn't drop. When it hit the receiver's hands, the audio was like a burglarize shot. "Oh, yeah," said offensive lineman Nate Newton. "Troy's psyched." After each practice, Aikman would run iii or four miles, lift weights, and watch game films. Then he'd caput abode, read his playbook, sentinel Leno's monologue, and go to bed.

Finally, on November 2, he made his comeback against the Philadelphia Eagles, throwing two touchdown passes in a 34—0 victory. The window is nevertheless open, at to the lowest degree for at present.

IN OUR Last CONVERSATION, I CAN'T help merely inquire him if he is still having that same dream virtually the shoes.

"Yes, sometimes I do," he says. He pauses and then tells me that he is too having some other dream, most playing once again in the Super Basin. "I see myself running out onto the field, where in that location'due south all that color and pageantry. You know what it'southward like. Those blimps above the stadium, the jet fighter planes flying by, a star like Garth Brooks singing the National Anthem."

Aikman then tells me that he sees himself at the line of scrimmage, calling out signals, feeling the snap of leather against his hand, backpedaling as bodies crash into one another effectually him, helmets swell, commotion everywhere. Then one of his receivers shakes free, and he cocks and fires.

Only later do I realize that the daydream doesn't include Aikman being carried off on the shoulders of his teammates. He didn't mention whether the Cowboys win or lose the game. All that matters was that he got dorsum on the field.

Source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-real-troy-aikman/

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