Boys Will Be Boys – Jeff Pearlman, 2008 ★★★½

Rise and Fall of an NFL Juggernaut

In his acknowledgements for Boys Will Be Boys, author Jeff Pearlman thanks a number of people for their cooperation, including 146 current or former members of the Dallas Cowboys organization. He then thanks others, including his young son, whom I suspect was a toddler at the time.

At the end of his mention of the young lad came a word that caught me short at first, before realizing it summed up the entire spirit of the book. The word is “fish!”

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys, and Daddies should pay that some mind, too. Not if those Cowboys are like the crowd featured in Boys Will Be Boys.

In the early 1990s, the Dallas Cowboys rose from the ashes of a 1-15 season to win three Super Bowls and stake a claim as one of the most dominating teams of all time. But they were also a locker room of drug addicts, sex maniacs, and dangerous psychotics.

Bringing them together was Jerry Jones, a former fullback at the University of Arkansas who made a fortune as an oil-and-gas wildcatter. As he had always hankered to own a pro football team, he seized the opportunity in 1989 to buy the Cowboys. It meant firing their legendary coach, Tom Landry, a condition of the sale as set by departing owner H. R. “Bum” Bright. But the Cowboys had become a losing franchise under Landry, and Jones was game. He had just the guy to take his place in an old Arkansas Razorback teammate, Jimmy Johnson.

Thus began what might be termed the NFL’s own version of “The Odd Couple.”

“Johnson found Jones to be an arrogant braggadocio,” Pearlman writes. “Jones considered Johnson aloof and dismissive. ‘We haven’t done half a dozen things socially since we’ve known each other,’ Johnson once said. There was a ‘like’ between the two. Just not strong like.”

As couples go, Jones and Johnson were destined to achieve the kind of success that would inspire awe yet eventually shatter their union, not to mention the team they built around them.

And what a team! Most of Pearlman’s book is devoted to the sleazy antics and occasional felonies committed by the Cowboys during their 1990-95 heyday. People who like their sports books outfitted with statistical tables detailing individual and collective performance year-by-year will be disappointed; the scorekeeping here is more about who was snorting lines and having sex with strippers.

At the head of the class is Charles Haley, a defensive lineman who Pearlman describes as one of the most talented pass rushers of his day, and probably the most mentally unstable. How unstable? It’s hard to know who may be reading this someday, so let’s just say his antics are the kind that keep pornographers in business.

Haley also was highly confrontational. He ran out his welcome with the San Francisco 49ers by swinging at the coach, calling out his quarterback’s manhood, and topping it all by cutting a hole in the roof of a teammate’s BMW and then urinating on the steering wheel.

“There are some things you just don’t do,” an ex-teammate tells Pearlman. “And that tops the list.”

Michael Irvin is the star who gets the most attention in Boys Will Be Boys. Pearlman paints him as a chronic philanderer and drug user who at the same time possessed a fierce work ethic which allowed him to be one of the most serious threats in the Cowboys’ offense. Irvin set an example for his team, which as Pearlman puts it, helped instill the confidence to achieve their dreams but also made them believe they had a license to misbehave.

Michael Irvin could outrun defenders with ease. His own demons proved harder to elude. [Image from www.nfl.com]

Pearlman describes Irvin standing nude before a group of rookies and exclaiming: "This is the body you will aspire to have. You will not achieve it, but this is what you will strive to achieve." Irvin made this sort of thing easier to accept by taking other players out to strip clubs and hooking them up with women of amazing physical attractiveness.

The antics chronicled in Boys Will Be Boys are lurid and excessive. It’s clear Pearlman has a target market in mind, that being the same people who see Hangover movies and play a lot of “Grand Theft Auto.” A lot of times, usually when I stopped laughing, I wondered how Pearlman avoided a monster lawsuit, or a visit from Charles Haley. The idea hit me with thunderclap clarity: It must all be true.

Allowing for some hyperbole, of course. Pearlman is one who likes to dish that out a lot. He digs his graves deep for people of questionable usefulness that show up in his narrative. David Shula, the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator early in their breakout, “was well suited to tutor Division I-AA tight ends or, better yet, sell insurance or manage a steak house.”

Pearlman may take his cues from Coach Johnson, who emerges as Boys Will Be Boys’ nastiest character. Pearlman relates the legend of how Johnson at one of his first practices cut a kicker for having asthma. He cut a backup running back for fumbling in the postseason, even though it left the Cowboys a man short for the next game. After taking a jog one day, Johnson even cut his wife. She didn’t fit into his plans for becoming a successful NFL coach.

At times, Pearlman’s wisecracking style gets annoying. He reminds me too often of my least-favorite sportswriter, Rick Reilly, for the way he pushes his commentary in the direction of one-liners. Two Cowboys who didn’t talk to Pearlman, quarterback Troy Aikman and running back Emmitt Smith, are sorely missed. One wishes at times for some play-by-play commentary from Pearlman, and perhaps a deeper sense of what made the Cowboys so special other than the wild personalities they brought together. But Pearlman is more interested in the lurid parts. Most of the way through Boys Will Be Boys, so are you.