NFL PLAYOFFS : This Star Wears the Lone Star

Thirty-six hours before the football game that would send him to a Super Bowl to be played on his collegiate field, Troy Aikman came back from dinner with his agent, Leigh Steinberg, and watched a movie. It was “Under Siege,” a title certainly befitting an NFL quarterback, and Aikman sat spellbound.

When a villain’s eyes were gouged, Steinberg looked away. He thought the violence the worst he had ever seen.

But Aikman sat forward, excitedly.

“If this can’t get me ready to play football, what will?” he said.

Aikman was ready. He aimed. He fired. With San Francisco’s 49ers trying to do him bodily harm, Aikman passed for 322 yards and two touchdowns Sunday during the Dallas Cowboys’ 30-20 raid on Candlestick. So, on he goes to the Super Bowl at the Rose Bowl, where Aikman first caught the Cowboys’ eye, playing for UCLA.

Joe Montana isn’t going to the Super Bowl. Nor is Steve Young. Nor is Dan Marino. Not this time.

Troy Aikman is.

The Cerritos bandito himself. That’s where he grew up, in the California sun. Then, when he was 12, Aikman’s family moved to Henryetta, Okla., population 6,000, which has since named a street after him. Last fall, as the hometown hero who had become quarterback of “America’s Team,” the Dallas Cowboys themselves, Aikman pledged to personally match any money that was raised in a fund drive for a Henryetta health and fitness center, and he also sponsored a scholarship at his high school as well as a children’s charity foundation in Dallas-Ft. Worth.

He had made it, all right. But not to the top. Not to the Super Bowl.

“Everybody dreams about it, and I’m no different,” Aikman said after starring in a game that returns him to Hollywood as the newest member of the “A” list of quarterbacks.

“It probably won’t really dawn on me what’s happened until I touch down in L.A.,” Aikman continued. “The one thing that still gets to me is for the Cowboys to go 1-15 and to get to the Super Bowl four years later. That’s just amazing. That’s the best.”

Jerry Jones, the man who bought this team Feb. 25, 1989 and then signed top draft choice Aikman to a six-year contract two months later, shook his head at the memory of it all--of the nightmarish first season with 15 defeats in 16 games to the moment Aikman caught Kelvin Martin in a crossing pattern and put the Cowboys back in the Super Bowl, where their fans so sincerely believe that they belong.

Jones sometimes felt he was the one under siege. “I never slept a wink last night,” the owner said. “To think of how much is riding on something so tenuous as 60 minutes of football.”

Aikman made it happen. Never once did he flinch under fire. Not once Sunday was he intercepted. Never once did San Francisco’s early sack dances around his helmet disturb Aikman to the extent that he would become rattled and unglued. He simply kept making surgical strikes to Michael Irvin, to Alvin Harper, to Jay Novacek, to Emmitt Smith, until ultimately came the incredibly gutsy pass to Martin that made every Dallas fan’s day.

Norv Turner made that call. As the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator, he has a big say-so in such things, and the boss, Jimmy Johnson, makes sure to listen. As Aikman said: “Norv plays to win. With him, it’s not just calling plays to avoid losing. He’s very gutsy. He doesn’t run the football just because the safest thing to do is to run the football. The man plays football to win.”

And so does Aikman, who has gone from the indignity of 1-15 to being mentioned in the same breath as Roger Staubach, in several not-so-easy lessons.

“Roger’s big thing was to be mentally prepared and not worry about making physical mistakes,” Aikman said. “With him, everything was execution. Execute, execute, execute.”

Sixteen-yard touchdown pass to Smith, fourth quarter. Six-yard touchdown pass to Martin, fourth quarter. Clutch third-down throws, upfield, downfield. Execute, execute. Aikman did what it took. He isn’t a runner as Young is. He steps back into a pocket, searches and destroys.

And now his next target is the Wild West Super Bowl--the one between a bunch of Cowboys out of Texas and a pack of trick-shot artists who call themselves the Buffalo Bills.