ANALYSIS : Future Is Looking Super for Cowboys

Someone mussed up Jimmy Johnson’s hair. Wow. News from the Super Bowl: Someone mussed up Jimmy’s bullet-proof head of hair. They dumped water on the coach’s ‘do and then mussed it up but good. At least four hairs were thought to be out of their assigned places. The coach even laughed there on the sideline in the last minute as his boss, Jerry Jones, produced a comb from his suit pocket and straightened things out for Jimmy. “Combed it just for show,” said Jones, the Arkansas oilman who owns the Dallas Cowboys and gets telephone calls from other Arkansas folks.

“President Clinton called right after the trophy presentation,” Jones said. “He’d been watching television with Gov. Ann Richards of Texas and Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York. The president said he thought the people in Arkansas are prouder of me for winning the Super Bowl than they are of him for winning the election. I told him I had it in perspective and I didn’t think so.”

The Cowboys’ money man is wrong. Football’s right there with the Baptist church in Texas, both about seven rungs up the ladder from politics. As far as folks in Arkansas and Texas are concerned, the world had been spinning backward since Roger Staubach called it quits and God quit doing miracles for the Dallas Cowboys. But now order has been restored to the universe. The vote was 52-17.

You could see it coming. The Friday before Sunday’s big dance, photographers asked Marv Levy to pose with the Super Bowl trophy. Such a thing to ask. You’d have thought they asked Marv to kiss a hissing cobra. He took a step back from the thing. He shook his head in distaste. No one saw the word “fear” blink in neon across Marv’s delicate brow. But it was there. Fear and loathing of the Super Bowl.

Levy is the Buffalo Bills’ coach who quotes Shakespeare and Truman. Better he start quoting Jimmy Johnson. The photogs earlier had asked Johnson, the Cowboys’ coach, to pose with the Super Bowl trophy. “I have no problem with that,” Johnson said. Here is a man who became the Cowboys’ coach and divorced his wife of 25 years because he didn’t want to waste time he should be spending on Xs and O’s. Here is a man who separates incidentals, such as love, from necessities, such as a gutsy quarterback who throws strikes. Smiling for the photogs, Johnson took the plug of Tiffany silver to his chest as if it were his. No problem.

Seeing these body-language speeches, dime-store psychologists rushed to judgment: the Cowboys, and by a ton. The poor Bills. Same as the year before when Washington’s Joe Gibbs smiled with the trophy and Levy asked if he pretty please could just hold the Bills’ helmet. Marv’s theory is if you don’t win the Super Bowl, you shouldn’t put your mitts on the trophy. And now for three years in a row, a record, the poor Bills have been left for dead in the Super Bowl, a story so familiar and so sad that Buffalo quarterback Jim Kelly spoke with a tear in his voice this time.

“We’re proud that we’ve been here three straight times,” Kelly said. He threw two interceptions. He got nothing done. Then, halfway through the second quarter, he got his knee torn up and didn’t play again. Now he leaned against a concrete block wall under the Rose Bowl, television lights on his face. He had crutches under his shoulders. “I know we haven’t been a winner,” he said, his voice growing tiny, “but deep down we know ...”

He didn’t finish that sentence before someone in the reporters’ crowd shouted out, “Is it a nightmare?” Kelly looked at the sensitive chap and said, “Any time you lose the Super Bowl, it’s a nightmare.”

Four years ago, when Jimmy Johnson took Tom Landry’s job, the first thing he did was ignore advice from his friend, Lou Holtz, the Notre Dame coach. Holtz suggested that Johnson draft Tony Mandarich, the giant Michigan State tackle. Instead, Johnson used the draft’s first pick to take UCLA quarterback Troy Aikman.

Of such decisions are dreams made real and nightmares averted. For while Jim Kelly stumbled and came apart, Troy Aikman stepped surely onto a pedestal reserved for the great ones. Every decision on a pass, however brash, was followed by a throw so precise, so beautiful, that the decision seemed not only reasonable but inevitable. In his first and certainly not his last Super Bowl, Aikman did work that can best be described in two words: Joe Montana.

“A weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” Aikman said. Meaning the weight of a rookie season in which the Cowboys went 1-15. Meaning the weight of the public’s expectations that the draft’s first pick be Roger Staubach and be him in a hurry. Meaning, perhaps more than anything else, the weight of his own ambitions. Here is Norv Turner, the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator who was hired two years ago, replacing the fired David Shula, primarily to help Aikman become what he now is:

“All Troy needed was direction and a feeling for something that would work. He’s never had an ounce of doubt in his body about his own ability. You wouldn’t make the throws he makes unless you had unbelievable confidence.”

In victory, Aikman felt a measure of compassion for the suffering Bills. It’s sad, Aikman said, that a football game such as the Super Bowl is made so big that its importance brings such melancholy to the losers. But there it is, bigger than imagination, Garth Brooks singing, Michael Jackson dancing, F-18s screaming low over the dreamy Rose Bowl, a circus for the Nero in all of us.

It’s sad, yes, it is, Troy Aikman said, right before saying, “But now that I’ve won one, I don’t want to be greedy, but,” and here he smiled, “I’d like to win two.”