These Yellow Roses Prove Thorny Beneath Surface

Their season began with a magazine quoting an anonymous friend of quarterback Troy Aikman’s as saying that where the Dallas Cowboys’ coach, Jimmy Johnson, was concerned, “Troy doesn’t trust him as far as he can throw him.”

Then came the acquisition of Charles Haley, who, in the locker room of the L.A. Coliseum after a 1991 San Francisco 49er loss to the Raiders, had “berated quarterback Steve Young, cursed the coaches for playing Young, (gone) berserk and punched a hole in the wall and threatened to punch Young. Haley (then) began crying, curled into the fetal position and wouldn’t move.”

Later came the holdout from camp of wide receiver Michael Irvin, who wanted to be paid like Michael Jordan. Said the owner, Jerry Jones: “I might as well give him part of the club.”

These are but a few of the anecdotes that you will find in “The Boys” (Simon & Schuster, $23), a blow-by-blow account of the recent Super Bowl season of the Dallas Cowboys by a Texas writer who knows the organization inside and out, Skip Bayless, and tells everything he knows.

You may have read a recent excerpt from this book in a national magazine, in which “best friends” Johnson and Jones were surprisingly revealed to be not nearly the bosom buddies we have been led to believe.

It’s all here, 317 pages rich in diary-like detail. By the end of the season, the Cowboys have become the conquering heroes of Pasadena, the coach thinks the owner is hogging both the credit and the trophy, the author is apologizing to Aikman for saying that the Cowboys should have kept Steve Walsh instead, and the quarterback of America’s team is entertaining America on its most enduring TV talk show.

So, Jay Leno asked Aikman, will you do some sort of country-western album the way Terry Bradshaw did after he became the Super Bowl’s MVP?

“No, I don’t sing,” Aikman replied. “And, from what I hear, Terry doesn’t, either.”

For those who have forgotten, the Dallas Cowboys of last season were the NFL’s youngest team, opening the season at an average age of 25.3 years, but, as Bayless puts it, “the Boys became men.”

The organization itself had gone from being the kings of football to the peasants, but were storming the castle again. And the young leaders of the rebellion--Aikman, Irvin, Emmitt Smith--were in many ways more mature than the men for whom they worked.

This book is a tell-all, not thrown together after the season but painstakingly put together from the opening kickoff by Bayless, who contracted to write it long before the Super Bowl campaign began. It is truthful and candid, not some authorized pap in which all of mama’s Cowboys have grown up to be heroes. And yet, it is written with love and regard by someone who has a great deal of both for Dallas, city and team.

Here is hotheaded, spray-haired Jimmy Johnson, who at times can make Mike Ditka resemble Mister Rogers.

After a loss at Washington, the team’s charter airplane could not depart because the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport was closed because of thunderstorms. A cursing Johnson, regardless, told the pilot to “get this . . . plane off the ground.” Informed that the pilot was under orders to stay put, Johnson snapped: “I don’t care. Just fly somewhere.”

Flight attendants said he was deadly serious. Then they began plying him with Heinekens, without so much as a request from the coach, who simply grunted and shook his glass of ice. (Johnson drinks beer on the rocks.)

He then literally sent the “Boys” to bed without supper, instructing the crew to cancel dinner service. Once the plane was airborne, Johnson came down the aisle and ordered everyone standing to be seated. One of those standing was easygoing backup center Frank Cornish, who thought the coach was kidding. Johnson said: “You think this is . . . funny, Frank? It’s not funny.”

Cornish was standing because he was waiting to use the restroom, which was occupied.

Simultaneously a chronicle of success and foible, “The Boys” is particularly revealing in its portraits of Johnson and Jones, the JJs, the two old Arkansas Razorback bunkmates who restored glory to pro football’s most talked-about team.

We see the Johnson who divorced his wife of 26 years as soon as he accepted the Dallas coaching job, the Johnson who resents the term workaholic but never spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with his family, who says of his sons’ childhood: “I barely knew them.”

We see the Jones who often acts the fool, defended by his own son, who says: “Dad has a lot more upstairs than most people think.” Here was a man originally portrayed as a schnook, called Jethro behind his back, who was despised by the public for defrocking the sainted Tom Landry, and a nuisance who had the nerve to invite a visiting prince from a foreign land onto the sideline of a game, infuriating the coach.

Buddies? Johnson says the only reason the JJs roomed together in college was the alphabetical nature of their names.

Bayless, who also wrote the revisionist “God’s Coach” about Landry, is still the best teller of cowboy tales since Louis L’Amour in my book. Only his aren’t fiction.