A New Route in Life

Michael Irvin, in Lake Tahoe last week for a celebrity golf tournament, was talking with a reporter about how focused he is on his daily workouts.

“Sounds like you’re monomaniacal,” the reporter said.

“Monomaniacal, that’s a great word,” Irvin said. “What does it mean?”

The reporter told him it means excessive interest in one thing.

“I’m going to use it tonight on the show,” Irvin said.

The next day Irvin called on his cell phone. “Did you hear me use your word, monomaniacal?” he said. “You got another word for me today?”

Two years since retiring from football, Irvin, who commutes to Los Angeles from his home outside Dallas to work regularly on Fox’s “Best Damn Sports Show Period,” seems as monomaniacal about his new career in broadcasting as he was about catching passes.

In 12 seasons as a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, he played on three Super Bowl championship teams, made the Pro Bowl five seasons in a row, led the NFL in yards receiving in 1991 with a club-record 1,523 and finished his career with 11,904 yards receiving and 750 receptions, both club records.

But with his fame came trouble.

In 1996, he pleaded no contest to felony drug possession after he, former teammate Alfredo Roberts and two strippers were busted in a motel room where cocaine and marijuana were found. That was only one of his run-ins with the law.

Irvin says he was never addicted to drugs. His addiction was sex. It was an addiction that almost cost him everything. He eventually hit bottom.

That happened, he says, on Valentine’s Day, 2001.

The previous night, he came home after being gone for two days. He left again but promised wife Sandi he’d be back in an hour.

He came back the next morning, after spending the night with another woman.

“I was with my brother Derrick,” he said in a recent interview. “We drove past a bar and he suggested stopping for one drink. I said, ‘OK, but only one drink.’

“I would always tell myself I was going to have only one drink. Then a bad woman would come over, and sometimes she’d bring a friend. That was always my excuse to myself for having another drink--bad women.”

The drinks often led to partying and illicit sex. Drugs were usually involved, at least until Irvin quit doing drugs following his 1996 drug conviction. He had little choice in the matter then.

“I was put on probation for four years and was tested for drugs four or five times a week,” he said.

“It’s all about self-esteem. I lacked self-esteem, going all the way back to kindergarten [in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.]. I couldn’t read or write, but the white kids could. I thought, ‘I’m just a dumb black kid.’

“I didn’t realize the white kids had been to preschool.

“That lack of self-esteem stays with you. You’re always trying to prove to everybody how great you are, how perfect you are.

“It made me [excessive] in football. That’s also what all the women were about. I had to prove to everyone I could get a lot of women, that I was perfect.

“I used to think I could do everything myself. I didn’t need to play anybody’s game, I was going to do it my way.

“That’s why I showed up in court after my drug charge wearing a mink coat. It was a dumb thing to do, but I was going to show everyone I was doing it my way.”

Irvin attributes most of his own troubles to his sex addiction, which isn’t much different than being addicted to drugs and alcohol. It’s something Irvin will have to always battle.

“You can’t beat a sex addiction any more than you can beat alcoholism,” said Dr. John Sealy, the medical director of the sexual addiction recovery program at Del Amo Hospital in Torrance.

“We call it getting into recovery, rather than being recovered. Each day you make a commitment to stay in recovery.”

Irvin said he has made a commitment to God, which Sealy said is one way of handling it.

There are many ways to act out on the addiction, be it on the Internet or with prostitutes, according to Sealy.

“Or by picking up girls,” he said.

For Irvin, finding women to feed his addiction was never a problem, particularly in Dallas, where he enjoyed superstar status.

“As a man, you really don’t think about women hitting on you,” he said. “Women get hit on all the time, but not men. Well, believe me, I got hit on all the time.”

And, he said, he usually obliged.

Irvin, 36, went into a depression after he retired in July 2000. He was drinking and chasing women, sometimes staying out all night.

When he returned home Valentine’s morning last year after another night of extramarital sex, he said he broke down, got on his knees and cried. So did Sandi.

“Of course I was very disappointed, but he was also very disappointed in himself,” Sandi said by telephone from the Irvins’ home in the Dallas suburb of Plano.

“He was usually late, but he never promised he would be home at a certain time. It’s hard to get him to promise to do anything because he doesn’t want to break the promise.

“This time he had broken his promise, and I think that’s what made him realize he had no control.”

Her words were not much different then than they were other times when Irvin got into trouble.

Sandi, devoutly religious, told Michael, “You have to make peace with God. Baby, you have to pray and ask God for strength.”

Pray they did. They checked into a hotel room, ordered room service and prayed all night.

The next Sunday, Irvin went to church with Sandi and prayed some more. About a month later, he spoke at a revival meeting and publicly apologized to Sandi.

He also quit drinking alcohol.

Michael and Sandi, who have four children--two boys, two girls--renewed their marriage vows on June 23 while attending a marriage seminar in Jacksonville, Fla. It was their 12th anniversary.

Sandi, who met Irvin while both were at the University of Miami, has a high-pitched voice that personifies sweetness, and the voice tells a lot about the person.

Irvin calls Sandi the “greatest blessing of my life.” He said if she hadn’t stuck by him he may not have survived.

These days, he is as religious as she is, maybe more so.

He regularly recites scriptures, continually says, “God bless you” to those around him, and refuses to use bad language.

He won’t even say “Best Damn Sports Show Period.” He prefers to call the show “BDSSP,” thus avoiding the word “damn.”

Tom Arnold, who is also on “Best Damn Sports Show,” was a recent guest on David Letterman’s show. When Arnold mentioned Irvin was now on the show--”He has been arrested almost as many times as I have,” Arnold cracked--Letterman asked, “How did that happen? ... Wasn’t this the guy with the drugs, guns and strippers?”

Said Arnold: “He doesn’t have drugs, guns and strippers now, he has Jesus.”

Arnold also said, “He embraces his past, so you can make fun of him, which is nice. Lots of times those guys get religious and don’t like to talk about the drugs, guns and strippers. But we can make our jokes. He’s great.”

Said Letterman: “So he’s clean and sober?”

“Absolutely,” said Arnold, himself a recovering alcoholic. “They asked me to look into his eyes. They asked me, ‘Can you guarantee he’ll stay sober?’

“Hell, I can’t guarantee I’ll stay sober.”

One person who doesn’t think Irvin will revert to his former ways is Louis Moreno, who supervised Irvin’s probation following his 1996 drug conviction. It was three years of intensive supervision and another year of minimum supervision.

Moreno says Irvin did all the right things, passed all his drug tests and fulfilled his 800 hours of his community service work obligation, mostly in central Dallas.

Cowboy owner Jerry Jones thinks enough of Irvin to have hired him as the television commentator for his Arena Football League team, the Dallas Desperados.

The play-by-play announcer is Brad Sham, the radio voice of the Cowboys for the last 24 years.

“I didn’t socialize with Michael when he was a player, so I can’t personally attest to what he was like then,” Sham said. “But I’m certainly aware of his reputation.

“Now I spend a great deal of time with him on the road, and he is not what he used to be. He is faithful to his wife, he is not drinking and he is not swearing.

“These religious conversions tend to breed skepticism, and if you don’t know Michael you may feel that skepticism.”

Sham is not skeptical.

“Even knowing what we know about how these life reformations can go,” he said, “it appears he has turned his life around dramatically.

“I’ve been in his hotel room on the road and he is either reading his game notes or reading the Bible or he has his laptop up and running.”

Irvin says he puts as much effort into his new lifestyle as he did his old one.

“I wanted to be the best in football, and now I want to be the best in broadcasting,” he said.

He knows he needs work, particularly on his diction and grammar. That’s why he’s working with voice specialist Arthur Joseph, founder of the Vocal Awareness Institute.

Joseph said he has rarely seen anyone as dedicated as Irvin.

“I love his effort, and I love his discipline,” Joseph said.

He likes some things that he sees and hears, cringing at others.

Irvin continually has trouble using the correct verb tense. During a recent show, he was doing fine until he interviewed Shaquille O’Neal, then the old Irvin came out. He said things such as, “Tom Arnold’s always talking about he live next door to you.”

Joseph is working on such things, and more.

“He affects your whole life,” Irvin said. “He has got me reading the front page of the newspaper for the first time in my life. I used to only read the sports section.”

Fox Sports Net first hired Irvin on the day he announced he was retiring from football. But a month later Irvin was arrested in a woman’s North Dallas apartment, where police found marijuana.

Irvin admits to going to the woman’s apartment to have sex but says he was unaware of the marijuana. It was determined later that the police had conducted an illegal search of the apartment. The charges were dropped, but the damage had already been done and the network dropped him.

Last summer, George Greenberg, the executive producer of “Best Damn Sports Show Period,” went to Dallas to conduct auditions. Irvin was among those auditioning, even though David Hill, the chairman of Fox Sports, had said Irvin would never work for Fox.

“Michael was great in the audition,” Greenberg said. “The problem was convincing David we should hire him.”

Hill said he changed his mind about Irvin after talking with Jones and Pat Summerall.

“Jerry and Pat gave him great character references,” Hill said. “It appeared he had seen the error of his ways, so we decided to give him another shot. He is a wonderful, affable person and he has come out of the box strong.”

Summerall says he and Irvin have become close and that he and his wife Cheri sometimes go to church with Michael and Sandi. Summerall said whenever Irvin gets up to speak in church, or wherever he makes a public speech, it is something to behold.

When Irvin was hired by Fox Sports Net for a second time on June 4, it was announced that he would be part of “The NFL Show,” formerly “NFL This Morning.” (The name was changed because this season the show will be televised Saturday nights, then repeated Sunday mornings.)

But Greenberg also knew he was going to find a regular spot for Irvin on his show, “BDSSP,” as Irvin calls it.

“If Michael stays on track, he’ll be the next big talent on television from the players’ world,” Greenberg said.

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Times staff writer Sam Farmer contributed to this story.