Hard Work Is Aikman’s Secret

It must be nice being Troy Aikman.

You transfer from Oklahoma to UCLA and become an All-American. You are picked No. 1 in the NFL draft and win three Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys. At least 14 books are written about you.

When it becomes time to retire from football, you decide to try broadcasting, and after one season you’re part of the No. 1 NFL announcing team on Fox.

Life isn’t supposed to be that easy.

“I think what people don’t realize about Troy,” said his friend David Norrie, another former UCLA quarterback who is a college football commentator for ABC, “is just how hard he works. He was that way as a player, and he is that way as a broadcaster.

“No one does as much as Troy when it comes to making phone calls, looking at film and breaking down games.

“Am I surprised how well he has done in broadcasting, and how quickly he got to where he is? If it was anyone else, I would have been surprised.

“But not with Troy. He is an amazing guy who just blows me away. It’s hard to find any weaknesses.”

Fox play-by-play announcer Joe Buck, who’ll be calling Sunday’s playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles with Aikman and Cris Collinsworth, said of Aikman, “The more I talk about him, the more I think I have a crush on him.

“He’s not human. He has no flaws. I have at least 10, and I could give you a list on Cris, but I can’t name one flaw with Troy. He is the most organized, most thorough guy I know. He’s

dialed into everybody in the NFL, on top of everything else, he’s wonderful with fans. He and Stan Musial are the two best at that I’ve ever seen.”

As a broadcaster, Aikman has that easy-on-the-ears style that makes a viewer feel comfortable. It seems as though he just shows up and casually converses about the game. But the opposite is true. He is super-prepared. That’s the way it is with the good ones.

While he was playing, Aikman worked a few NFL Europe games for Fox. Ed Goren, the president of Fox Sports, visited with Aikman at a golf tournament in Las Vegas and let him know they’d find a good spot for him when he retired.

“That made the decision to retire [in April 2001] a lot easier,” Aikman said.

In his first year with Fox, Aikman worked with Dick Stockton and former Cowboy teammate Daryl Johnston on the No. 2 team. There was an opening because Matt Millen had left to become president of the Detroit Lions.

The next season, John Madden left for ABC, and Aikman suddenly found himself on the No. 1 team with Buck and Collinsworth.

He also does a weekly Thursday show for the Sporting News radio network during the football season.

“I’ve been fortunate,” Aikman said.

But no one accomplishes such a quick rise in such a competitive business just because of good fortune. There’s more to it than that.

Trojan Fan

Another thing about Aikman is that he is a devoted father of three girls.

While doing a phone interview from his home in Dallas, Aikman had one of his two young daughters on his lap. He also has a teenage stepdaughter.

Aikman grew up in Southern California -- he and his family moved from Cerritos to a farm near Henryetta, Okla., when he was 12. And get this: Aikman was a USC fan as a kid.

“My name was Troy, there was the Helen of Troy thing and that whole deal,” Aikman said. “I loved watching Pat Haden and [J.K.] McKay and Coach [John] McKay and Ricky Bell.”

But neither USC nor UCLA recruited him out of high school. He ended up going to Oklahoma, and by his sophomore year he was the Sooners’ starting quarterback.

But he broke a leg in his fourth game -- “against Jimmy Johnson’s Miami team,” he pointed out. By the time Aikman came back, Jamelle Holieway had taken hold of the quarterback spot.

And Coach Barry Switzer had gone back to a wishbone offense, so there was no place for a strong drop-back passer.

His plan was to transfer, sit out a year and then be the starting quarterback someplace for two years.

“I looked at four schools,” he said. “UCLA, where Matt Stevens was the starter, Iowa, which had Chuck Long, and Arizona State, which had Jeff Van Raaphorst. They were all seniors who’d be gone the next year.

“USC had Rodney Peete, who was only a sophomore.”

So that took USC out of the running and put UCLA at the top of the list.

Things didn’t start out all that well for Aikman at UCLA. At first, Coach Terry Donahue and offensive coordinator Steve Axman, who is now in his second stint in that position, wanted to platoon Aikman with Brendan McCracken, another junior who had been Stevens’ backup the previous season.

But things worked out fine for Aikman. Things usually do.

Figure Skating

ABC has the U.S. Figure Skating Championships on Saturday at 1 and 8 p.m., plus an exhibition Sunday at 3 p.m. The women’s finals are Saturday night.

There are three feature pieces to look for Saturday night. One is with Michelle Kwan and Karl Malone, taped at the Laker practice facility in El Segundo. Kwan is a big Laker fan, and Malone encourages her to keep on competing.

In another piece, Dick Button looks back at his 40 years as an ABC skating commentator.

And Peggy Fleming narrates a feature with Jenny Kirk and her sister Emily about how their relationship developed after their mother’s death from breast cancer two years ago.

It’s appropriate to have Fleming, 55, do this feature because she had surgery for breast cancer in 1998. Fleming is also on the board of the V Foundation, which is named after the late Jim Valvano and raises money for cancer research.

Back to NBC

Michael Weisman, the esteemed former executive producer of NBC Sports, is going back to NBC. But not in sports. He’ll produce the daily afternoon “Jane Pauley Show,” scheduled to make its debut on NBC in August, after the Summer Olympics at Athens.

Weisman, Fox’s lead baseball producer who also served as a special consultant to NBC during the Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002, said, “People may wonder why I’m giving up an opportunity to work both the Olympics and the World Series this year. The way I look at it, this is an exciting new challenge that is totally different than anything I’ve ever done.”

It also means Weisman will be moving from his home in Brentwood back to New York, where he has family. His mother-in-law, who lives there, recently lost her husband, and his daughter, Brett, a recent Syracuse graduate, is living and working in Manhattan.

Radio Notes

It was noted in this space last week that KMPC (1540) couldn’t come to terms with Chris Myers and Bob Golic. Golic said that wasn’t exactly true in his case. “There were no negotiations,” he said. “I would have taken a salary cut if that’s what it took to stay on the air.” ... Laker radio announcer Joel Meyers begins doing a daily one-hour show, “L.A. Reloaded,” Monday at 8 a.m. for XTRA (690, 1150). Meyers did talk radio for the old KMPC (710) in the 1980s, when his show was sandwiched around Jim Healy’s. ... XTRA has tabbed Fox Sports Net’s Van Earl Wright as its main fill-in host.

Short Waves

Attention college basketball fans: Fox Sports Net offers No. 4 Stanford at No. 3 Arizona on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ... Attention hockey fans: College Sports Television, available on DirecTV and some Adelphia cable systems, offers taped coverage of the USA’s recent gold-medal run at hockey’s World Junior Championships on Monday at 5 p.m. and Tuesday at 6 p.m.

The Raiders’ Tim Brown will be filling in for Eric Dickerson on Channel 2 this weekend. ... Tampa Bay’s John Lynch has joined foxsports.com to provide analysis the next two weekends. ... Mike Garrett will be among the alums of the East-West Shrine Game who will be honored at halftime of Saturday’s game on ESPN. ... ESPN announced this week it is planning to make dramatic movies based on the lives of Dale Earnhardt and Pete Rose.