For the early '90s Dallas
Cowboys, winning three Super Bowls in four years excused a multitude of sins,
ranging from rape accusations to a near-fatal assault on a teammate with a pair
of scissors. Emotionally stunted players like Michael Irvin and coaches like
Jimmy Johnson put football (and the fast-lane lifestyle that went with it)
above their wives, children, and mental health, but that doesn't make them
unique in professional sports. What makes them different, judging by Jeff
Pearlman's salacious page-turner Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days And Party
Nights Of The Dallas Cowboys Dynasty, is how successful they were at reconciling a
steely-eyed commitment to gridiron perfection with an insatiable hunger for
hookers and blow.
Pearlman, who chronicled
the similarly depraved '86 New York Mets in the bestseller The Bad Guys Won!, suggests that
off-the-field insanity was an essential part of the team's winning makeup, even
if hard living and lax discipline finally finished off the Cowboys' run of
championships by the decade's end. The player who personified the Cowboys'
"work hard, play harder" ethos was Irvin, a complicated man who routinely
cheated on his wife but was fiercely loyal to his teammates, who in turn
respected him for his tireless work ethic almost as much for his ability to bed
up to a dozen women at once. For a team that bonded by going to strip clubs and
doing bong rips with dancers in the champagne room, Irvin was a role model.
Pearlman occasionally adopts an
overly jokey tone when describing the utter lunacy of the Cowboys locker room,
which is unnecessary considering how outrageous the stories are by themselves.
He's better off when he lets his reporting—he interviewed nearly 150
players and coaches—vividly flesh out the team's generous collection of
larger-than-life characters. There's Jerry Jones, the megalomaniacal owner who
saw his team go from 1-15 to the top of the NFL, and used his status to chase
the same big-breasted groupies his players enjoyed. There's Nate Newton, a
massively overweight Pro Bowl offensive lineman who went to prison after
getting caught with more than 200 pounds of marijuana. And most memorably,
there's Charles Haley, a seemingly psychotic defensive end who livened up team
meetings by masturbating while discussing other players' wives, and who once
cut open the roof of a teammate's convertible in order to piss into it.
It's no wonder Pearlman
compares the Cowboys to Aerosmith, Kiss, and The Rolling Stones all rolled into
one. Boys Will Be Boys has the classic Behind The Music structure: a group of
misfits comes from nothing, hits it big, and loses it all after success goes to
their heads. It's an old story, but as told by Pearlman, it's still incredibly
entertaining.