Cowboys Will Be Boys

EVEN BY THE SORDID OFF-FIELD standards that have come to symbolize football's Dallas Cowboys, the latest accusations were shocking. A 23-year-old woman told police that, one night after the team's opening-round playoff victory, she was raped at gunpoint by three men, including two Cowboys stars, at the North Dallas home of one of them, all-pro tackle Erik Williams. The woman, who has done some makeup work for the team's cheerleaders, said that Williams and another man raped her while superstar receiver Michael Irvin held a gun on her. And, she said, the incident was videotaped. Police, besieged by media inquiries about the allegations, revealed that they had searched Williams's home and confiscated a videotape containing sexual activity--and suggested that criminal charges might be imminent.

But by the end of the week, Irvin and Williams were preparing to fly off with the team for its second-round matchup with Carolina, and Dallas police were backpedaling like a defensive back. The police said that they had not interviewed--and had no current plans to interview--either player and that their inquiry might last "several days to several weeks." Williams and Irvin denied all charges, the latter with so much conviction that it would require dissembling skills equal to his football abilities. Irvin's attorney, Royce West, said that his client has an airtight alibi for the evening of the alleged attack. Williams told his lawyer Irvin hasn't visited his home in more than a year. The lineman insisted that he, too, has been "falsely accused." "I'm not a bad person. I realize the responsibilities and privileges that it takes to be a Dallas Cowboy," he says. "I'm looking forward to the truth coming out as soon as possible."

Whatever the truth of the accusations, what rang hollow in Williams's remarks was his sanctimony about what it means to be a Cowboy. Only an NFL flack would still call the Cowboys "America's Team"; from anyone else, it would be thought a slur on a great nation. Even before these accusation, the team led the league--indeed all leagues--in scandals; of the last 13 NFL players suspended for drug violations, seven have played for Dallas.

Both Irvin, 30, and Williams, 28, have had prior run-ins with the law. Williams's two-year probation from a drunken-driving charge recently expired. And in April of 1995, a 17-year-old topless dancer accused the 324-pound tackle of sexually assaulting her at his home; she settled with Williams out of court, and he was not indicted. Irvin is currently serving four years' probation on drug charges to which he pleaded no contest after he was found last March partying in a hotel room with a former teammate--and a couple of local dancers. The judge warned him that a revocation of probation would mean "you're looking at 20 years in the penitentiary."

The Dallas Cowboys have always been a wild and woolly bunch, the beneficiaries of a local culture that deifies its football heroes like no place else in the country. What has changed is that nobody in the organization, not owner Jerry Jones or coach Barry Switzer, seems willing to take responsibility for--or to do anything about--the team's disgrace, as long as it keeps winning. Tom Landry, who coached the Cowboys for its first 29 years, before Jones purchased the team, told NBC News that, while players deserve second chances to straighten out, "if they don't, then we have to get rid of them. The owner or the coach--they have the responsibility of developing the character of a football team."

By current scandal standards, both police comments and press speculation about the Irvin and Williams allegations have been relatively restrained. Irvin says that he is anxious to see if reporters "rewrite, reprint, rerun all these things about what happened Sunday night when you find out I wasn't even at Erik's house." But regardless of what really happened that evening at Williams's home, there is clearly a backlash against today's overpaid and overpampered athletes. The public seems eager to believe the worst about them. O. J. Simpson's case seems to have represented a turning point. "Obviously there is and always has been a huge problem with the way men in this country treat women," says Richard Lapchick, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society. "But it was the O. J. Simpson case that crystallized it and brought the issue to public scrutiny."