Of all the unflinching moments in the new Netflix blockbuster, America’s Team: the Gambler and his Cowboys, one stands out more than most. It comes after the Dallas Cowboys’ former star receiver Michael Irvin is asked about the White House, the secret mansion where some players would unwind while winning three Super Bowls during the 1990s. “I was the president of the White House,” Irvin says with a cackle, his eyes lighting up. “It was a safe place for camaraderie.”
But this, it turns out, was a very different style of team building than going down the pub.
“We had five rooms and whatever you liked you were going to mingle with your like,” Irvin says. “In that room you may be smoking weed, in this room they may be doing ecstasy, coke, whatever. There’s a group of girls in each room and you just kind of bounced from room to room.”
Another player says: “We played hard, then we played hard.” A third confesses to getting locked up “two or three times” and being let loose by cops “maybe 100 times”. Then the Cowboys’ fixer appears, to explain how he would clean things up.
At this point two thoughts come to mind. This is a far grittier and, yes, better sports documentary than The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan hagiography that bewitched us during lockdown. In fact, I am not sure I have seen a more complete portrayal of the rise and fall of a sports dynasty, in all its glory and grubbiness. But also: can we have more of this, please?
Imagine a Netflix epic on Manchester United that had Sir Alex Ferguson unloading on every topic under the sun, Rio Ferdinand on his missed drugs test, and the Glazers taking you into the heart of their takeover. This is, in essence, the NFL equivalent.
Early in the documentary, we see old footage of the former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson shouting at one of his players after he collapses during a running test. “You’re on the wrong field to have asthma,” Johnson tells him, before promptly cutting him. After a defeat by Washington, Johnson refuses to let his players eat on their flight home. “Jimmy was a complete asshole,” one player says. But this tough love, combined with drafting a team of future superstars, turned the Cowboys into back-to-back Super Bowl winners. But then Johnson left after feuding with Jerry Jones, the Cowboys’ owner and general manager, over who deserved the most credit for the team’s success and the two have been fighting over their legacy almost ever since.
That dispute lies at the heart of the Gambler and his Cowboys. But it still finds fresh ways to reopen old wounds. Jones, for instance, reveals for the first time that he had cancer – a stage four melanoma that required multiple surgeries. But rather than dwell on his mortality, he then tells the story of how his doctor told him to make a list of 10 people who made his blood boil and to wish them success while meditating.
“Number one, I wrote down the name Jimmy Johnson,” Jones says. “But then I went back to my doctor: ‘I can’t get past that first motherfucker.’”
While the two men reconcile eventually, it is refreshing to hear such honesty, especially as so many sports documentaries are compromised. We all know there is usually a price to pay for access. Questions unasked. Thorny topics skirted over. But in a world where most documentaries feel as airbrushed as a Vogue cover shoot, the Gambler and his Cowboys bucks the trend.
So why is that? Why were these people willing to unburden their souls and tell stories we haven’t heard before? Part of that is the skill of the documentary makers. They ask the tough questions. And they are so diligent they even get the prosecutor and judge in the case that led to Irvin being fined $10,000 for cocaine possession to talk about it.
Want to know what it is like to be concussed? Well, the Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman explains the sensation better than anyone I have ever heard. At one point he also talks about blood coming from his ear. In another, he admits not remembering playing in an NFC Championship game. “I watched the game the next day and I played well,” he says. That is a skill, too.
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Maybe part of it is also an age and generation thing. Johnson and Jones are 82. They won’t be around for that much longer. The players also come from a time when media training wasn’t designed to strangle their personalities.
It was also just a very different era. The Hall of Fame star Charles Haley, for instance, joined Dallas from the San Francisco 49ers after reportedly walking into the 49ers general manager’s office, pulling out his penis, urinating on his desk and said: “This is how bad I want out of here.” Players don’t do things like that any more.
Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to watch something as unvarnished and raw about some of the great British teams? The Liverpool side of the 70s and 80s, perhaps, as well as United in the 90s? There is surely a great documentary also on the rise and fall of England’s Rugby World Cup winners, including the horrific concussion stories and the tabloid tales of dwarf-throwing contests?
Certainly the Cowboy and his Gamblers lays down the template. Towards the end of it, Irvin talks about being left temporarily paralysed after hitting his neck on the ground and calling his wife from the ambulance to tell her. It leads to him having to retire. Yet he also admits that such was his bond with his teammates that, if Cowboys were still in their prime, he would have risked coming back.
“We are all imperfect people,” Irvin says, with a sagacity of someone who has been there and done it all. “And each of us has at least two of us in all of us. That person you show everybody. And that person that you never show anybody.” The trick this documentary pulls off is to reveal those deeper truths.
