Troy Aikman

And yet, despite his sense of kinship with Aikman, Irvin rarely ribs him about women or about the quarterback's status as the game's latest, greatest heartthrob. Here is a situation that requires sensitivity. One day Cosmopolitan magazine calls to quiz Aikman about his love life, the next day a national newspaper does the same. Aikman entertains the queries with a mixture of curiosity and exasperation, wondering how his image ever came to this.

Back in the old days when Namath played for the New York Jets, he would cruise Manhattan nightspots looking for women to pick up. Aikman lacks Namath's nose for the hunt, and, if anything, his money has made him that much more careful about his evenings out. He says that when he goes out, it's with the same three or four women--"friends, nothing serious." And though published reports have linked him romantically to any number of starlets, he says he hasn't even met most of them.

"In the last few years Troy's become so big, he's almost like a prisoner," says former Cowboys quarterback Babe Laufenberg, a close friend of Aikman's. "People get weird when they see him. And every time you go out with him, something totally unexpected happens. Every time. So you end up going back to his house and watching TV. That's your big night out with Troy."

"They used to just say his name," says Rich Dalrymple, director of public relations for the Cowboys. "They'd shout, 'Hey, Troy; hey, Troy!' And some might have their I LOVE YOU TROY signs. But now they're doing things I'd never seen before. We were in San Diego on Oct. 15, and as we were walking into the stadium, there were some girls who started jumping up and down and screaming and crying. It was like they'd seen a rock star. Elvis."

Before everything changed for him, Aikman used to drop by Little League ball fields and watch the kids play. He liked being out in the air and witnessing the drama. But he stopped once the mobs started finding him. For the same reason, he can't waste an afternoon shopping at the mall. Now when he wants to pick up some new clothes, he arranges for a local department store to open up after business hours. That way he can browse the aisles without fear of attack by hysterical autograph hounds and by women who want to introduce him to their daughters. When he does venture out on the town, it's usually with an off-duty cop dressed in plain clothes.

Aikman is as visible a player as there is in the game right now. Last season he wrote an autobiographical children's book, Things Change, which sold an astounding 200,000 copies. Aikman's has graced the cover of GQ. He has appeared on Letterman and Leno and on Regis and Kathie Lee. He was a presenter at the Country Music Awards in 1993 and ESPN's Espy Awards in '94. He played himself on the TV sitcom Coach. He did Oprah, too.

"Yeah," he says, " Oprah. I was told it was going to be myself and a couple of other athletes and some soap-opera girls. We were going to talk about the parallels in our careers. Not until I got on the set did they inform us that we were playing the Dating Game. It was one of those matchmaking things. I wasn't happy."

AIKMAN'S BACKGROUND doesn't suggest that he was fated for such peculiar problems. Although he spent his early childhood in Southern California, where anything is possible and perhaps expected, his formative years belong to Henryetta, Okla., a town of about 6,500 people off I-40 in the eastern part of the state. Troy was 12 when his family moved to a 172-acre parcel of land near Henryetta to fulfill his father's dream of operating a ranch. Before then Kenneth Aikman had worked as a construction foreman, putting in water and gas lines--"pipelinin'," the occupation is called. In California, Troy had dreamed of playing pro baseball. He had practiced signing his autograph, imagining lines of fans desperate to get it. But all that stopped when he got to Henryetta. "We ended up seven miles out of town on dirt roads that were too rough to ride your bike on," he says. "It was tough. Even at that age I could see my athletic career falling apart."

In the mornings before school Troy fed slop to the pigs. In the summer he hauled hay in the fields, often late into the night. His best class was typing, and there he had no peer. One year he won a typing contest, producing 75 words a minute. He was a good player on a mediocre football team--the Henryetta Fighting Hens, they were then called. (Now they're the Knights.) Nonetheless, Troy was eager for fame to find him. By the time he was a junior, folks in Oklahoma recognized his name as belonging to the tall string bean of a kid with the amazing right arm. In 1984 the University of Oklahoma invited Troy to a summer football camp, and though the wishbone had long been the Sooners' offense of choice, a passing talent like Aikman's was too special for the coach-- Barry Switzer--to ignore.

"I remember an assistant comes to me and says he has this quarterback he wants me to meet," says Switzer. "I asked him, 'Is he black?' He answered, 'No, Barry, he's white. But he can run the option. He's got 4.6 speed, and he's got an arm.' I remember the first time I ever saw Troy. I walked out on the practice field, and he was standing facing south, his back to the scoreboard. I started walking toward him, and somebody threw him a football, and I stopped and watched him. He threw the ball back, and I said to myself, This kid is different. I watched him throw it five or six times, and then I said it again: Yeah, he's different. I offered him a scholarship on the spot, which I don't remember ever having done before with a quarterback. But then I'd never seen a kid who could throw the ball like he could. His arm was as good when he was 16 or 17 as it is now."