Free Boys Will Be Boys by Jeff Pearlman

to guide the world’s most famous football team as Mindy Cohn was to win an Oscar. Raised in the Southern California town of Cerritos, Troy was an ordinary baby until, at eight months, his parents struggled to slide shoes over his feet. Initially unalarmed, Ken and Charlyn Aikman began to fret when their son’s legs bowed below his knees and his toes curled under his feet. The diagnosis was clubfoot.
    For the succeeding five months Troy wore casts on his feet, until, shortly after his first birthday, they were replaced by special shoes—white high-tops with the toes jutting out at exaggerated angles. Troy kept the shoes on at all hours, and had his heels strapped together at night.
    Though he overcame the condition to become one of the town’s best schoolboy jocks, Troy was a sensitive kid who suffered through nightmares and depression. At age ten his grandfather died, and Troy started to obsess over death. The worries kept him up late into the night—a common fear for adults in their sixties and seventies, but unusual for a child tearing up Little League. Twelve-year-old Troy’s unease was hardly helped when his father announced that, following his dream of operating a ranch, the family would be relocating to Henryetta, Oklahoma.
    Home to 6,500 people, a nine-hole golf course, two lakes, and one of the state’s better Labor Day carnivals, Henryetta was famous across the nation for, well, absolutely nothing. Not only was the Aikman clan (Troy, his parents, and his two older sisters) relocating to the middle of nowhere, but they would be living in a trailer until their house was constructed. The ranch the family resided on stretched over 172 acres. Everything smelled like manure. Troy’s morning job was to feed the pigs.
    Seriously. He fed the pigs.
    “We ended up seven miles out of town on dirt roads that were too rough to ride your bike on,” Aikman said. “It was tough. Even at that age I could see my athletic career falling apart.”
    Like countless boys growing up outside of Los Angeles, Troy had envisioned himself one day starting at shortstop for legendary University of Southern California baseball coach Rod Dedeaux.
    How was he supposed to get to USC now, languishing in the troughs of far-off Henryetta?
     
    We all have moments when life swerves. You choose to take the elevator and meet your future wife. You duck into a bathroom stall, look down, and find a wallet stuffed with $100 bills. You get hit by a bus crossing the street.
    For Troy Aikman the moment came at age thirteen, when his father asked whether he was thinking of signing up for junior high school football.
    “He was a tough old country boy who loved football,” Aikman wrote of his father in his book, Things Change. “He liked the roughness of it. I knew what he wanted, so I signed up. If he hadn’t asked, I might never have played. I never rebelled against my father. Never.”
    Back in California, Aikman’s prodigious arm had made him an obvious peewee-league quarterback. Upon coming to Oklahoma, however, he decided to keep quiet and see if coaches would assign him to a less pivotal position. Young Troy cherished sports, but shied away from the attention accompanying them. Hence, Troy Aikman began his junior high gridiron career as a burly fullback–tight end who bruised easily and loathed excessive contact.
    He returned to quarterbacking as a freshman at Henryetta High School, and as a sophomore won the starting job for the Fighting Hens. In his first varsity game, Aikman led a stirring come-from-behind win over archrival Checotah High. A star was in the making.
    Yet in his three years as the varsity stud, Aikman never adopted the persona. He was a soft-spoken kid on a ranch who worked Saturdays in a store called Western Auto, drove around in his pickup truck, and liked a pinch of Skoal between his lower lip and his gum. If Aikman was driven by one thing, it was not football glory, but that ever-present ticking clock. When would he die?