By Brad Townsend, The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS — As a kid in the early ’70s, Troy Aikman was captivated by a phenomenon called “Monday Night Football,” especially — an omen? — one of its color commentators.
Aikman’s mother, Charlyn, adored Don Meredith. Therefore so did Troy, although all he knew about witty, irreverent Meredith was that he’d apparently been a Dallas Cowboys quarterback.
Sharing that remembrance a half-century later, Aikman chuckles.
“I think that’s probably how a lot of this younger generation now views me.”
Perhaps that’s true in some crevices of NFL fandom, but not the 20 million-plus viewers of this past Monday night’s Cowboys-Arizona Cardinals game in AT&T Stadium, with “MNF” analysts Aikman and Joe Buck in the broadcast booth.
Aikman, believe it or not, turns 59 this month, but Cowboys lovers-haters alike understand his permanence in franchise lore. Three Super Bowl titles. MVP of Super Bowl XXVII. Pro Football Hall of Famer.
All are a testament to his natural drive, meticulous preparation and unwavering focus — as are a pair of prodigious post-playing-career statistics that might surprise you.
Seasons as an NFL TV analyst: 25.
Seasons paired with Buck: 24. That is the most by any NFL TV broadcast duo, surpassing the 21-year run of Pat Summerall and John Madden (1981-2002).
Perspective: Aikman’s longevity as a high-profile broadcaster has more than doubled his 12-season run as Cowboys quarterback (1989-2000).
“I thought I’d do it for a couple of years, until I figured out what I wanted to do with myself,” he said. “I guess I haven’t figured that out yet.”
If you’ve even loosely followed Aikman’s life, you know he’d done plenty. He said that as his playing career neared its end, he figured he’d venture into the business world or perhaps an NFL front office.
A quarter-century later, he’s not only carved a broadcasting career he hadn’t fathomed — one that reportedly pays him $18 million annually — but done just about everything else.
Normally he commutes to and from “MNF” assignments by private jet, but this past Monday he drove from his Dallas home to Arlington.
AT&T Stadium is walking distance to Texas Live! and Aikman’s restaurant, Troy’s, which naturally features his Eight Elite Lager.
Turns out Aikman not only followed Meredith’s 1960s path as the Cowboys’ original glamor quarterback and into the broadcast booth, but also as a product pitchman.
Of course Dandy Don’s Lipton commercials contradicted his booth activities with Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford from 1970-73 and 1977-84, as detailed in the 1988 book “Monday Night Mayhem,” which Aikman said he read with fascination after he and Buck moved from Fox to ESPN in 2022.
“Times have changed,” Aikman said. “We were talking about that group before a recent game. There was a little alcohol being served up in the booth back in the day.
“Which sometimes I think, ‘Gosh, if it was like in the ‘70s, I’d be able to drink my beer up there and nobody would think anything of it.”
For older Cowboys fans who recall Aikman’s team-sanctum-guarding persona as a player, it’s been refreshing to see and hear glimpses of Genuine Troy these past 25 years.
No, he’s not folksy like Meredith, but he’s sharp-witted, authentic and, when necessary, blunt. The Aikman-Buck rapport has seemed organic since their first season together at Fox in 2002.
If anything their friendship that’s deepened through the years has made their harmony all the more conversational, in the booth as well.
When The News reached out to ask about Aikman, Buck immediately responded because “We’re talking about my favorite topic.
“If I joke with him, he knows it’s done in a way to make the broadcast better,” Buck said. “We can laugh at each other. We can laugh with each other. We can laugh at ourselves. I think that’s kind of the secret sauce.
“Every once in a while we’ll have a light moment where I can get him laughing. Whenever I can get Troy laughing, it’s been a win.”
‘He refuses to fail’
With apologies to Aikman and Buck, they were not the only elite, must-listen duo broadcasting Cowboys-Cardinals. Or the longest tenured.
Officially, Brad Sham and Babe Laufenberg have been paired as the Cowboys’ radio voices since 1998, although their stints predate that.
Sham’s first Cowboys radio role came in 1976. He not only covered Aikman’s career, but co-hosted his weekly radio show. Former NFL quarterback Laufenberg was Aikman’s teammate in 1989-90 and they have been close ever since.
For Laufenberg and Sham, a benefit of Aikman’s move to “MNF” is they now get to watch most of his broadcasts, except for nights like Cowboys-Cardinals.
“I know how hard he studies and watches games,” Laufenberg said. “Well, you’re doing this story, right? Here we are, 25 years later, and I will guarantee you he’s working just as hard for this [past] Monday night game as when he was trying to make his way in the broadcasting world.
“Which is somewhat unique, I would say.”
How unique?
“He refuses to fail,” Laufenberg said. “He’s meticulous in everything in his life. When I talk to kids, I always say the number one thing is preparation, and no one is more prepared than Troy is to do his job.
“If you had him on a garbage truck, there would be nobody more prepared on that garbage truck than Troy.”
Aikman said his preparation consists of many hours of film work and very little reading. He prefers to draw conclusions about teams and players by what he sees.
Sham said Aikman within his first months of broadcasting mastered an art that takes many others years, if ever, to figure out: The ability to make his point clearly and concisely, between plays.
As a former quarterback himself, Laufenberg understands the tightrope that Aikman walks while critiquing decisions and throws of current quarterbacks, in real time.
Laufenberg said he always tells young broadcasters that the easiest places from which to analyze quarterbacks are from your living room couch and from 200 feet high in a broadcast booth.
On the field, Aikman often made quarterbacking seem effortless when it’s anything but.
“It was easier for him than it [is] for 99% of guys, like me,” Laufenberg said. “What I appreciate is he still knows how hard it is, so he never goes to ‘That’s the worst throw I’ve seen in the history of football.’
“He understands and appreciates that it’s not as easy as the fan watching at home thinks.”
Sham said the Aikman that fans see on TV is the “winning personality” Aikman he’s long known. Sham compares the public perception of Aikman in the ‘90s to the supposed “stiff and emotionless” Tom Landry that fans saw of the iconic Cowboys coach on the sidelines.
“That’s who people thought they were,” Sham said. “No, that’s an aspect, their professional persona, not who they are.
“For those of us who know Troy, there was no doubt. “I’m so not surprised by his success. It might have been the most predictable thing I’ve ever seen in my working life.
“And I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s such a good person. And if he’s your friend, you don’t have a better friend.”
‘We’ve got to hire him’
Take, for example, the backstory of how Aikman got into broadcasting.
The way Aikman always tells it, including recently to The News, Sham largely was responsible for his first broadcast, a 1998 NFL Europe game in Berlin that they called together.
While that’s factually true, Sham said Aikman always leaves out this part: “He did that first trip for two reasons: To have a great weekend on someone else’s nickel and because he wanted to help me, not the other way around.”
The way Sham told it, the Cowboys were returning from a late-season East Coast game. Sham knew Cowboys long snapper Dale Hellestrae was scheduled to broadcast NFL Europe games that summer, so he went to Hellestrae’s row on the team plane to express interest in doing likewise.
Aikman was seated next to Hellestrae, reading a magazine.
“Hey, that sounds like fun. I might like to do that.”
Sham: “Great. Call Fox. If I call, nothing’s gonna happen. If you call, we’ve got a shot.”
Sure enough, Aikman and Sham were assigned the Berlin game; Aikman and Hellestrae a game in Scotland.
“The only thing I did for him,” Sham said, “was create an initial comfort zone.”
The story goes that executive producer Ed Goren was walking through Fox Sports’ control room in Hollywood when he overheard the Berlin broadcast.
“I thought Aikman was doing this game.”
“That is Aikman.”
“Oh. We’ve got to hire him.”
Until that experience, Aikman said, he could not have fathomed being able to fill a three-hour broadcast with analysis and chatter. That day he had the comfort of knowing Sham could carry the broadcast if necessary.
“But when you do the work and prepare,” Aikman said, “what you find is that you have all kinds of stuff to talk about.”
By his final season as a player, in which the Cowboys went 5-11 in 2000, Aikman knew he had a job waiting at Fox. And when Fox analyst Matt Millen left to become the Detroit Lions’ general manager, it opened a slot for Aikman on Fox’s No. 2 broadcast team, with Dick Stockton and ex-Cowboys teammate Daryl Johnston.
Even so, Aikman viewed the job as a placeholder, at most. But one year later, Summerall retired and Madden left Fox to go to “Monday Night Football.” Thus was born the Aikman-Buck team that would supplant Madden-Summerall in more ways than one.
Initially Aikman and Buck teamed with Cris Collinsworth until he left for NBC three years later.
“It’s been kind of a wild ride,” Aikman said.
An NFL front-office role?
Certainly it’s helped to have a partner the caliber of seven-time Emmy winner Buck.
Buck also forged baseball broadcast partnerships of 18 years with Tim McCarver and six seasons with John Smoltz.
“Yeah, I feel good about my long-term relationships,” Buck said. “Although I’ve been married twice, so I don’t know; I’m not a success across the board.”
Aikman notes that he and Buck, 56, are similar in age, outlooks and life experience, as “girl dads” who went through divorce at roughly the same time.
What they also have in common is dedication to craft and being team-first, an approach Buck said Aikman clearly carried from his playing days.
Their longevity was tested in 2022, when Aikman left Fox for “Monday Night Football” — hoping, but not assuming that Buck would ask to be let out of his Fox contract to join him.
“I think that was a big moment for us,” Aikman said. “He could have easily said, ‘This was great; loved working with Troy, but I want to stay at Fox.’
“He’d be working with Tom Brady right now, but instead, that was a moment to prove both of us wanted to keep working together.”
Going to “Monday Night Football” has in one sense been full circle for Aikman, from those days of growing up in Cerritos, Calif., watching MNF with his mother.
Aikman said he got to meet Don Meredith as a rookie in 1989, when Meredtih came in for Lee Roy Jordan’s Cowboys Ring of Honor ceremony.
Later in Aikman’s career, Meredith came in for a fundraiser gathering of Cowboys quarterbacks. Charlyn came and naturally was thrilled to meet Meredith in person.
“He was awesome, the way he treated her that night, made her laugh,” Aikman said.
Charlyn died in November 2022, two months after Troy’s “MNF” broadcast debut.
Aikman’s 25th broadcasting season began with little fanfare, perhaps because he and Buck have become such a staple that it’s hard to imagine a time when they won’t be a tandem, or when Aikman won’t be on TV.
Or that he mostly would disappear from public life, the way Meredith did after working the 1984 season’s Super Bowl.
“If I wasn’t in broadcasting, if I was just in business that had nothing to do with football, I guess I’d still watch games,” Aikman said. “I just wouldn’t watch them as intensely.
“And I wouldn’t know the players and coaches personally, so that would change how I view the games. … So this gives me a little more reason to watch, a little more purpose, a little more investment as I watch.”
But what about that other idea he had in the late 1990s, the one about joining and potentially leading an NFL front office? Aikman said it never left the back of his mind, but that he wouldn’t have considered it until the younger of his two daughters graduated from high school in 2021.
“As a single dad, I just needed to be home and with my daughters, so that would have been the time to do it,” he said. “But when that time came, not that things changed in broadcasting, but the economics of broadcasting certainly changed. And I was really enjoying my life at that time.”
Now?
“I’ve always been up for a challenge,” he said. “It’s pretty far-fetched to think I would now go into a front office, but with that being said, I think when my days are coming to an end, that will be something I’ll look back on.
“Not in regret that I didn’t do it, but always wonder what it might have looked like had I gone down that route. I think I would do really well. I feel strongly in my abilities to put together a team that can compete, to create a culture that allows people to be at their best.”
The path he chose has worked out awfully well. Certainly better than he imagined, since he’d never fathomed it, not even as a kid watching “Monday Night Football”
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