He Adds Perfect Touch

I can’t believe No. 8 on the Dallas Cowboys is a real person. It’s too perfect.

Look at him: Straight, even white teeth, neatly trimmed blond hair and the level, steady blue-eyed gaze of a lawman on the trail of a varmint in the old West. This guy isn’t for real, right? He is Frank Merriwell. Or Hollywood invented him. This is the most perfect casting since Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Maybe this is Tom Cruise under the helmet and pads.

Troy Aikman as Super Bowl quarterback would get the approval of every film director in town. He has hero written all over him. His name should be Frank Faultless or Dick Dauntless. Or maybe Lancelot or Galahad.

Troy Aikman ain’t bad.

He just reeks of the Right Stuff. You figure if he weren’t a quarterback, he would be an astronaut. In ancient times, he’d be a member of the Knights of the Round Table.

There is not a frivolous thing about him. He is as serious as a surgeon. He has a nice smile, but he doesn’t use it much. He looks like a guy who knows the world is a dangerous place. You never know when a blitz is coming. He wants to be ready.

He is the kind of guy you would want next to you in a foxhole. You can’t tell by looking at him whether he is ahead by 10 or behind by 20. Or whether he’s got four aces--or a busted flush. You get that same unafraid, unrevealing stare. He makes the Sphinx look emotional. You would hate to play poker with him.

He is not too much fun to play football with. He almost looks bored. But then you expect him to lay down a hand and say, “Are these any good?” and you want to kill him.

If the Dallas Cowboys win the Super Bowl today--and if you don’t think so, you get six points--he will be the guy who looks as if he is trying to remember where he left his keys. Don’t look for any end zone dances or sideline shimmies. Look for Aikman. It’s only a game, isn’t it?

He is 6 feet 4, 220 pounds, the All-American boy, a walking bubble-gum card. He is the NFL’s cover boy. That’s why it is hard to believe he exists and isn’t a product of the sound stages or a lab. You want to say, “Take this back and break a nose. At least, put a scar on the cheek.” Girls throw their unmentionables at him, but he remains a bachelor. Anyone else in his position would be working on his third marriage by now. He goes to church on Sunday in the off-season and apologizes because he can’t during the season. He is the second coming of Roger Staubach, and if that’s so, there might be four more Super Bowls in his resume. He will never be known as “Broadway Troy” or “the Snake” or “Hollywood.” Maybe, “Troy Terrific.”

But if he only looked the part, he would be merely another pretty face throwing interceptions. Aikman has a chance to go down in history as the best at the position for the Dallas Cowboys since Staubach, who was too good to be true, too.

Aikman is not the only reason the Dallas Cowboys are in the Super Bowl, but he is a main one.

His counterpart today is almost an exact opposite. Jim Kelly smiles all the time, exudes a kind of perpetual Irish charm, is as emotional as the second act of “Carmen,” wears his heart on his sleeve and is as convivial as a bartender. Kelly will dance a jig if he wins and probably sing until dawn. The grape will flow. Aikman might celebrate with a pizza-with-everything. And a beer.

Aikman is only now coming into his own. Kelly has been there for some time. If experience is to decide the issue, the outcome should result in the singing of “Kay-ee-double-ell-why!”

But there is something chilling to Aikman’s approach, which reminds you of nothing so much as a guy stalking a bear. There’s a relentless air about his play. Like him, it’s not splashy, simply effective. Ask the San Francisco 49ers. Some think that was the Super Bowl.

He didn’t even intend to be a career quarterback. He meant to be a surgeon. He played football to get to medical school. It didn’t work. “The time constraints to playing football made getting into the medical field impossible,” he says. “The practices, the meetings were too time-consuming. I had to go into something more manageable--management systems first, later sociology.”

Medicine might have lost as good a prospect as football gained. The football version of Dr. Aikman conducts his game plans with operating-table precision.

He might never have been the Cowboys’ quarterback at all if then-Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer, of all people, had not had a burst of humanitarianism. Aikman, although born in Southern California, was raised in Henryetta, Okla., and recruited by Switzer for his Sooners.

Switzer soon perceived that Aikman, a pure passer, chafed under the restraints of his wishbone system, which put a premium on running. Passing was an afterthought in the wishbone. Magnanimously, Switzer put in a call to UCLA Coach Terry Donahue. Donahue, with his pro pass set, was overjoyed to get this superb technician to run it. Aikman migrated West.

He never made a Rose Bowl, which frustrates him some to this day. But he was good enough--the third-rated passer in NCAA history with more than 5,000 yards and 41 touchdowns in two years--to be the No. 1 pick in the draft.

If he had remained at Oklahoma? Aikman shrugs and says: “There’s no doubt (my career) would have turned out drastically different. I would have been a free agent rather than a No. 1 draft choice. But I think I would have caught on somewhere.”

Maybe so. But most likely, he would not have been handed the football as quickly as he was at Dallas.

On the other hand, maybe he would have. There’s something about Aikman that inspires great trust. You imagine Sergeant York looked like this. He looks as if he is about to clean out Dodge City. If I were Buffalo, I’d try to draw first.