re: Why isn't Troy Aikman all f'd up with CTE?

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Aikman’s departure from the Cowboys was weird. He was actually released by the Cowboys. At the time it was commonly believed because of concussions. He was only 34yo. Aikman has since claimed he never signed with another team or played again because of his back.

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One being the fact that it wasn’t so much the physical toll (concussions, back) that lead to AIkman’s retirement at the age of 34. Instead, the Super Bowl XXVII MVP hinted that it was more due to his displeasure with the direction that the Cowboys organization was heading at the time. The second big revelation was that Aikman seriously considered coming out of retirement to play for the Miami Dolphins. “I almost…I was going to come out of retirement my third year out,” Aikman told Fox Sports announcer Thom Brennaman during the NFL Network show, A Football Life. “I got a call from [Dave] Wannstedt and he was the head coach. He was with the Dolphins when they made a run at me. He says ‘I’d like to get with you’. Norv [Turner] was the offensive coordinator. So I visited with him, he talked to me. He says ‘Do you think you could come back and play?’ I called him up…and said ‘You know what? I think I want to do it.” Says okay. ‘Well, I’m going to start training as if I’m coming back’. So I did.” Miami ultimately didn’t sign Aikman. According to a Los Angeles Times article in January of 2002, the Dolphins did indeed have interest in the former six-time Pro Bowler. Miami was two years removed from the retirement of their own Hall of Fame quarterback, Dan Marino. And they had undrafted journeyman Jay Fiedler under center.

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Was Junior Seau broke?

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Aikman has since claimed he never signed with another team or played again because of his back.

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Two days after his 50th birthday, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman pulls out of a Starbucks in an upscale shopping mall in Dallas’s Highland Park, heads towards today’s Cowboys practice, and talks about his GQ cover shoot from 1993. It was the summer after he’d won his first Super Bowl, and shortly after he suffered the back injury that helped cause him career-ending pain.

“When we were doing the shoot, I couldn’t move,” he says, “I was in back spasms. They propped me up against the wall.”

Aikman’s dressed head-to-toe in black athletic gear, his statuesque 6-foot-4 frame entirely too massive for the driver’s seat of his dark gray Range Rover. On the 23-year-old GQ cover, Aikman wears a boxy, double-breasted suit with a comically big pocket square. You can't see it looking at the photo, but Aikman was in a full sweat because of the pain, nearly 20 miles from where we are now, at the Cowboys’ old practice home in Valley Ranch.

“When I got done, I couldn’t get the clothes off because I was in such bad spasms,” says Aikman, gearing the Range towards the Dallas Cowboys’ new facility in Frisco, Texas.

Troy Aikman sat at his locker after the shoot ended, clothes still on, thinking, shite, I’m going to spend the night in here. He was the reigning Super Bowl MVP at twenty-six; he was the hero that had delivered America’s Team to their first championship in fifteen years; he was, as GQ dubbed him on its cover, “God’s Quarterback.” And he couldn’t get his pants off.

“Every time I see that cover,” Aikman says now, “I think about it.”

Two teammates came in and got him undressed. He would go on to get an MRI and discover he had a herniated disk. Surgery came days later. He’d play eight more years, the last of which would require shots to deal with the debilitating back pain. He’d win two more Super Bowls in the next three seasons. That shoot, in June of 1993, was the beginning and the end of Troy Aikman’s football career.

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His second wife. If he's gay, he's doing it wrong.

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booth with Joe Buck

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