By Zak Keefer
Troy Aikman, the “Monday Night Football” analyst and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, had just finished a raucous sales rally for Eight, the beer company he founded in 2022, and now he was manning the tap.
“How about that pour?” Aikman said, serving one up.
He knew he did not have to be here, playing celebrity bartender, posing for photos, signing autographs and telling stories. He was going to be calling an NFL preseason game in Canton, Ohio, in a few days and had a trip to New York to celebrate his daughter’s birthday before that. A video message would have sufficed.
But that would have been too easy. He hates easy.
Kenneth Aikman had his son shingling the roof at 12 and clocking in for his first job at 13. “He treated me as a man from the time I was 6,” Troy Aikman said.
In high school, he spent his Friday nights on the football field and his Saturday mornings installing tires and changing out dead batteries at the Western Auto down the road. A lesson he learned then is printed on every can of his beer now: no shortcuts.
Without that wiring, there are no Super Bowls, no 23-year broadcasting career, no successful business ventures. On paper, his was the archetypal American success story, the country boy who made good because he was raised right. GQ once put him on the cover above the headline, “God’s Quarterback.”
Now, Aikman is 57. He has not taken a warm shower in years. He starts each morning with a cold one and a 20-minute walk in low-level sunlight to set his circadian rhythm. He is in bed by 9 p.m. unless he is calling a game.
He tracks his sleep. He reads about biohacking. He took up yoga this spring, and for the first three months it absolutely wrecked him. “Hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. Class would finish and he would just lie there, soaked in sweat, unable to move. The quarterback who once finished a game as a rookie after being knocked out cold could not muster the strength to stand.
He has come to love it. “I feel like I can do everything I did when I was in my 30s,” he said.
Even play in an NFL game?
“If I had to, yeah,” he said.
The work is what always separated him. He did not have Dan Marino’s arm or Steve Young’s improvisation. But the work never scared him.
“I’ve always felt that my success as an athlete, and as a broadcaster, is not because I’m the most talented guy in the room,” Aikman said. “It’s because I’m willing to do what most people are not.”
He is also willing to say what others will not. It is why Aikman remains one of the top television analysts: He not only prepares as though he is still playing, but he is blunt when others tend to back away, unafraid to call it the way he sees it. He is at his best when he says what the fans at home are thinking.
“Troy might be the most honest guy ever,” said Norv Turner, his former offensive coordinator in Dallas.
The routine never changes. After the game ends on a Monday night, he will take notes while he watches a replay on his private jet home. Then he starts preparing for the next week first thing on Tuesday. He designed his own spotting boards before his first year in the booth, in 2001, and he has been using them ever since. He prints them out on Thursdays, color codes them, and then adds notes until kickoff.
“It took me about a week of us working together to realize why the guy had won three Super Bowls,” said Joe Buck, his on-air partner and close friend. The pair is the longest-tenured broadcast team in NFL history. Their 23rd season together began last week with the New York Jets-San Francisco 49ers game and continued Monday night with the Atlanta Falcons at the Philadelphia Eagles.
Most people remember the trophies, but Aikman remembers how much the beginning of his NFL career humbled him and how much the end hurt. He was 0-11 as a rookie.
But then he became the first quarterback to win three Super Bowls in four seasons, and his story was irresistibly American: the son of a rancher from Oklahoma, the No. 1 pick with the icy demeanor who would stand in the pocket, take the hit and fire it on the money. But the team’s owner, Jerry Jones, once said fans would write him letters, asking why his quarterback did not have more fun on the field.
By the time the Cowboys won their third title, in January 1996, Aikman knew they were slipping. “Hanging on by a thread,” said Daryl Johnston, Aikman’s teammate for 11 seasons in Dallas.
By 2000, Aikman’s last year in Dallas, he was taking painkilling shots before every game. The Cowboys were 5-11. He decided midway through the season he would never play for them again. It was not the back issues or the concussions. He was disgusted at what America’s Team had become.
What still irritates him is that it was not the 49ers or the Green Bay Packers that dethroned them. The NFL’s team of the 1990s sabotaged itself.
“Not one time did you ever read Michael Irvin complaining that he wasn’t getting enough credit, or Emmitt Smith complaining he wasn’t getting enough credit, or me complaining I wasn’t getting enough credit,” Aikman said. “Every player on those teams did what we had to do to win. And yet the two guys who led the organization couldn’t do it.”
Turner put it this way: “Deep down, Troy thinks they could’ve won a couple more.”
Broadcasting scratched an itch for Aikman, but he slowly learned the void would never again be filled. “You know the thing about this business that kills me?” he told Buck in their first year together. “There’s no scoreboard.”
He poured himself into other pursuits. A restaurant. A car dealership. For a time, he was an owner of the San Diego Padres, and then a NASCAR team. He moved on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. It was all he knew to do. Standing still scared him.
“There have been times when I’m like, ‘Bro, just chill, you don’t have to chase all this stuff,’” Buck said. “But any idea of him just drifting into a peaceful retirement, sitting on a beach somewhere, that’s just the furthest thing from his mind.”
Years passed. The more Aikman ran from contentment, the more it robbed him of his own happiness. His first marriage fell apart. Then his second. So he went to work on himself, trying to balance something that took years for him to accept: The traits that made him a Hall of Famer were the same ones keeping him from life’s simple joys.
He started meditating daily. He learned he could skip one workout a week and not beat himself up over it. He realized that everyone did not think like a quarterback and that being content was not a sign of weakness.
“It’s taken decades,” Aikman said. “Not to get weird on you, but it’s taken a lot of personal work, finding it within myself to give myself grace. There was a lot of, ‘Why do I feel this way?’”
Back at the beer distributor in Dallas, Aikman finished bartending and slipped out the back. His plane was waiting for him. After a busy summer traveling and promoting Eight, he was eager to get back to the rhythms of a football season. He has learned to enjoy it more than he did in the past.
More than that, he has learned he is allowed to enjoy it.
“I’ve found contentment, if you can believe it,” Aikman said. “And it’s a really good feeling.”
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