The more things change, the more that they remain the same.
There, of course, was the White House where Irvin and other Cowboys players could bring women. The time Irvin spouted off at TV cameras, saying “the media can’t control my mouth” after being questioned by reporters following his emotional speech crediting Switzer after the Cowboys beat the Packers in the NFC Championship that just so happened to involve some swearing. What about the time he attacked guard Everett McIver with scissors over a haircut? Or the limo, according to Jeff Pearlman in his book Boys Will Be Boys, that Irvin rented before Super Bowl XXX so he could have a rolling, constant party.
Via Pearlman:Irvin enthusiastically endorsed the port-a-skank concept and, in fact, rented his own 10-passenger, 30-foot monstrosity customized with a black leather-and-brushed crome interior (and equipped with a bounty of Absolut Vodka and hip-hop CDs). What baffled some about Irvin’s ways was that his wife Sandy was intelligent, loving, an excellent mother to the couple’s two daughters-and drop-dead gorgeous. “She’s the most beautiful black woman I’ve ever seen with my eyes,” says Kenny Gant, the former Cowboy defensive back. “I’ve loved her to death since the first time I met her.” Yet Irvin-who sported a large gold cross around his neck-never thought twice about professing his devotion toward his family one minute, then jumping into the hot-tub with two coked-up strippers the next. Why, on the evening before the Cowboys departed for Tempe, Irvin had partied with a pair of prostitutes at the Irving Residence Inn.
Not to mention the 1996 drug trial following Irvin’s 30th birthday party with two topless dancers in which police seized 10 grams of cocaine and more than an ounce of weed along with sex toys that earned Irvin a five-game suspension and kept him from another 1,000-yard season. And in Irvin fashion, he arrived to the trial the way everyone probably expected him to.
Via Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly from Sept. 1996:It was Irvin’s full-length mink coat, which he wore along with a diamond stud earring for his grand jury appearance last spring, that let everybody know this wasn’t just a simple drug possession case; it was going to resemble a Las Vegas floor show. Courtroom employees oohed and ahhed at Irvin and the coat. One woman asked him to autograph her Bible. Irvin, who calls himself the Playmaker and parks his black Mercedes in the no-parking zone at the Cowboys’ training facility, basked in the attention. He considered himself untouchable—and why shouldn’t he?
This is the same 1996 drug trial that ultimately uncovered details of a Dallas policeman who had been hired to kill Irvin after Irvin allegedly threatened the policeman’s wife. (The officer was later arrested and charged.)