Michael Irvin is a pretty emotional guy, as we’ve come to find out over the years.
But when he started playing for the Cowboys in the late 1980s, he spent a lot of his time—crying?
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Irvin told DallasNews.com that after going from a winning program at Miami, coming to the downtrodden Cowboys was a culture shock.
“Dog, I was crying for real,” Irvin said of his rookie season in 1988. “I’m not talking about pouting, I’m talking about tears falling out of my eyes crying because I wasn’t used to it.”
The team went 3-13 that season. And things got even worse the next year.
“And then we drafted Troy Aikman, and I just thought, ‘OK now I got who I need. I got it, I got a quarterback.’ And I cried 15 games the next year. We were 1-15 that year. I was like, ‘wow this is incredible.’ I went from losing maybe two games my whole college career to losing every game I played in the pros. So it was a hard, hard turn.”
It was only after the Cowboys drafted a running back from Irvin’s college rival Florida that his crying days were over.
“And then we got Emmitt, and you could see that we were getting the nucleus of something and continuing to add pieces and making works. And it worked out well.”
After winning three Super Bowls in four years, those tears of frustration became tears of joy for the 2007 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee.