Long before Skip Bayless bloviated on ESPN, he worked at the Dallas Morning News and for a time was the feature sports columnist there. In the early ’90s, he parlayed his work as a print journalist into a series of books on those wild Dallas Cowboys teams. In the third book, Hell-Bent: The Crazy Truth About the “Win or Else” Dallas Cowboys, Bayless addressed a rumor about Troy Aikman’s sexuality. In short, he said there were people in the Cowboys organization that believed Aikman was gay.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch, Aikman addressed that wild accusation.
Deitsch: There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, and people who read this column know very well how I feel professionally about Skip Bayless. In a book on the Cowboys in the 1990s, Bayless had a unsubstantiated claim that you were gay. Over the years you have generally not responded to this but I did read in the Dallas Morning News a couple of years ago that you said, and I quote: “I’ve not physically seen Skip Bayless since that time. That was in ’95. And I still kind of wonder what I might do to him when I do see him.” How much anger today do you feel about what was written in that book?
Aikman: I’m upset about it because it was made up and there was nothing accurate about anything that was insinuated. And he did it, as he does everything, just for attention. I am probably more upset because I probably should have responded to it at the time it was going on. The advice to me was “Hey, just don’t address it. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s ridiculous. All it’s going to do is have people continue to talk about his book.” So I didn’t. But I probably could have responded differently and maybe that would have changed things. Maybe it wouldn’t have. But it is ridiculous, and, yeah, it bothers me. If that is a lifestyle people choose, so be it. It doesn’t affect me one way or another. But it is not my lifestyle.
Yes, Skip Bayless questioned someone’s sexuality, profited from it, and somehow still has a job 25 years later. Why? Seriously, why?
