America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys follows the ’90s Dallas football dynasty through their highest highs and lowest lows. One of the most iconic teams in the history of sports is on full display in the retrospective sports series, featuring never-before-seen footage and interviews with legendary figures including Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Deion Sanders.
From Super Bowls to spicy separations to scandals, the conversations are largely unfiltered — but there is one topic that nobody seems willing to discuss. A subject that makes even the former athletes with big personalities who made careers of throwing caution to the wind wary: the White House.
In Episode 5, several athletes decline to speak on the subject. Maclain Way, who co-directed the series with his brother, Chapman, tells Tudum that there were challenges in getting players to speak on the famous dwelling.
“We quickly learned, these guys don’t want to go anywhere near [The White House]. We brought that up to Michael [Irvin] in the interview and his answer was, ‘Dude, I was the president of the White House,’ and then he just dove in and was funny and charming and hilarious about this pretty wild story.”
And what was the White House, exactly?
The White House was an Irving, Texas home located near the Cowboys’ practice facility in Valley Ranch. Maclain describes it as “a party house that follows the ’90s Cowboys mythic lore.” In Irvin’s own words, the house was “a safe place for camaraderie,” adding that it had “five rooms and whatever you liked, you could mingle with your like.”
The “likes” seemed to be a variety of drugs and women. As Irvin explains in the series, “In that room you may be smoking weed, in this room they may be doing [ecstasy], coke, whatever. [There’s] a group of girls in each room, and you just kind of bounce from room to room.”
The house was used in lieu of hotels, as the larger-than-life Cowboys, accustomed to playing under bright lights and living under big microscopes, sought a private space to indulge in some Texas-sized vices.
Chapman Way describes working with Irvin as a “very unique experience … I think the most fun we had interviewing was with [him]. He had us just dying from laughter a handful of times. There were a few takes that we ruined behind the camera from laughing so hard. Then, minutes later, he’d have you crying with some really profound, insightful story. The way that he was able to captivate was unique from a filmmaking perspective.”
America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys is streaming on Netflix now.
