Troy Aikman

He was born Troy Kenneth Aikman in West Covina, California, on November 21, 1966. The youngest of the three children of Ken and Charlyn Aikman, he grew up in Cerritos, a suburb of Los Angeles. Because of congenital problems with his feet, he was forced to wear casts up to his knees until he was fourteen months old. His foot problems as an infant, however, did nothing to slow Aikman's development as an athlete. As a boy, he was most interested in baseball. When Troy was twelve, the Aikmans moved to a farm near Henryetta, Oklahoma, and he soon found himself focusing less on baseball and more on football, which was particularly popular in the Sooner State. Aikman quarterbacked his Henryetta High School football team, as a junior leading the Fighting Hens to their first state playoffs in thirty years and to a 6-4 record in his senior year. Although Henryetta never became a football power during his years there, Aikman managed to earn all-state honors his senior year, and word filtered out about his brilliance on the gridiron. As a result, he was heavily recruited by some of the top colleges in the country. Impressed by its football coach, Barry Switzer, Aikman finally decided on the University of Oklahoma.

As impressed as he had been with Switzer as a person, Aikman found that the Oklahoma coach's strategy made little use of his quarterbacking skills. He soon realized that Switzer didn't plan to alter his offensive strategy to accommodate him. Aikman later told Sports Illustrated: "He changed… [the offense] a little bit, but the only real difference when I played was that we threw the ball 12 times a game instead of seven." A crushing lost to archrival Kansas further eroded Aikman's confidence. After a disappointing freshman season, Aikman returned for his sophomore year and led the Sooners to victory in their first three games of the season, only to have his ankle broken in the team's face-off with the University of Miami. Switzer tapped Jamelle Holloway as the new starting quarterback, and Aikman despaired of regaining the job. In the end, he decided to transfer to UCLA, where he was confident he would get more of an opportunity to play. He was forced to sit out his first season at UCLA after the transfer but won the starting quarterback job in 1987, finishing his debut season with the team as the second highest rated college passer in the country. Aikman led UCLA to records of 10-2 in both his junior and senior years, winning All-American honors and finishing his college career as the third-ranked passer in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) history.