Mama Don’t Let Your Cowboy Cuss Receiver’s Mom Swears She’ll Scold Son

Michael Irvin insists he will say what he wants whenever he wants. His mom says not so fast.

“I will be talking with my boy,” Pearl Irvin said from her home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I don’t need to tell you he didn’t learn to speak that way in this house.”

Pearl Irvin chuckled softly through much of the Thursday morning conversation. That means her son, better known as the Dallas Cowboys’ 29-year-old perennial Pro Bowl receiver, probably will avoid a spanking. But she said grown man or not, he won’t get off without a scolding, at the very least, for his choice of words on several occasions in recent days.

Irvin created an uproar last weekend while addressing a Texas Stadium crowd and a live national television audience during presentation of the NFC championship trophy. In defending beleaguered coach Barry Switzer, he let slip a four-letter word. Given a chance to apologize Wednesday, Irvin instead faced the battery of TV cameras at the Cowboys Valley Ranch training facility and repeated the same word five times.

“I almost fell through the floor the first time he said it,” Pearl Irvin recalled. “I have never in my life heard Michael talk that way.

“He told me, ‘Mama, I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Michael, you know that’s no way to talk, especially not when you’re speaking in public. And especially when you’ve got a little brother coming up who listens to everything you say. You wouldn’t want him speaking like that.’

“Now,” she added, “I’ve got to remind him one more time.”

Pearl Irvin said Michael spent much of his youth playing pickup football in the street with his older brothers, so that the only yelling she ever heard him do back then was at quarterbacks who wouldn’t throw him the football. And, having raised 15 kids of her own and two more, she had no doubt she could get her third-youngest to do what the NFL and the Cowboys organization have been unable to do so far: bite his tongue on occasion.

“Another thing I told all my kids was act ugly and the world will treat you that way,” she said. “If he hasn’t remembered that, maybe I’ll have to pass it on again, too.”

Pearl Irvin will get a chance to do that in person next week in Phoenix just before the Super Bowl. But she suspects the message will get through to her boy much quicker - if it hasn’t already.”

“My sister called me up the first time he said that on TV, and she said she was going to write him a letter,” Pearl Irvin said. “I’ll bet if he got that in the mail, he’s being careful about what he says already.”