He has a Bible in one hand and a microphone in the other, and now Deion Sanders is pounding the pulpit and demanding that you touch the person beside you and hold hands with the person beside you and say I love you to the person beside you. Hallelujah! Five days removed from ankle surgery, Sanders is hobbling through this church's aisles, arms outstretched, palms open, head back, eyes closed. A thick gold-and-diamond cross sparkles on his necklace, right where the thick gold-and-diamond dollar sign used to hang.

A woman in the second row stands, arms flailing, shoulders shuddering, screaming at the sky in tongues. Sanders keeps speaking, from whisper to shout to whisper, the organist's music rising and falling with his voice. Sanders lies flat on the stage, hugging the Bible to his chest, and then he is up again, asking the 189 people here, in that singsong way of preachers, to repeat after me, repeat after me, repeat after me.

The epiphany woke Sanders from sleep a year ago this month, bright lights spilling through his darkness, but he won't give too many details because, well, he's got a book coming out in October. Even though he was available on everything from CD to Sega, even though he wore furs on flights and owned more than 200 suits (each with the words "Prime Time" stitched inside the jacket), even though women threw themselves at him with such zeal that his mother now says, "Just write whatever you think happened -- because it all did," Sanders says he tried to kill himself twice last year, mapping out elaborate suicide plans. "I acted it out; it was a failed attempt," he says, but, again, you're going to need about $24.95 if you want to read more.

Sanders has poured himself into his faith, waking his pastor at 2 a.m. for Bible interpretations, reading scripture at stoplights while listening to taped sermons on his car stereo, preaching to anyone who will listen. (You should have been at Denny's that night, when he put his hands upon a stranger and the broken man fell to the ground, sobbing.) When a Redskins fan threw a beer on him last season, Sanders knelt before him and prayed. He'll line up opposite receivers and say, "God is good, ain't He?" Sanders gave his church $1 million in April, $465,000 of it from his book advance, and while all this preaching might rub some teammates the wrong way, he keeps dragging God into the locker room.

"I'm not going to be ashamed of the gospel," Sanders says over lunch, blue bandanna stretching the word "Jesus" across his forehead in big, white letters. "How can I be ashamed when I wasn't ashamed to come into the locker room talking about the previous night's sexual exploits? Nothing was enough. When you are laying up with one woman, then you want two, then three. Let me get another car. That ain't it. Let me get another $2 million house. That ain't it. Another Rolex. That ain't it. Another woman. That ain't it. I was never happy. I was in pain, man."

Sanders now begins and ends conversations with a slight bow and the words, "Bless you." Ask to interview him, and he'll respond, "Are your motives pure?" These Bible studies he started -- Prime Time Tuesdays, they're called -- move him like no touchdown or paycheck. There was this one morning Sanders spoke at a school, as he does weekly, and a Mohawk-wearing teen walked out angry, figuring Sanders couldn't identify with him. Sanders chased him down and found that the kid's house had recently burned down and his mother had just tried to kill herself. That night, Sanders invited the family to his Bible study, where one person offered new furniture and another made a donation and pretty soon, dollar by dollar, the family had the down payment for another home. Sanders, head in his hands, wept right there.

The Bible studies outgrew his garage and his theater room and then a small church, so now they are here, in this spacious Plano outreach center where the first speaker announces, "Please, no autographs," and the 11-woman choir sings and sways, and the man behind the keyboard reaches up and begs God to "Break us! Break us so you can fix us!" and one of the world's most famous athletes is right out in front, warning the congregation that, "There-there-there-there's a devil at every level."

"Everybody treats this like it's a phase for Brother Deion, like a new pair of shoes," says Sanders' friend Vince Romo. "They're waiting for him to fail, but every time I visit his house, Deion is in his Nike shorts, with two open books in both hands and another open book on his desk, trying to interpret the Bible. He has immersed himself. He has recreated his soul."

Sanders, it appears, has been saved.



So now, brothers and sisters, the question becomes: Can his team be?

The Dallas Cowboys are the most sordid team in sports. We can agree on that, right? Some Cowboys say, no, things haven't been any worse on this sintillating team than elsewhere -- just more magnified, because of three Super Bowls in six years -- but that isn't exactly right. Because no other team has had its gun-toting coach arrested at the airport. And no other team has had its star receiver caught in a motel with crack and strippers. And no other star receiver's mother has walked to her lawn and found a front-page headline about a police officer trying to kill her son. And no other team's players have rented a two-story brick house on the corner of Tony Dorsett Drive and Danny White Lane, where partying players congregated to have sex with women who weren't their wives. And no other team has been banned by its owner from going to sports bars like the one in Valley Ranch, where one former Cowboy says he witnessed teammates having their way with women in the corners.

Dallas owner Jerry Jones can address all this. Man, can he address it. You sit on his office sofa and ask a single question -- Can the scandalous Cowboys be saved? -- and his answer meanders for exactly six minutes and 33 seconds, weaving from, "I recognize our visibility" to "This was in 1989" to "That's a long-winded way of saying ... " You tap Jones on the knee, trying to ask a second question, but he raises a finger and says, "Let me mention one other thing," and then he is off again, uninterruptible, for seven minutes and 20 seconds, saying, "I did more homework in selecting a new coach than I did in buying this football team" and "Character is a major focus here" and "I'm getting long-winded again ... "

This, however, speaks louder than that: Jones has spent several million on improving his team's behavior. He has created a support staff of more than 15 employees -- security people, psychologists, educators, drug counselors and consultants (including Grant Hill's parents) -- and the NFL says this is the most expensive behavior-monitoring program pro sports has ever known.

"We need to use the same thing that got us in trouble -- the visibility, the celebrity -- for the positive," Jones says, and here he stands up in a karate stance. "It's like in martial arts. You've got a big man coming at you. You don't take on all the momentum. You use it against him. Let's take all this interest there is in the Cowboys, and use that momentum the right way. We've lost our benefit-of-the-doubt collateral. We've spent it. This is the perfect time to show people what you can do after being knocked down. The stakes are huge."

Still, maybe Jones has been part of the problem. See, he parties too. He will walk into a bar, buy everyone tequila shots, and pretty soon he's dancing, wrists in front of his face, threatening to buy the whole place if bartenders don't keep serving past closing. Ask former Cowboys coach Barry Switzer, a friend, about Jones' nightlife, and he says: "I'm not going there. Don't even try to take me there." Jones sleeps about three hours a night, with the TV on. Once, he asked psychologists why he had been snapping at employees. They said it was because he hadn't had a drink in three months. Jones calls his partying "a respite, a relief," adding, "Don't lump me with the guy who has been sitting on the same bar stool for the last 20 years, talking about what he's going to do. It's not habitual. If I hadn't been able to blow off steam, I couldn't be the risk-taker I am."

Clearly, Jones is trying to polish the stained Dallas star. He has banned his players from some nightspots and strip clubs. He has installed cameras at camp, so Cowboys know they are being watched. He has waived players -- tight end Kendell Watkins, wide receiver Cory Fleming, cornerback Clayton Holmes -- for unbecoming conduct. Jones received an unprecedented nine minutes from NBC at halftime of last year's Thanksgiving game to show Cowboys working with the Salvation Army. And he didn't draft troubled Randy Moss, even though his offense needs a game-breaking receiver.

But you know what? It doesn't take much to erase all that effort, doesn't take much to create more national jokes and headlines, doesn't take much of a slip to start another slide. Because, in a weak moment, Leon Lett can take everything -- the counselors, the surveillance cameras, the whole damn Salvation Army -- and snort it all right up his nose.

***

Prime Time was an act. The whole thing. Sanders brought this upon himself, arriving for his last college game by limousine in a tux and top hat. He drove a car with a license plate that read JUS GOT PAID. This is the trouble with neon: It's bright enough to blind, hiding what's underneath. And this is the trouble with Nike: It packages personality the way it does sneakers, making you valuable but locking you in a box. So Sanders, once described by his friend Lenny Harris of the Cincinnati Reds as "the most boring guy in the world," felt burdened by his image because, well, it was a lie. "The depth of his unhappiness cannot be described," says his pastor, David Forbes Jr. Claiming infidelity, Sanders' wife divorced him -- "Women were my vice," he admits -- and that's when he became wedded to God.

"We had a use-use relationship, me and the media, and there's something sick in that," Sanders says. "I gave you an image, and you ran with it. That's my past, though. I've put aside power and money and sex. All old things have passed away. I have reversed myself and my mind. No more facade. No more hiding. I'm really me now. I don't have to run from revealing."

This is how Brother Deion talks, quoting Job and Luke, saying things like, "I was in the church, but the church wasn't in me." Asked if he is embarrassed by his team's soiled image, he says, "How can I be when I was a part of it? All the guys around here who claim they are embarrassed, they just didn't get caught. We were the winningest team with the most foolish desires." Sanders points at the locker room and says, "I was good compared to what's in there, but only because I wasn't walking around with a bunch of women on my arm in public."

Follow his finger, straight ahead, and you will arrive at the locker of Michael Irvin, which has an inspirational message posted to it. "Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up," it reads. "It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. Doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

Irvin has always run hard and fast, before the sun came up and beyond. That's how he ended up in that motel and how the news about a hit man landed on his mother's lawn and how he attended his first community-service session with an entourage of seven, bodyguard included. "Michael's life is chaos," says Bears running backs coach Joe Brodsky, who has known Irvin since high school and coached him in college and in Dallas. "He thrives on the edge. I love the kid to death, and I worry about him every day of my life. But is he worried about himself? No." You can't ask Irvin about this because he doesn't speak publicly about his troubles. Rehabbing his image, he will only do interviews about football. Discussing his past, he figures, will only make it seep like sewage into his present.

"This team is trying to do things right, trying to get our life in order," says Emmitt Smith. "But when we fail, everyone is there to criticize. They put us on a pedestal, then chop us up at the ankles and at the knees and at the waist and then we're just a torso flailing around."

Smith is a born-again Christian. So is his new coach, Chan Gailey. So maybe that's how the healing here begins, from on high. Jones interviewed Gailey for three days -- in restaurants and hotels, on his plane and in his mansion -- and says, "I don't know of anyone I could have chosen who is better qualified to stand any critique of character." Gailey is a former choirboy. The person he'd most like to meet? Jesus Christ. What would he change if he were president for a day? He'd allow prayer in school.

"I don't preach to players about my private beliefs," Gailey says. "This isn't a revival. My job description is to win football games. I have to remove my personal wants. There are a lot of things you want to do that aren't smart in the best interest of the team. I don't keep [religion] out. I just don't talk about it. I live it. I don't have to say it. As a coach, you don't want to exclude people. I'm not trying to evangelize them right now, but it may happen."

Ask Gailey about this team's past, and he stammers, choosing his words carefully, saying he doesn't care to discuss it. "I don't want to assume the people here are bad," he says when pressed. "I assume they're good until they prove they're bad, not that they're bad until they prove they're good. Will the players respect me? Time will tell. If we don't win, people will say players didn't respect me. If we win, everyone will have respected you. Ultimately, your won-loss record is how you're judged. On this Earth, anyway."

Well, not exactly. Barry Switzer's winning percentage in Dallas was better than Jimmy Johnson's, after all, and about all that got Switzer was unemployed. Switzer is visiting mini-camp today, doing an interview in the locker room while his ex-team runs drills outside. Did Jones fire him? Did he resign? "We decided to resign," is how Switzer puts it, but he is tired of hearing his team was out of control, as even fullback Daryl Johnston has suggested.

"That's total bull--," Switzer says. "Does it come down that way in Pittsburgh" -- Gailey's former team -- "with Bam Morris [arrested with six pounds of marijuana]? If we had been 6-10 four straight years, nobody would give a damn about undisciplined. We won a Super Bowl undisciplined then, I guess, because nothing changed. My style didn't lose, okay? It did okay at Oklahoma. I won more football games in 16 years than anybody. Tom Osborne was 60-3 his last few years, and I'm still fourth and he's still fifth. Who do I have to answer to? I have been at this 40 years, you know?"

This is pride talking, a strong man clinging to what others are trying to take. "I'm in the fourth quarter of my life -- not near the two-minute warning, and headed for overtime," Switzer, 60, says, and as he laughs, his former players, done practicing, thunder into the locker room like cattle, right through the door where he's sitting. They hug him and call him Coach and ask about his motorcycle and then there is a logjam, Switzer in the way. Switzer, still sitting, grabs his chair with both hands and hops, hops, hops to the side, and, just like that, the Cowboys move on, leaving Barry Switzer behind.

Gailey? He inherits this. All of it. Inherits Jones coming to the sidelines during play and tapping him on the shoulder, as he did with Switzer. Inherits a job Terry Donahue called "a death trap," inherits a coaching staff Jones hired for him, inherits a boss so omnipresent that Gailey's contract stipulates the coach gets to call the plays. Inherits Brother Deion's faith and Irvin's lifestyle and, more than anything, inherits a 6-10 record. Gailey is sitting in his office now, and, behind his desk, above the family photos, are religious books with titles such as Love Is Always Right and The Measure Of A Man. "I've waited my whole career for this opportunity," Gailey says. So you know what he did when he got it? He went to church, fell to his knees and whispered a thank-you prayer.

Lord help him.

This article appears in the July 13, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine.