Nearly every reporter who spent time in the Dallas Cowboys locker room during the ’90s seems to have a Michael Irvin story—because, naturally, they would. However, very few were invited to the Hall of Fame wide receiver’s “office.” Peter King, though, was one of the lucky few.
The twist? Irvin didn’t have an office in the traditional sense; instead, his “office” was a strip club. Being at Sports Illustrated—and the access that came with it—had its perks. During an appearance on the Marchand Sports Media podcast with The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, King shared a wild tale about interviewing Irvin—now a media personality—at none other than a strip club.
Peter King told legendary story after legendary story on the pod.
This one about Michael Irvin and a strip club. 😂 pic.twitter.com/Iv6SCoZ9IC
— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) February 6, 2025
Anything to get the story, right? “Dealing with Michael Irvin was utterly fantastic,” King informed Marchand. “Everyone else there was buttoned up. Irvin was absolutely wide open. The first time I ever interviewed him at length, he said, ‘I’m going to take you to my office.’ And he took me to a strip club. I quite literally interviewed him at a strip club. And he loved it. He said, ‘Man, this is great. Now I got something to hold over your head.’” No word on if there was a breakfast buffet, but Irvin sure knows how to make an impression, and King found himself fortunate.
Bringing an SI columnist to a strip club was Irvin being Irvin, but it also paralleled the antics of the ’90s Dallas Cowboys. Take ‘The White House,’ for example. In the 1990s, when the Cowboys were juggernauts, Irvin and a few other Dallas players rented a five-bedroom house near the team’s practice facility. This house could be described as both a party destination and a de facto brothel.
Here’s what Jeff Pearlman once wrote about the “White House.”
“The house … was rented under the name of receiver Alvin Harper, and the new neighbors in an exclusively white, low-key community were 6-foot-5 inch, 300 pound African American men escorting an endless conveyor belt of large-breasted blondes. Nate Newton insists the White House was a haven for neither prostitution (‘What did we need a prostitute for? Women laid down for us’) nor drugs (Never saw ’em), yet his take is disputed by myriad teammates and people in the know.”
For King, having that level of access to Irvin’s “office” was a rare privilege that few of his colleagues could claim, offering a peek behind the curtain at a larger-than-life figure in a setting that captured Irvin’s persona in all its unapologetic glory. Without a doubt, it stands as one of the more bizarre moments in sports media history.
