Boys Will Be Boys (4 page)

When Jones initially learned of the franchise’s availability, he told himself he would fork over whatever it took. After all, a dream was a dream. Yet the eventual deal was, in hindsight, a steal. Though Bright had wanted $180 million, he wound up settling for significantly less:
$90 million for the team, $50 million for the stadium, and $10 million to assume the mortgage on the team’s headquarters. After four days of negotiating, Bright and Jones had one of their final battles on the morning of February 25 at the Bright Banc on Stemmons Freeway, when they disagreed over $300,000 in closing fees. Bright pulled a quarter from his pocket. “Let’s flip for it,” he said.

Jones called tails. The coin landed heads up.

“Oh well,” said Jones with a chuckle. “You just made three hundred thousand dollars.” (Bright later presented Jones with a quarter glued to a block, along with a note reading, “You’ll never know if it was a two-headed coin.”)

Midway through the meeting Tex Schramm arrived, looked at Johnson (who had attended at Jones’s insistence), and roared, “You need to get your ass out of town! Your people have embarrassed Tom Landry enough already.” Though Schramm himself had been trying to deftly,
sensitively
nudge Landry aside for the past few years, there were proper ways to go about it. Dinner at Mia’s was not one of them.

Johnson heeded the advice and caught the next flight to Miami. Jones and Schramm, meanwhile, had their own flying to do. Bright assured Jones that he would have no problem firing Landry as his final act of ownership, but Jones refused. He believed that, as the new boss, it was his duty to confront Landry face-to-face. Bright wasn’t one to argue the point—as long as Landry was a goner, he was content. “Bum Bright owed it to Tom to pick up the phone and give him a heads-up that the sale was going through,” says Bob Ackles, the team’s director of player personnel. “But Bum didn’t like Landry and felt he owed him nothing.”

With his time dwindling, Landry followed the course of action of many imperiled men before him…and
fled.
Schramm had asked the coach to remain in Dallas so that Jones might speak with him, but Landry had little interest in making his ousting an easy process. As most Dallas residents were learning of his imminent demise from the
Morning News,
Landry was piloting his Cessna 210 to Lakeway, Texas, where his family owned a weekend getaway house. As if the big news
of the day were a 4-H bake sale (and not his dismissal), Landry headed out to the Hidden Hills golf course, where he played eighteen holes with his son, Tom Landry, Jr.

By the time Jones and Schramm reached Hidden Hills on the evening of February 25, the sky was darkening. Only two golfers—Landry and his son—remained at the facility; they were practicing their putting. With Schramm at his side, Jones approached the men and introduced himself. The four retreated to a sales office, where Jones and Landry sat face-to-face. “This is with absolutely no disrespect to you,” Jones said. “But I’m here and so is Jimmy.”

Having seen Landry on TV, oh, ten thousand times, Jones expected his reaction to be subdued and polite. “I’ll always regret going there,” says Jones. “I misread the situation. I wanted to do the right thing and tell him in person. I thought it would be honorable. But it didn’t come off that way. I’ll always be haunted by that.”

“You could have saved your plane trip down here,” Landry snapped. “As a matter of fact, you could have handled this whole thing a lot better. This whole thing is just a bunch of grandstand tactics. You had no obligation to do this. You could have saved your gas.”

With that, the third-winningest coach in NFL history began to cry.

Later that evening, Jones and Schramm returned to Valley Ranch to announce the takeover of America’s Team. With approximately twenty-five reporters waiting in an auditorium, Jones stepped into Schramm’s private bathroom and shaved. Normally cool under pressure, Jones found himself sweating profusely.

Upon leaving the bathroom, Jones was approached by Doug Todd, the team’s veteran media relations director. Todd had handled Super Bowls and drug scandals, surprising trades and shocking deaths. “You’ll enter the room and there will be a dais on the right,” Todd told Jones as he tightened the knot atop his tie. “And over here will be a row of chairs—”

“Hold on,” snapped the new owner. “I can handle it. I can handle it.”

But he couldn’t. Jones was not merely an outsider purchasing a football team—he was an outsider purchasing the soul of Dallas in the midst of a citywide slump. The same financial crisis that had done in Bright was impacting hundreds of thousands of denizens. Within the past seven years not a single new business had relocated to downtown Dallas. The murder, rape, and aggravated assault rates were the highest in the city’s history, and the public schools were being compared with those in Detroit and Houston. “Dallas was suffering from a self-confidence crisis,” says Steve Bartlett, who served as mayor from 1991 to 1995. “If the sports team did well the people would start feeling better about themselves too. But at the time the Cowboys were terrible and people were angry. That’s what Jerry was walking into.”

The press conference was a disaster. In what would come to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Jones took the podium (Johnson remained in Miami) and presented himself as a backwoods Arkansan bumpkin powered by a heart of coal. With dozens of team employees apprehensively looking on, Jones kicked things off by exclaiming, “This is like Christmas for me!” and followed with a meandering seven-minute, twenty-four-second monologue that detailed his euphoria and excitement.

“I had a little media experience when I played at Arkansas,” says Jones. “But I had no idea what I was doing. Admittedly, it was terrible.”

When he finally got around to the beloved Landry, Jones’s words lacked depth and empathy. “This man is like Bear Bryant to me, like Vince Lombardi to me,” he said, suppressing a giddy smirk. “If you love competitors, Tom Landry’s an angel.” Collectively, the assembled media groaned. Landry may well have deserved to be fired—
but by this yokel?
Jones would promptly be nicknamed “Jethro” after the doltish Jethro Bodine character from TV’s
The Beverly Hillbillies.

“Jerry was so obviously in over his head,” says Jim Dent, the veteran Dallas writer. “In the media, we felt stabbed in the heart by the way he fired Landry. Jerry just dropped out of nowhere, and the opinion
was, What the hell does this guy know? That press conference cemented the belief.”

At his best, Jones came off as dumb. He called Johnson “the best coach in America” and said that, as the new owner, he would be involved with everything from “jocks to socks.”

Standing beside his new boss, Schramm shrunk by the second. Though his relationship with Landry ran hot and cold, there was always respect. At one point a reporter asked of Schramm’s status. “He’s standing right next to me, isn’t he?” Jones said. Told that Schramm was actually standing behind him, Jones said, “He’s a little behind tonight. We’ve got an evolving thing. Tex and I just initially talked this morning at nine o’clock. We’ve got a lot of settling to do.”

Like Landry, Schramm was a goner. The man who had constructed the Cowboys would soon take a job as president of the new World League of American Football. Gil Brandt, the personnel wizard, was eventually jettisoned too.

With a tilted grin, Jones assured the masses that he “needed” the holdover employees to show him the way. Then he went on a firing spree, unloading dozens upon dozens of longtime Cowboy workers. “On his first full day he had a bunch of us come into his office,” says Carlton Stowers, the outgoing editor of
Cowboy Weekly,
the team’s self-published tabloid. “He gave us the ol’ I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing speech. The next day the ticket manager got a note saying she had to be out of the building by five o’clock. She’d been with the team for twenty years.”

On Monday, February 27, Tom Landry—his boxes packed, his office empty—addressed his players one final time. The former head coach entered a room at Valley Ranch and, as always, removed his hat. Following a lengthy pause, he began to speak softly. “This will be our last…meeting together,” he said, taking deep breaths. “We will…all go on. You’ll…all find that in…adverse situations, strength…comes through. I believe that…through all of this…that we’ll all learn.
But what…makes me sad is…that I…had a lot…of plans for…next season, and my…dreams have…been dashed. I love…you all, and…”

Landry paused. He dabbed his moist eyes with a sleeve, took a deep breath, wiped away more tears. The assembled Cowboys were shocked. “He kept trying to talk, basically about handing the command over to Jimmy, and he tried to talk a little more, and he cracked a little more,” says Garry Cobb, the linebacker. “Then he just started crying. And crying. He never finished the speech. He collapsed on the floor and the other coaches came and tried to console him. And he was done. Everyone filed out.”

For some players, Landry’s departure was a gleeful case of what-goes-around-comes-around. A handful of Cowboys even celebrated with drinks at a nearby pub. How many athletes had Landry cut during his years leading the Cowboys? Now he was getting his. “Tom probably fired ten thousand football players without ceremony,” says Crawford Ker, the longtime Cowboys offensive lineman. “Every dog has his day.”

For most, however, Landry’s demise proved heart-wrenching. Here was a decent man who embodied a life of rectitude. “He wanted you to be a great football player,” says Jeff Rohrer, a Cowboys linebacker from 1982 to 1989. “But he really wanted you to be a great person.

“The way they did him at the end, it just wasn’t right. You don’t treat a legend that way. Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson had a lot to prove. Not to me and not to the players, but to all of Dallas.”

W
HEN JOURNALISTS FIRST
learned that Jerry Jones would be hiring Jimmy Johnson to coach the Dallas Cowboys, they all but attacked their keyboards in an effort to paint the portrait of a pair of lifelong best friends triumphantly taking the reins of America’s Team.

The story line was irresistible—teammates and roommates at the University of Arkansas who had learned at the knee of legendary coach Frank Broyles and were now, nearly thirty years later, making good. Jones was the studious financial whiz who would go on to earn millions, Johnson the gridiron guru destined to pace the sidelines of the nation’s elite football powerhouses. Wrote William Oscar Johnson in
Sports Illustrated:
“The Jones-Johnson friendship is a heartwarming thing, to be sure, going back a quarter of a century to their college days. They used to lie in bed at night talking about how much they wanted football always to be a part of their lives.”

Indeed, Jones and Johnson were friendly at Arkansas, and—based on the alphabetical proximity of their surnames—roomed together on road trips. They may well have even discussed their futures once or
twice. But the stereotypes were, at best, far-fetched. Boasting a 149 IQ and a degree in industrial psychology, Johnson stood out as Jones’s intellectual superior. He was the forward thinker. The
deeper
thinker. The one who would likely go on to a successful career as an industrial psychologist. As for the kinship, Johnson found Jones to be an arrogant braggadocio. Jones considered Johnson aloof and dismissive. “We haven’t done half a dozen things socially since we’ve known each other,” Johnson once said. There was “like” between the two. Just not
strong
like.

Well schooled in Jones’s Madonna-esque need for attention, Johnson—drawn by the prospect of an NFL dream job—went along for the ride. He’d drink beers with Jones, pose shoulder to shoulder, hug and laugh and guffaw. He would put up with Jones’s antics because this was the Dallas Cowboys.

To Jones’s credit, he was bringing in the ideal man to deal with the scrutiny of replacing a legend. Born on August 14, 1943, Johnson was raised in the Texas boomtown of Port Arthur, where blue-collar whites and blacks attended separate schools, used separate toilets, ate at separate restaurants, yet bonded over similarly arduous existences. As his peers were choosing to stick mostly within their racial boundaries, color rarely seemed to occur to young Jimmy. If you could play ball, you could play ball. “Jimmy never thought there was any difference between him and the blacks,” his father, C. W. Johnson, said. “And he didn’t like it when anybody said anything about it, either.”

Perhaps that’s because, economically, C. W. and Allene Johnson’s family had more in common with blacks than whites. Jimmy grew up poor, the youngest son of a father who toiled for the Gulf Oil refinery and, later, the Townsend Dairy. While he didn’t earn much, C. W. worked hard and expected the same from his two sons. It was this ethic that helped Jimmy emerge as a big man at Thomas Jefferson High, which he attended with a certain sloppily dressed, music-loving gal named Janis Joplin. (In a typical jock-meets-hippie clash, Johnson mockingly tagged Joplin “Beat Weeds.”) With rare exception, Johnson was respected across social and economic lines as the school’s top athlete (he earned all-state
honors on the offensive and defensive lines) and as an accelerated student who, in the words of
Sports Illustrated
’s Ed Hinton, “could solve algebra problems at a glance and write term papers worthy of A’s the night before they were due.” He was nicknamed “Scar Head” by a childhood buddy named Jimmy Maxfield—an ode to both his eternally cut-up noggin (largely the product of wrestling matches between Jimmy and older brother Wayne) and the determination that inspired him to attack all challenges.

During his senior year at Thomas Jefferson in 1960–61, Johnson was heavily recruited by two dozen major colleges, including Alabama and its tenacious young coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant. Given that his parents were born and raised Arkansans, however, he signed with the Razorbacks. Johnson’s freshman coach, a twenty-four-year-old novice named Barry Switzer, was immediately impressed by the noseguard’s ferocity, and his varsity coach, the esteemed Broyles, looked upon Johnson as a team leader. As a senior against Nebraska in the 1965 Cotton Bowl, Johnson accumulated twelve tackles as the Razorbacks won 10–7 to capture their first national championship. “I got my first taste of the concept of winning it all,” Johnson once wrote. “I thought, ‘Now that’s the way to end a playing career.’”

With the Razorbacks’ success, collegiate programs from across the country came to Fayetteville to learn the vaunted “Arkansas Monster Slide Defense.” Intelligent and articulate, the soon-to-graduate Johnson was asked to explain the intricacies of Broyles’s system. One of the men to sit in on a Johnson lecture was Louisiana Tech head coach Joe Aillet, who was taken aback by the twenty-one-year-old’s maturity. When Tech’s defensive coordinator suffered a heart attack that would cause him to miss the ’65 campaign, Aillet offered Johnson the job. At the time, Jimmy was spending the summer working as a shipyard welder, desperate to earn some extra money to support his new wife, Linda Kay (whom he had met as an undergrad and married the summer before), and their toddler son, Brent. “They said they’d pay me a thousand dollars a month for
three months,” Johnson wrote. “One thousand dollars a month, in 1965! I said, ‘Hey, I’ll be there.’”

In his three months at Louisiana Tech, Johnson shed his aspiring psychologist skin and transformed into an aspiring football coach. He loved the plotting and the strategy—taking a concept, writing it on a chalkboard, and watching it come to life. That Tech finished a mediocre 4–4 mattered little to Johnson. Through four years of college he was never quite sure where life would lead him. Now, he had an idea.

Johnson spent the spring of ’66 as a graduate assistant at Arkansas, and that fall moved his family to Picayune, Mississippi, best known as the world’s tung oil capital. As an assistant coach at Picayune High School, he helped a team that had gone 0–10 the year before…to go 0–10 again. “With all my expertise in coaching,” he wrote, “we came
close
to winning a game.” Though Johnson cherished tung and its mystical healing powers, he dreaded the nonstop losing. Salvation came in the form of a call from Switzer, who informed Johnson that Wichita State was searching for a young, inexpensive defensive assistant. Johnson left Picayune before the school year had ended and reported to Larry Lacewell, Switzer’s friend and the Shockers’ defensive coordinator. “Jimmy immediately struck me as extremely smart,” says Lacewell, who later worked with Johnson in Dallas. “He’s moody, he can be a horse’s ass, and he enjoys the role of coming off as a complicated person. But I’ll tell you something—that boy knew his football and how to reach players.”

Johnson spent the two years after Wichita working as a defensive assistant under Johnny Majors at Iowa State, and in 1970 was hired as defensive line coach by the University of Oklahoma. Though 517 miles from Port Arthur, Norman felt like home, what with Switzer and Lacewell also serving as assistants to head coach Chuck Fairbanks. The three were inseparable, raising hell in the local bars and spending long nights downing beers and talking football. “Jimmy was probably
the most fun guy on that staff,” says Lacewell. “We all did some crazy, crazy stuff.” There was a nude midnight streak across campus; setting Switzer’s door on fire. “Tons of shit,” says Lacewell. “Just great stuff. When you’re an assistant there’s a level of freedom you don’t have when you’re running the program.”

Johnson left Oklahoma in 1973 to join Broyles as Arkansas’ defensive coordinator. His big break was supposed to come three years later, when Broyles announced his retirement to devote full attention to his duties as the school’s athletic director. At age thirty-three Johnson assumed he would be the successor. Instead, Broyles hired Lou Holtz, an outsider coming off a disasterous 3–10 season leading the New York Jets.

Johnson spent the next two years as an assistant at the University of Pittsburgh and then finally, in 1978, his moment arrived. Oklahoma State University was looking for a new head coach, and a member of the search committee happened to be Kevin Leonard, a close friend of Jerry Jones’s. “I told him Jimmy Johnson would do wonders,” says Jones. “Jimmy was still pretty young, but I always knew he could do magic at the head of a program.” Before accepting the position at OSU, Johnson made a call to Switzer, then the head coach of the University of Oklahoma. “It’s always better to be a head coach than an assistant,” Switzer told him. “But I’m warning you now—I’m going to beat your ass every single year.”

With Oklahoma State on probation for an array of NCAA violations, the program Johnson inherited was in shambles. In his first season in Stillwater, Johnson had only fifty-five scholarship players. (Most Big 8 rivals had ninety-five.) Outgunned and undermanned, Johnson invited any and all male Oklahoma State students to join the squad. His team finished with a shocking seven wins and led the nation with nearly two hundred names on its roster. There was Kay the marketing major, Boockvar the aspiring doctor, Platt the soon-to-be stockbroker. Lacking gear for so many “players,” one equipment manager found a discount store selling soccer shoes for $3 a pair.

Although he never turned Oklahoma State into a national power,
Johnson gained recognition as one of the nation’s top young coaches. “The job Jimmy did there,” says Switzer, “was amazing.” Like Switzer, Johnson differentiated himself from the other white men who monopolized America’s sidelines. He could reach back into his Port Arthur roots and comprehend the pain of being a black male trying to make it, coming from nothing. “It goes beyond not being prejudiced,” says Melvin Bratton, who later played for Johnson at the University of Miami. “Jimmy was white, but you don’t think of him racially.” In 1983 Oklahoma State turned the corner, going 8–4 and defeating Baylor, 24–14, in the Bluebonnet Bowl.

Unfortunately for Stillwater’s football hard-core, Johnson wouldn’t be around very long. As Oklahoma State was climbing its way up the Big 8 ladder, Sam Jankovich, the University of Miami’s athletic director, was looking for someone to replace Howard Schnellenberger, the head coach who had departed for the upstart United States Football League after leading the Hurricanes to the ’83 national championship. Midway through a convention of college coaches in the spring of 1984, Jankovich pulled Johnson aside and asked for recommendations. “You know,” Johnson replied, “I wouldn’t mind living on the beach.”

Several weeks later Jankovich offered Johnson the job—with one catch. To come to Miami, he would have to inherit Schnellenberger’s staff for at least a year; the athletic director felt it the honorable thing to do, given Schnellenberger’s last-minute departure. Johnson sought out wisdom from dozens of peers, none of whom advised him to leave Oklahoma State. Finally, he asked Lacewell. “Jimmy, I’d go,” he said. “You coached at Oklahoma one time; you know their firepower. You can’t win a national championship at Oklahoma State. But you can win one at Miami.” Lacewell’s words rang true.

Upon arriving at Miami, however, Johnson found himself in a toxic environment. Three of Schnellenberger’s assistants (defensive coordinator Tom Olivadotti, offensive coordinator Gary Stevens, and an administrative assistant named Bill Trout) had applied for the head coaching position. Johnson’s first meeting with the staff was less than promising. He was greeted with a grim-faced silence. As Johnson began
to speak, the bitter Olivadotti dropped his keys on the table, picked them up, dropped his keys on the table, picked them up. “I’ve seen your teams play,” Olivadotti said, “and I really don’t think our philosophies could coexist. Your teams don’t play the way
we
want to play.”

“I’m sure that we can work with each other,” Johnson replied before leaving for his introductory press conference. Inside, he fumed.

To Johnson’s delight, Olivadotti resigned. To his dismay, the other assistants remained. Though the defending national champions played well in Johnson’s debut season, winning eight of their first ten games, much of Johnson’s time was spent worrying whether his coaches were poisoning his milk.

In Miami’s second-to-last game, Johnson’s team blew a 31–0 halftime lead to Maryland, allowing Terrapins quarterback Frank Reich to pick the defense apart in a staggering 42–40 loss. The following week, the Hurricanes struggled against Boston College before staging a late drive to grab a 45–41 lead. On the last play of the game, 5-foot, 9-inch quarterback Doug Flutie scrambled away from the defense and threw a Hail Mary that was caught in the end zone by Gerard Phelan, giving BC the victory and college football one of its defining moments. Even before Flutie threw the ball, Trout had left his position in the press box. He was resigning from Johnson’s staff, and felt no need to remain for the final play.

The season ended with a 39–37 Fiesta Bowl loss to UCLA, and as soon as the clock read 0:00 Johnson pledged he would never tolerate an experience akin to the 1984 season again. The morning after the game he held a press conference, announcing a restructured staff of Oklahoma State refugees committed to Johnson’s way. To the new Miami way.

The Hurricanes of 1985 were brash, bold, and dominant. They went 9–1 through the first ten games and would complete the regular season with a November 30 home matchup against Notre Dame. Entering the game, the Fighting Irish were 5–5, a record that had the South Bend faithful desperate for redemption. If there was any hope of defeating the Hurricanes, it was that maybe, just maybe, the players
would win one last game for the Gipper—er, Gerry Faust, their inept outgoing coach.

Instead, the Hurricanes humiliated their once-proud visitors, 58–7. The nationally televised game was a coming-out party for the “new” Hurricanes. Miami’s players taunted and strutted, trash-talked, and end-zone danced. When safety Bennie Blades intercepted a second-quarter pass and returned it 61 yards for a touchdown, he slowed at the 2-yard line to high-five a teammate. When the ’Canes closed the third quarter with a 37–7 lead, Johnson demanded that his quarterbacks continue to throw the ball. With 71 seconds remaining, Miami ran a reverse. From his seat in the CBS booth, broadcaster Ara Parseghian—the former Notre Dame head coach—asked whether Miami had heard of this thing called decency. “It’s time for Jimmy Johnson to show some compassion,” said the man who, in his day, had led the Irish to a 69–13 win over Pittsburgh, a 48–0 win over Purdue, and a 44–0 win over, ahem, Miami. “This is not right.”