The Hungriest Coach
Coach Jimmy Johnson wants the Dallas Cowboys to win the super bowl so badly he can taste it.
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Johnson seems to have gone out of his way to demonstrate that he is not Tom Landry. One of his first major moves was to trade running back Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings, something Landry never would have done. Landry regarded Walker as a franchise player, a talent that comes along maybe once or twice in a coach’s career. And yet three years later the trade is clearly the watershed event in the rebuilding of the Cowboys: Eleven current players, including running back Emmitt Smith, defensive lineman Russell maryland, and corner-back Kevin Smith, all first-round draft choices, are linked to the trade. In Landry’s overly sophisticated system for evaluation players, Emmitt Smith would have been seen as too slow to warrant risking a first-round draft choice. Nevertheless, Emmitt led the league in rushing last season, even as Herschel Walker was on his way to being given his outright release by the Vikings. Landry would have judged Russell Maryland too short to be a great defensive tackle. Johnson believes Maryland is a future all-pro. Unlike Landry, who judged potential draftees by a computerized standards—and by what he saw on files or in scouting reports—Johnson personally eyeballs every top prospect in the country and makes his decision on gut feeling more than hard evidence. “The first think Jimmy asks about a prospect is, Can he play?” says offensive line coach Tony Wise.
Maybe, as some have suggested, the game had passed Landry by. Not the technical aspects of football but the motivation factor: Today’s players aren’t as hungry or as eager to play for the pure enjoyment of playing or as willing to risk life and limb as they were in the years when Landry had the Cowboys on top. Even allowing for inflation, salaries have gone through the roof. Until 1968, there was no players union. Hardly anyone used agents or business managers—or hair spray, for that matter. Johnson likes to tell his players and staff that the game is not about money—a point he once illustrated by taking off his Rolex and giving it to a penny-pinching (and suddenly flabbergasted) accountant at the University of Miami—but of course it is about money. In 1990 Johnson’s salary was $1.45 million, which mad him the highest-paid coach in the league. True, his wages were inflated by a one-time-only payment of $1 million for future TV and radio work, but his base salary is still $450,000, a sum not to be confused with peanuts.
But different times do require different approaches. Players today don’t need coaching as much as they need manipulating. Landry was an engineer by training; Johnson majored in psychology. Landry never gave a pep talk in his life. He believed that professional football players should motivate themselves. Johnson’s chief asset is his ability to motivate. He practices his Pygmalion technique on everyone around him. “Treat a person as he is and he will remain as he is,” Johnson preaches. “Treat that person as if he were what he could be and should be and he will become what he could be and should be.”
Landry was methodical; Johnson is devious. Johnson wears an easy smile that suggest that he knows something you don’t. When he coached at Miami, Johnson kept a copy of a book titled What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School on the corner of his desk, positioned so that visitor’s couldn’t help but notice it.
Johnson has a way to go to equal Landry’s record, but his teams are more interesting to watch. They’re faster, more physical, and strange to say, more like the old-timey football of Landry’s generation. “Jimmy is vocal, excitable, prone to show his emotions,” says defensive back Bill Bates, one of a handful of players still around from the Landry era. “The team has taken on his personality, I guess you’s say.” Landry’s Cowboys were a fitness team, a cool connection of highly skilled athletes who baffled opponents with multiple formations, and exotic defenses that only Landry fully understood. But they had a flaw, and everyone in the league knew it. Even in their glory years, the Cowboys could be intimidated: Ask the Pittsburgh Steelers, who beat them in two Super Bowls. Under Johnson, the Cowboys are intimidators. They are not the bad boys that his Miami teams were reputed to be—unjustly, in Johnson’s opinion—but nobody in the league looks forward to a Sunday afternoon of knocking heads with the Cowboys.
Johnson’s critics (they are fewer every season) warn of burnout and insist that a coach can’t drive a team as hard as Johnson drives the Cowboys and expect them to endure an NFL schedule. But Johnson has increased the work load each season, and each season has been more successful than the one before. During Johnson’s first training camp four years ago, veteran players bellyached that there was too much physical contact and whispered that Johnson was basically a Joe College type who didn’t understand how things were done in the NFL. “I think Jimmy wanted to make a point that first year, maybe weed out players who didn’t want to do it his way,” says Bill Bates. “There was a lot of bitching, but if you’ll notice, most of the bitchers aren’t here anymore.”
TO SAY THAT JOHNSON HAS HIGH expectations for the 1992 season is putting it mildly: He has predicted that the Cowboys will go at least as far as the conference championship game. “I’m impatient,” he says. “Sometimes my expectations are more than they should be, but at least we’re driving to be better.” In 1991, when most people believed that the Cowboys would be lucky to win half of their games Jimmy predicted that they would go to the play-offs; in fact, they went to the second round of the play-offs.
The team’s successful stretch run at the close of last season proved exquisitely the very points that Johnson had been expounding—about conditioning, preparedness, discipline (the Cowboys were the least-penalized team in the National Football Conference), and willingness to take calculated risks. When Aikman was injured for the third consecutive season, Beuerlein, acquired for a piddling forth-round draft choice, stepped in brilliantly. The victory over Washington in the critical twelfth game of the season was an example of Johnson at his high-rolling best. The Redskins were undefeated, playing at home, and raring toward a Super Bowl championship. Dallas had lost three of its last four games and was falling out of the running for a play-off spot. Johnson shocked Jerry Jones and everyone else connected with the team when he confided to them shortly before game time that he intended to use the onside kick, a tactic normally reserved as a last resort when a game is otherwise lost. Not only did the Cowboys use the onside kick successfully, but they also ran on fourth down, threw a Hail Mary pass for a touchdown just before the half, and blitzed the Redskins unmercifully. Taken completely by surprise, the Redskins fell behind early and never caught up. For the Cowboys, that game was the turning point of the season (and perhaps for seasons to come_ because it made believers out of every man on the team. They had felt the whip; now they tasted the sugar. Suddenly revitalized, the Cowboys finished the year with a string of victories over Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Chicago before finally losing to the Lions in Detroit.
The Lions didn’t merely beat the Cowboys, they embarrassed them, 38-6, exposing an Achilles’ heel that Johnson knew would eventually be exposed. The Cowboys didn’t have enough good defensive backs to defend against the run-and-shoot offense used by the Lions and a growing number of other NFL teams. Walking off the field that day last January, Johnson was already thinking about 1992. “If we’re going to be successful next season,” he told an interviewer, “we’ve got to figure out how to defend against the run-and-shoot.” At the NFL draft three months later, he used seven of his fifteen choices on defensive blocks.
AND NOW NEXT SEASON IS HERE. The minicamp in early May is the first time Johnson has seen the entire cast on the same field at the same time. He glows with anticipation, his rosy cheeks even redder than usual.
As though to emphasize their own dedication to excellence, Johnson and his coaches have endured a seven-week diet and exercise program, each man putting up $500 to be forfeited if he fails to meet the goal set by a professional nutritionist. The first day of minicamp is also weigh-in day for the dieters. Every man makes his goal with something to spare. Johnson’s personal goal was 20 pounds. Overachiever that he is, he lost 22.1, notwithstanding his known appetite for beer and Mexican food.
“In the whole seven weeks,” he brags to reporters, running a thumb along the waistband of his newly downsized coach’s shorts, “I only transgressed three times.”
“Was that three twelve-ounce transgressions?” a reporter enquires.
“Three sittings,” Johnson snaps, impatient with the questions that didn’t pertain to football and ready to get on with the business at hand.
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