Game Over 
The Hungriest Coach
Coach Jimmy Johnson wants the Dallas Cowboys to win the super bowl so badly he can taste it.
It is only the first weekend in May—just a minicamp in preparation for more minicamps in preparation for training camp in preparation for the Dallas Cowboys’ 1992 season—but the look of urgency on Coach Jimmy Johnson’s face couldn’t be more intense if this was the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. “Let’s go, hurry, hurry, hurry!” he yells impatiently, clapping his hands while his offense scampers into position without benefit of a huddle. As quarterback Troy Aikman barks signals, Johnson studies the way the defensive players realign themselves. They are a little tentative, a little unsure. “You’ve got to do better than that,” he shouts at a cornerback who is slow to find the man he is supposed to cover. The purpose of this drill is to give the defense experience against the no-huddle offense that Johnson expects the Washington Redskins to run when the two old rivals face off in the season opener September 7. The game is four months away, but Johnson—don’t you see?—believes in being prepared.
A month later the Cowboys are at it again. After a two-hour practice, Johnson puts his team through a torturous set of wind sprints—ten consecutive 110-yard dashes, each of them timed and measured against a minimum standard that each man is required to meet. “Hey, Big Frank,” the coach yells at 295-pound Frank Cornish, a Cowboys newcomer who played last season with the San Diego Chargers, “did they do this out West?” Cornish shakes his head, spraying an arc of sweat across the Valley Ranch practice field near Irving. No, they didn’t do this at San Diego or anywhere else in the National Football League. Nobody works his team or his staff in the off-season—or for that matter, during the season—as hard as Jimmy Johnson. Most of these players had been running, lifting weights, and studying football four days a week since a month after the 1991 season ended.
Football is an eleven-month-a-year job when you work for Jimmy Johnson, and he would make it twelve or thirteen if he could figure out a way. Even certifiable workaholics like Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs permit themselves some type of off-season activity; indeed, as one of the Cowboys’ minicamps was under way in the spring, Gibbs was in Dallas promoting his new investment in stock car racing. Johnson is unique among NFL coaches in that he holds four minicamps—three of them “voluntary.” Players who do not volunteer do not play for Johnson, not for long. The only player absent from the minicamps is linebacker Ken Norton. One of nine starters who has not yet signed a new contract, Norton is nevertheless the only one who didn’t “volunteer” for the extra work. “Norton has damaged himself by not being here,” Johnson says after practice. “I tell our players that off-season workouts are voluntary, but, hey, if you’re not here, it eventually catches up with you. Sooner or later I’m going to have to make a decision between you and another player with similar skills. When that happens, I’m going to remember which one made that extra effort.” Cowboys insiders already speak of Norton in the past tense.
Not since Vince Lombardi was molding the Green Bay Packers into his own granite image in the sixties has the NFL had a coach as focused or as single-minded—or as egotistical—as Jimmy Johnson. “In Jimmy’s book, winning is everything and everything relates to winning,” says line coach Tony Wise. “Everything—the color of the uniform, the length of the socks, the size of the weight room, what hotel you stay at, what players you pick in the draft.”
Because of his personal relationship with team owner Jerry Jones, Johnson has become one of the two or three most powerful coaches. Johnson and Jones—Dallas Morning News sports columnist Blackie Sherrod has dubbed them the Jaybirds—were teammates on the University of Arkansas’ 1964 national championship team, and though Jones was a starting guard and co-captain, Johnson was the player who coaches, fans, and media venerated and remembered (he was named to Arkansas’ all-decade team of the sixties as a defensive lineman). Like everyone else on the team, Jones looked up to Johnson. “He was intelligent and focused,” Jones remembers. “Even in college, you could see that he had what I call ‘people skills.’ His positive attitude was infectious. He had the ability to make hard work seem pleasant.” Their longtime “friendship” (they were roommates when the Arkansas team traveled only because their names fell in alphabetical order) has been largely exaggerated by the media. “I think Jerry was a better friend of Jimmy’s than Jimmy was of Jerry’s,” says a man who knows them both. The Cowboys are one of the few teams in the league in which the owner and the coach share equal responsibility for all team decisions—Jones says there has never been a dispute they haven’t been able to settle between themselves—but everyone knows which one of the Jaybirds is boss. At one of the minicamps last year, as players and staff were introducing themselves, a newcomer asked—jokingly—who Jimmy Johnson was. “I’m the guy who decides whether or not you get a paycheck every week,” Johnson said, no trace of humor shading his face. “I’m the guy who decides whether or not you have a career in this league.”
How badly did Jimmy want the Cowboys job? Well, he divorced his wife to devote full time to it. He confessed not long ago, “I’ve put myself into a position where I have very few things that are important to me. My priorities are winning football games first and my two sons second.” If there was a third, he didn’t mention it.
JOHNSON’S WORLD IS REMARKABLY COMPACT. Essentially, it is a few square miles surrounding the Cowboys’ Valley Ranch complex. The complex, named for a subdivision, resembles a small, modern junior college with its array of offices, classrooms, film libraries, training facilities, and practice fields, fenced off and tucked away in the gently rolling hills west of Dallas. Jimmy lives alone, three blocks from the complex, in one of the subdivision’s high-dollar homes. Some of the players also live in the subdivision. Texas Stadium, where the Cowboys play their home games, is a few miles to the south of Valley Ranch. Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport is just to the southwest. In its own way, the fiefdom that Jimmy has created at Valley Ranch is as isolated and as autocratic as the one that Lombardi created at Green Bay.
Nobody really knows Jimmy Johnson. He has no close friends, no hobbies, no life apart from football. As a coach, he is the logical extreme of what football fans—especially those in Dallas—have come to require: an ascetic whose single-mindedness and devotion to winning give them hope and comfort. They don’t really care what he does with his private life. Johnson’s predecessor, Tom Landry, was devoted to winning, but not as devoted as he was to religion and family. In his early years as the Cowboys’ coach, Landry even maintained an insurance business in the off-season and was extremely active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Landry’s detractors called him “plastic man,” but at least they conceded that he had an image. Off the field, Johnson has no discernible personality. There’s nothing to like or dislike.
Johnson reads and reacts to everything written about the Dallas Cowboys. Sportswriters never knew if Landry read the paper—nobody can remember him ever mentioning a story, good or bad—but Johnson misses nothing. “He knows, for example, the difference between a beat writer and a columnist,” says Cowboys publicity man Rich Dalrymple. “He knows that Randy Galloway does five radio shows a week in addition to writing four columns for the Dallas Morning News.” When Galloway or one of his radio callers says something negative about the Cowboys, the hot line buzzes and Jimmy is on the phone with a rebuttal. The tiniest slight or misperception can raise his ire. He jumped Rick Gosselin of the Morning News for writing that luck was one of ten contributing factors for the Cowboys’ success in 1991. “Luck had nothing to do with it,” Jimmy told Gosselin. “I hate that word. Luck is something that happens only when you work to make it happen.”
My Library
