Super Bowl XXVII : Now They’re Jimmy’s Team

He doesn’t even look like a football coach. A cherub in a Christmas play, perhaps. The kid next door.

First of all, there’s that apple-pie round face, the unblinking blue-eyed stare, the blond hair too carefully coiffed. No tobacco juice trickling down the chin, no blue-black stubble of beard. The voice when he speaks is a high-pitched East Texas twang, no rumble like a mine cave-in. He’d never be “the Bear,” “the Rock,” “Pop” or “Iron Mike.” He’s Jimmy, Jimmy Johnson. In the movies, he wouldn’t get the girl, he’d be the cheerleader.

But he has done something almost no mentor has ever been able to do in the annals of sport--replace a legend successfully and make the community eat its words.

Think of it. When Knute Rockne went down, a successor named Hunk Anderson couldn’t begin to hold the pieces together. When Bear Bryant departed, Alabama’s Crimson Tide became a pink trickle. When Vince Lombardi died, the Pack never could find anybody to lead it back. UCLA is still trying to find another John Wooden.

None of the above loomed higher over their fields than Tom Landry. In Texas, he ranked with the Alamo as a state shrine. His Dallas Cowboys football team was “America’s team” from coast to coast and, in their home state, occupied in public lore and romance somewhat the same esteem as the Texas Rangers--not the baseball team, the lawmen of “One riot, one ranger” fame. He was Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Davy Crockett and the Ringo Kid all rolled into one.

When an upstart Arkansas oil and gas millionaire named Jerral Wayne Jones bought America’s team and the rights to the stadium for $150 million, Texas naturally thought he was buying Tom Landry, too.

He wasn’t. He was bringing in his own coach, a fellow who had been his teammate and roommate at Arkansas, Jimmy Johnson. He signed him to a 10-year contract. He flew to Austin to fire Tom Landry.

The state was appalled, then angered. The citizens marched in the streets. They pelted Jones’ pictures with trash. You would have thought he had torched the Alamo. Never have two men began a career in such a profusion of community hostility as Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson. Gen. Santa Anna got a better press.

When the team went 1-15 its first year under the new duo, the chorus grew venomous. Probably never had any pair had to work in such a climate of public obloquy. Jerry Jones, who worked night and day to placate his new constituency, began to experience heart arrhythmia.

There is no evidence it bothered Jimmy Johnson at all. The man with the altar-boy looks went about his work oblivious to the reaction of the community. Not his table. He had a football team to build, not a community to woo. He ignored them.

Jimmy Johnson was a football coach, with all the name implies. He was one-dimensional. He left the PR to other people. He divorced his wife of 25 years. He set about with a singleness of purpose characteristic of him to reconstruct a football team. He was Hogan over a putt, Michael Jordan at the line. He was in a cocoon. Hand-shaking was not in the contract.

He had been handed a disaster. The Cowboys, 3-13 the year before he took over, were a spiritless, apathetic, underconfident bunch. All they had was a football. Jimmy Johnson had no time for the rest of Dallas. He had to worry about the team’s lack of esteem, not the town’s.

For all his seraphic good looks, Jimmy Johnson doesn’t really care what you think. Don’t ask him to dance. His world is 100 yards long by 160 feet wide and has hash marks.

There’s no evidence he started to build a championship team to show up Tom Landry or the state of Texas or the country at large. He did it because it’s what he does. The same reason birds fly or fish swim.

Other coaches have had to flee the shadow of a legend. Jimmy Johnson didn’t even know it was there. Tom Landry wasn’t his problem, nor was any downtown petroleum club. The secondary was. So was quarterback.

He had an all-world running back, Herschel Walker, but, as he said the other night on his arrival in L.A. for Super Bowl XXVII, “We felt like with Walker, we were wasting a good player--we weren’t a very good football team.”

So, he traded Walker to Minnesota for a pretty good football team. When you sorted out all the bits and pieces Johnson got for Walker, it was a pretty good football team. A Super Bowl team, as it turns out.

Johnson is about as sentimental as a border guard. He forbade his parents--in Port Arthur, Tex.--to come to the Super Bowl. He does not like distractions.

“They can watch it on big screen,” he says. “I don’t relish distractions. I can be rude if I have to. I am not in the ticket business. I came to the Super Bowl because it is a football game, and that is my business.”

He learned his business painstakingly. He was an assistant as long ago as 38 years at Louisiana Tech and at Iowa State, Wichita State, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Pittsburgh. He was head coach at Oklahoma State and Miami. But if you ask him which coach or job taught him the most, Johnson is hard put to remember. “All of them,” is his answer.

Jimmy Johnson is a man with his own deck, his own agenda. It’s a good idea to cut the cards. His business is beating you. Everything else is irrelevant.

Someone asked him on his arrival at the team hotel in Santa Monica if it bothered him that someone said that his opponents, the Buffalo Bills, had usurped the Cowboys’ longtime sobriquet, “America’s team.”

Johnson struggled manfully to look as if he cared. He couldn’t make it. It was obvious the idea bored him.

“I don’t care what they call themselves so long as we beat them,” he finally allowed.

It was a matter of small moment to him. After all, these Cowboys aren’t America’s team. They’re Jimmy Johnson’s team.