A Study in Contrast : Buffalo’s Marv Levy Is an NFL Renaissance Man, but Dallas’ Jimmy Johnson Has Time Only for Things to Help Him Win : Seemingly Cold and Calculating, Johnson Eliminates Everything Around Him That He Believes Will Interfere With a Super Bowl Victory

For a man who allows himself little leeway for human frailty, Jimmy Johnson was in a rare mood.

Dave Wannstedt, his close friend and football soul mate, had decided to leave his position as Johnson’s defensive coordinator to become the coach of the Chicago Bears.

On the Tuesday after the Dallas Cowboys had clinched a spot in the Super Bowl, Johnson announced the move with a mixture of pride and melancholy.

Then, for a moment, Johnson’s voice trailed off and his normally rigid features softened.

The change lasted no more than a few seconds. But the feeling lingered.

“It was a little bit of an emotional time for both Dave and myself,” Johnson had said in the amphitheater meeting hall of the Cowboys’ Valley Ranch training complex. “We knew what was going to happen. I had known it was going to happen for a long, long time. . . . (Pause) But I’m really happy for

him.”

He moved on quickly to the Buffalo Bills’ no-huddle offense, the distractions and implications of the week leading up to Super Bowl XXVII, talking for almost an hour longer.

But for a moment, there had been a peek past the shell, a glance at honest emotions.

Here is a man who plans every detail of his life; who has raised a wall between himself and the rest of the world so he can go about his job more shrewdly; who has pushed and prodded the Cowboys from the scrap heap to the pinnacle in four years.

Here is a man who orchestrated much of Wannstedt’s interview; who spoke to Bear owner Mike McCaskey to make sure the situation was right for his friend; who freed Wannstedt to do whatever he wanted, even though the Cowboys were still playing.

“It was inevitable,” Johnson said of Wannstedt’s leaving. “When things are inevitable, when I know these things are going to happen, then I don’t care anything about waiting to do it. I want it to happen now. “

And here was an unscripted public goodby to a best friend from a man who can count his close friends on one hand.

“When Dave got the job, we watched his press conference on the satellite in his office,” said Rich Dalrymple, the Cowboys’ public relations director who also was Johnson’s PR man at the University of Miami. “And Jimmy was sitting back, leaning back in his chair like a proud father. Like, ‘That’s my kid there.’

“And then (at Johnson’s media session), when he started getting rapid-fire questions about the whole thing, I think the personal aspect of their

relationship started to kick in and the fact that it’s never going to be like it once was. It’s hard for anybody who loses somebody who has been probably their best friend for the last 10 years. . . .

“But the way Jimmy’s mind works, as soon as that press conference was over, he has locked those thoughts out of his mind. He let his focus wander a little bit there, and now it’s back on track. And he probably won’t think about it again until sometime in February.”

The next day, Wannstedt was back from Chicago and the Cowboy coaching staff was deep into the work of preparing for Buffalo. But something was different.

Every day about noon, some of the coaches, led by Johnson and Wannstedt, went for a long run, to let loose the tensions of the morning and talk over the future.

On one of those runs, Johnson pitched the idea of trading Herschel Walker. Wannstedt told him he was crazy.

Run time was a time of friendship and camaraderie.

But on the day after his best friend had decided to leave him, Johnson ran alone.

Johnson is often alone these days--by choice, living a life stripped clean of what most consider the fabric of existence.

He is about winning football games, and anything that takes him away from success is gone.

“He derives more pleasure out of winning a football game--and doing it in convincing, thorough fashion with a little bit of flair and a little bit of style--than anything else in his life,” Dalrymple said.

Johnson divorced his wife in 1989--the year he took the reins of the Cowboys. By his own admission, he barely knew his two sons while they were growing up. And now, at 49, he has shaped his life around the Cowboys and the anticipation of Super Bowls.

“I don’t think Jimmy’s doing this for necessarily the traditional way we define enjoyment, the type of thing such as enjoying your family or anything like that,” said Jerry Jones, owner of the Cowboys and the college teammate of Johnson who fired Tom Landry and put Johnson in charge.

“I think this is just something that’s his life. . . . It’s been by his own choosing. He’s prepared, wants to be the best and that’s the thing that is driving him. He is driven.

“You say, ‘Sit back, enjoy it and be calm.’ That’s almost demeaning to him.”

Not that he really cares. Now that he has gotten to the Super Bowl, Johnson seems to have relaxed and attended the media sessions convinced that there are no questions he cannot answer.

He has joked about his plastic-shell hairdo, talked about how fascinated he is by the Hannibal Lecter character in the movie “Silence of the Lambs” and has oozed confidence in the team he has crafted.

Johnson knows he can play the big rooms.

He won at Oklahoma State and heard that he could not make the move to an elite school. He won the national title at Miami in 1987 and was showered with epithets when Jones brought him to the Cowboys two years later.

All Johnson did each time was make his plans, charge into each situation and win.

“The thing that strikes me, he’s got unbelievable confidence in his own abilities,” Dallas offensive coordinator Norv Turner said. “I mean, unbelievable confidence. And he never wavers in terms of, ‘Did I do the right thing? Did I not do the right thing?’ ”

Johnson doesn’t really have charisma. He doesn’t light up a room, he infuses it with the intensity of his desire for success. He doesn’t make you love him, he makes you fear what he can accomplish against you.

“I have focused down to the things I want,” Johnson said last week. “I have certain priorities in my life.

“I can tell you this--I am very, very happy with Jimmy Johnson. I really like him a lot. And not in a way of being boastful and being arrogant, but in a way that I’m just happy with myself.

“I’m happy with where I am in life. . . . I enjoy winning football games. And I’m committed to winning football games.”

For Johnson, the unstructured life is not worth living.

“I don’t like to do anything haphazard,” is one of his favorite remarks.

“I don’t like hair getting into my eyes,” Johnson said, explaining his hairstyle. “I like things to be in order--whether it be my home or my sons or my clothes or my hair--or my football team.

“I don’t want penalties on my football team. I don’t want them to make foolish mistakes. I want things to be in order. I want things to be right.

“And it just so happens that that’s the way I like my hair. So I use a touch of spray.”

For control.

At Dallas in 1989, Jones gave Johnson control of an old, bad team with one Pro Bowl player, Herschel Walker.

Johnson acknowledged the futility of trying to win early--Dallas was 1-15 in his first season--and traded Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for draft picks and players who gave the Cowboys room to experiment.

With the extra picks, Johnson started trading wildly and boldly, sprinkling his roster with young talent.

In four years, Johnson made 46 trades.

“I think a lot of people look at me and say I’m a risk taker,” Johnson said. “I’m not as big a risk taker as they think I am.

“I try to do things in a high-percentage way. I try to do things I’m going to be successful at. And so it might look like a risk to someone else, but in my mind, it’s a high-percentage play.”

When asked this week how he contemplates the future and the possibility of more trips to the Super Bowl, Johnson used a metaphor about elite mountain climbers scaling a wall of ice.

In a book he read recently, a mountain climber said the only way to get to the top is through extreme concentration.

Johnson said: “If he started to let his mind wander about things other than what had happened in the past 30 seconds or what might happen in the next five minutes, he might not be climbing that mountain. He might be at the bottom. And I thought that was very interesting.

“You talk about future Super Bowls--my concentration right now is Sunday, 3:18, and what happens thereafter. I have no idea what’s going to happen on Monday.”

It is the end of another long interview session, but Johnson still is chatting with a small group of reporters.

He is laughing, making the reporters laugh, casually answering everything thrown at him. Then someone asks him if he is enjoying this, the time spent talking to the media, and Johnson shrugs.

“Oh, it’s OK,” he says quietly. “I’m doing what I’m required to do.”

And nothing more.

He allows himself to be perceived as cold, calculating and cocky because he believes cold, calculating and cocky wins games in the NFL.

“Yeah, that’s Coach Johnson,” Dallas guard Nate Newton said. “He came in with a single goal in mind, and that’s to win the big show as many times as he can. He doesn’t want anything getting in his way.

“A lot of people say he’s a cold person, or he’s not sociable. But what are you going to do, hire a man to come in, woo the media and lose games? Or do you want a man who is going to win games and take the media how it comes?”

Johnson has lived his life to get here, to climb the mountain, to win with style before millions.

He has ignored almost everything else.

And he is asked: Jimmy, is it worth it?

“I don’t know,” Johnson answers. “We haven’t won yet.”

*

Johnson’s Record

REGULAR SEASON

Year, Team W L T 1989 Dallas 1 15 0 1990 Dallas 7 9 0 1991 Dallas 11 5 0 1992 Dallas 13 3 0 Totals 32 32 0

*POSTSEASON

Year, Team W L T 1991 Dallas 1 1 0 1992 Dallas 2 0 0 Totals 3 1 0 Overall Total 35 33 0

* 1991--Won wild-card playoff against Chicago, 17-13; lost to Detroit, 38-6, in divisional playoff.

* 1992--Won divisional playoff against Philadelphia, 34-10; won conference championship against San Francisco, 30-20.