SUPER BOWL XXVIII: Buffalo Bills vs. Dallas Cowboys : Part Coach, Part Couch : Psychology Plays Important Role in Jimmy Johnson’s Life

Phillip Trapp, retired chairman of the University of Arkansas psychology department, said he couldn’t say for sure if James William Johnson was “an A, B, C, D or F” student.

“But’s it like I told all our psychology majors at the time,” Trapp said by phone from Fayetteville on Monday. “Other things being equal, you should have an edge in dealing with people.”

Dallas 38, San Francisco 21.

James William Johnson, who once had been more interested in Freud and Jung than Lombardi and Halas, had already been exposed to abnormal behavior and child and adolescent psychology before becoming Jimmy Johnson, the football coach, destined to deepen Buffalo’s depression.

“My decision to major in psychology,” Johnson wrote in his book, “Turning the Thing Around,” “was also the decision that would eventually make the difference between a good Xs-to-O’s college coach and a national championship coach; between a good, solid NFL coach and a Super Bowl coach.”

Johnson, the aspiring industrial psychologist who passed on the pursuit of a master’s degree to become an assistant football coach in order to pay his bills, has risen to the very top of his profession with an uncompromising focus.

“I’ll crush you like a squirrel in the road,” Johnson once said when asked about his drive to succeed.

The Dallas Cowboys won Super Bowl XXVII because Jimmy Johnson ordained it to be so. Emmitt Smith’s contract holdout might have sabotaged their return visit to the Super Bowl, but complacency never had a chance against Johnson.

While head coach at the University of Miami, Johnson’s teams not only went five for five against opponents who were ranked No. 1 at the time, but 31-0 against competition that had been unranked. There is no sneaking up on Jimmy Johnson.

“You are about to read and learn more about the egotistical, selfish coach of the Dallas Cowboys,” Dallas Morning News columnist Frank Luksa wrote before this season began. “To describe Jimmy Johnson in those terms is not a criticism. It is to repeat his self-portrait.

“Johnson is bone-cutting honest on the subject of himself. He is without pretense. This is me, he says: a single man who likes his beer, loves his job, wants and needs few close pals, thinks he’s a hell of a coach, knows he will win and doesn’t mind being quoted about any of it since he’s said it before.”

The folks in Dallas, who looked upon Tom Landry’s fedora as if it were part of the Texas landscape, have now come to know and even accept the outsider, who vacations in the Bahamas, doesn’t believe in exchanging Christmas presents, hates baseball and pets, and wins football games.

“I don’t think anybody in the country understands the pressure of coming to the Cowboys after Tom Landry,” says Johnson, who makes more than $1 million per year and is signed through 1999. “You know deep down what the expectations are, and everyone is looking at you in a cockeyed way. ‘Can this guy do it?’

“We still have a long way to go here. But no one is looking at us with cocked eyes anymore.”

On Sunday, he had the fans on their feet cheering before the game had begun, as he had asked them to do earlier in the week. Those who had booed him in 1989 after guiding the Cowboys to a 1-15 mark in his first year as Landry’s successor were now his buddies.

“When Jimmy Johnson came here to coach the Cowboys, no one could be certain how long it would take for him to get the football team turned around,” said Jerry Jones, a former Arkansas football teammate of Johnson’s who hired him to coach after buying the Cowboys. “We knew we might have to have a little patience for a little while.

“But if you knew Jimmy, you knew the job would somehow get done. You just plain knew it.”

Winning football games is what Johnson is all about, and anything short of that earns a harsh response. Running back Curvin Richards fumbled twice last season against the Bears and was immediately cut. Linebacker John Roper fell asleep in a meeting, and was unemployed a few hours later.

He is a run-up-the-score kind of guy, who was accosted by then-New York Jet Coach Bruce Coslet this season for blitzing and hurting quarterback Boomer Esiason while leading by 21 points.

Johnson’s tantrums and demand for hard work in training camp garner headlines each July. In December, he still is yelling and prodding the players for more. After winning a franchise-record 13th regular-season game last season, he stormed off the field and went wild in the locker room because he was unhappy with his team’s performance.

“Don’t even think for a second that I don’t know what I am doing,” Johnson has said. “Don’t ever think this stuff just flows off the tip of my tongue. I didn’t get to the point where I am today by allowing the wind to blow me left and right.”

He walks through life like a man who always knows exactly where he is going, and there is no concern for speed bumps. He is tough, he can be charming, and he has been vindictive.

When Arkansas Athletic Director Frank Broyles passed on Johnson in 1983 and hired another former Razorback, Ken Hatfield, to be head coach, Johnson added Arkansas to Miami’s schedule. And in 1987, Miami handed the Razorbacks a 51-7 defeat, their worst loss ever in Little Rock.

It is not a good idea to let Jimmy Johnson down.

In “The Boys,” writer Skip Bayless’ account of the Cowboys’ 1992 run for the Super Bowl, he detailed Johnson’s tirade on the team’s return charter flight from Washington after a 20-17 defeat. Bayless wrote that Johnson loudly scolded players, ordered assistant coaches to sit down and stopped dinner service.

Bayless later quoted quarterback Troy Aikman about the trip: “A lot of players were extremely upset. (After the incident) there was just so much discussion and bitterness by so many guys. Here we’d done everything we could for this guy. We’d played our guts out, and it was only our third loss. It was like he sold us out.”

If the troops were considering mutiny, they changed their minds. The Cowboys won their next five games, including Super Bowl XXVII, and love him or despise him, Johnson got his team to perform.

“I really don’t manipulate people like I would puppets,” Johnson has said. “It’s just that I like my life structured, and what I say to be structured.

“I really do like to think about what I say and do. I’m a rigid planner. I don’t like shooting from the hip. Part of the reason for that is that I know when I’m talking to the media, I’m talking to the players and to the fans, too.”

A week ago he spoke to the 49ers through the media with his, “We will win and you can put it in three-inch headlines” outburst on the radio. Outburst? The man with the psychology degree had planned it all out, and while loosening up his own team he whipped his finesse-minded opponents into a frenzy.

“There are times when players need a kick in the rear, and at other times, like during the playoffs last year, they need stroking. I pride myself on knowing when and how to react to each situation.”

It’s not Xs and O’s, it’s knowing people, and yet he goes through life for the most part as if he preferred living on an island.

“I really don’t have time for other people,” Johnson has said. “I don’t have time to get close to many individuals outside the team and the staff. I think a lot of people perceive me (as impersonal) because I have had very little contact with them.”

Determination highlights his impersonal approach to achieving success. There is something there that almost makes winning football games more important than family, friends and life beyond the videotape of next week’s opponent.

“I have to have a rush,” Johnson has said. “My whole life is an extreme. I live it that way on purpose. I’m either at the depths of despair or the heights of ecstasy. There’s nothing in the middle.”