Johnson Speaks Truth, Volumes About This One

You probably didn’t hear it, because it wasn’t planted on some Dallas radio talk show, to be beamed off satellites into the living rooms of millions of American households, where hourly Tonya Harding updates could be interrupted for this-breaking-news-bulletin, but Jimmy Johnson has again predicted victory for the Dallas Cowboys in today’s Super Bowl.

He said it at Tuesday’s media day, during a discussion/dissection of the Buffalo Bills’ fragile psyche. It has been preserved on micro-cassette recording tape, played and replayed, in the pursuit of clarity and accuracy, and I quote:

“I think there’s got to be some frustration with Buffalo. They’ve lost four Super Bowls in a row.”

Yes, there’s got to be some frustration in Buffalo. To this point, the Bills have played in only three Super Bowls, lost them all, won’t play another until the sun sets in Atlanta this evening . . . and already Johnson has them down for four.

Freudian slip?

Possibly. Johnson has never met a football game he didn’t think he could win, and with a mouth powered by Diehard battery, that tongue is bound to commit a turnover every now and then.

Nothing but the truth?

So help the Bills. If Johnson was caught looking ahead, he wasn’t alone. Super Bowl XXVIII has become Foregone Conclusion II. In the four-year de-evolution of the Bills as Super Bowl contenders, their pre-kickoff chances have looked something like this:

XXV: The better team.

XXVI: Evenly matched.

XXVII: The lesser team, though Dallas is young and unproven and possibly ripe for an ambush, though, then again, this is Buffalo we’re talking about.

XXVIII: Blindfold and cigarette?

Buffalo’s margin of Super Bowl defeat has grown exponentially, from one point to 13 points to 35 points to what? The league record for biggest championship-game blowout is 73-0, Chicago over Washington, 1940. The Super Bowl record for biggest blowout is 55-10, San Francisco over Denver, early 1990.

Keep those numbers handy today, because with the Bills on one side of the football and Johnson (“If we’ve got 41 points, I want 51”) on the other, they could serve as helpful reference material.

In a perfect world, a team coached by Marv Levy would be able to beat a team coached by Johnson. Levy is the Super Bowl’s foremost tragic figure, a likable, sensitive, good-humored, highly intelligent man who in no way deserves the cruel fate he has been dealt.

Levy’s daily sessions with the media were free-form parlor discussions, with the conversation roaming from Dickens to Patton to the Battle of the Bulge to the no-huddle offense to the ethical treatment of animals.

And he wasn’t referring to the endangered buffalo.

Levy remembered when he was “about 12 years old and went out in the woods with some people, and they shot a bird. And I looked at that bird and thought, ‘Why do we come out here and call it fun to kill this creature, who was as happy as I was when I got up this morning?’ I just don’t understand that.”

Levy is one coach who has studied football and has studied the great battles of history and can tell the difference between the two. He talked about a Bills fan who calls his radio show every week to chide the coach for not taking the game seriously enough.

Every week, the fan tells Levy, “Coach, you’re not doing the right thing. You’ve got to tell your players football is war, this is war, I’m telling you.”

Each time, Levy would tell the caller he’s wrong, football isn’t even in the same ballpark with war, until last week. Then, Levy told him, “I’ve done you a disservice. I checked back in history and interviewed a bunch of guys who landed on the beaches of Iwo Jima and Normandy, and when they went in, they were all yelling, ‘This is football!’ ”

Johnson, on the other hand, could have been that caller. In his view, the world is flat, green, 100 yards long and striped with chalk. His social sphere is about as big as the diamond-loaded Super Bowl ring on his left hand, because the game is the only thing that matters, and “I don’t want to go to a party where some lady in a big bouffant hairdo is asking me what’s the name of my quarterback.”

Johnson spent most of his Super Bowl week talking up Jimmy Johnson, in some shape or form.

See this ring here? Big, isn’t it? “By the way,” Johnson says, “I had a large, large part in designing this ring. And I designed the national championship ring at Miami . . . Put a flawless three-karat Marquis in my Miami ring. I bought it myself, by the way. That ring is worth more than $20,000.

“So, if any jeweler out there needs any assistance or advice . . . “

When a Charlotte television crew informed Johnson that the owner of the expansion Panthers is predicting a Super Bowl title within 10 years, Johnson shot back, “Good for you, happy for Charlotte.” Then he fired off his resume. “Now, if they offer me $10 million to coach their team. Give me a new franchise with an open checkbook. I’ll beat their prediction.”

In less than 10 years?

“ Much less.”

Welcome to the real world.

Here, professional football championships are won with swagger, obsession, tunnel vision and a gluttonous accumulation of talent. Talk to Levy, and you sense he could have been many things in this life--historian, fiction writer, English professor. Talk to Johnson and you know he was born to do this and only this--coach the Dallas Cowboys.

The difference is reflected in the two teams. Levy’s Bills are smart and sensitive, which is why the Buffalo jokes and the national Anybody But The Bills sentiment truly seems to bother them. They ought to be loose--it can’t get any worse, right?--but they were on the defensive all week here.

The Cowboys, meanwhile, are faster, quicker, stronger and cockier, because Johnson designed it that way. Hate us, love us, good for you, happy for Charlotte, we couldn’t care less. Levy worries about his players and the emotional fallout from another defeat today. Johnson sees a player nodding off in a team meeting and cuts him.

It’s an unkind world, and life isn’t fair, and in this game, nothing is well-rounded, not even the ball.

Dallas 38, Buffalo 13.