Johnson’s Hire Is a Hair-Raiser for Rest of NFL

Today is a good hair day in Miami, where Jimmy Johnson and Pat Riley are now coaching, each making a fortune. A little dab will do ya.

Speculation is calling them the highest-paid coaches in the history of American sport, with Riley making ends meet with a reported $3 million a year to coach Miami Heat basketball and Johnson bagging a minimum of two mil to coach Dolphin football, a task he formally undertook Thursday. No hurricane of any strength will curl a strand on either head.

As good as it is to see Jimmy the Grease back in coaching, I hate to see him leave the media. His work for Fox and HBO reminded me that a football coach can be both smart and funny, even in a Hawaiian shirt. Very few in his profession were as from-the-hip as J.J., who once said of a certain lazy player, “I’ve caught fish that perspired more than him.”

Johnson’s new blockbuster deal with owner Wayne Huizenga brings him back where he belongs, with headphones around his shellac. Back when he parted company with Dallas, the owner there, Jerry Jones, had the gall to say that any of 500 other guys could coach the Cowboys every bit as well as Jimmy Johnson had. I guess 499 of them were unavailable before he got to Barry Switzer.

As a strategist, idealist, exhibitionist, visionary, you name it, Johnson is a natural-born football coach. The man has too much to contribute to this sport before retreating to a life of TV-booth punditry and deep-sea angling in the Florida Keys. If anybody could replace Tom Landry, he could, and if anybody can replace Don Shula, he can.

At last year’s Super Bowl week in Miami, he was sort of an insider looking in, not so much out of the game as in the wings. Night after night, there sat Jimmy, on a stool at his favorite stone-crab joint, cool as a breeze and shooting it with the customers. One night, I saw a guy go up to him and inquire, “Coach, when you comin’ back?”

“Where’d I go?” Jimmy asked.

Out of coaching was the obvious answer, but everybody knew, or sensed anyway, that Johnson was hardly likely to spend the rest of his adult life yapping with Terry Bradshaw and Nick Buoniconti, matching them guffaw for guffaw. The word coveted has been used to convey Jimmy’s interest in the Miami job, but naturally he had to wait until Shula went away to that two-bedroom condo in the pantheon of the gods.

Almost immediately, the fears of Dolphin fans everywhere were allayed, and the opinions of opponents were similar to the one expressed by Emmitt Smith, the coach’s former touchdown maker in Dallas, who said, “This makes the Dolphins a very dangerous team. Jimmy’s going to go in there and trim out all the fat, the guys just sitting around collecting checks. If I were some of those guys, I’d be a little worried.”

If you have read about Shula’s situation toward the end, you are aware that certain players didn’t respect/fear the coach the way they always did/should. Those players are no longer Dolphin-safe. Johnson is a kick-tail kind of leader who cleaned house in Dallas, put out the trash, got rid of guys whose loyalty obscured their value, endured one miserable season or two, then won a couple of hard-rock diamond rings.

Once he knew Shula was out and as soon as he met with Huizenga, everything happened in a hurry for Johnson, who is making a habit of succeeding the Mount Rushmore of coaching. (Where next? Penn State?) He said before taking the job, “The only way I’d ever go back into coaching was if I looked into the future and saw a Super Bowl,” which probably explains why he showed little interest in the Raider or Ram jobs.

Housecleaning is imminent in Miami, where the new coach was already behind a desk Thursday, leafing through paperwork. What was it Jimmy Hoffa said about getting rid of people your first day as boss, so those you keep will be appreciative right from the start? Watch how quickly Johnson trims that fat. The Dolphin defensive coordinator, Tom Olivadotti, seems a likely lame mammal, for example.

“Tom Outtofajobba,” he was called by the host of the Fabulous Sports Babe syndicated radio program Thursday.

Johnson’s new contract makes him the highest-paid coach in NFL history, if, as is guessed, his pact with captain video Huizenga is one of those “and a dollar more” deals that pays him a wee bit more than Shula was making. In inheriting a team, rather than that mess he had to clean up in Dallas, it would seem Johnson could be in the Super Bowl picture a year from now, particularly with Dan Marino not having many more shots at one.

No doubt his presence will be duly noted in Dallas, where the Cowboy coach, Barry Switzer, was already caterwauling this week that, “If we do win this thing [Super Bowl XXX], I’ll tell you the theme: They’ll say we did it in spite of me.”

True, because most of our mamas told us to speak the truth.

Johnson’s reputation bugs Switzer, who names no names, but raves on, “I never got into this business looking to be a hero, or get the guru label, or the genius label. It ain’t never been my desire for anybody to call me a legend. That’s real important to some of the other guys. Just not me. I’m not some . . . phony. I’m not an actor.”

Well put. And he can prove it at Super Bowl XXXI, when the Cowboys go head to head with the Dolphins in the game between a genuine genius and the coach who couldn’t spell either word if you spotted him the G-E-N.