That person recalls that when Sale was married to the billionaire Jets owner and Band-Aid heir, “Woody used to joke with me about her frugality. He said she would go over the telephone bill for the household. Woody would say, ‘It’s just nickels and dimes.’ But Sale never grasped that. So money has bothered her all along regarding Ahmad. Sale got really sort of fed up and bent out of shape.”
In mid-January of 2013, the New York Post published a gossip column item under the headline “Jets Ex-wife’s Marriage Woe.” The story stated that there was “trouble in paradise” for the couple, that their union was “on the rocks,” and that she was worried about “the influence of his friends, described as “known adulterers” Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.
But people close to Sale and Ahmad scoffed at some of the report.
As one of them asserted, “Ahmad likes to maintain the aura that his star hasn’t dimmed and so he hobnobs with Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.”
There was, however, no evidence of any womanizing as the gossip item seemed to imply.
“Sale never mentioned any other woman in Ahmad’s life,” maintains the family source. “She did talk about him traveling a lot. And when he does, he likes to hang around babes and party. But Sale complained that she wasn’t included in any of those adventures, which are sometimes work-related, or celebrity golf-related.”
With the relationship deteriorating, Rashad moved out of their shared homes that Sale owned in Manhattan and Florida in the early winter of 2012, and she began letting family members and close friends know in e-mails and telephone calls what had happened between them.
Among those she contacted was her former mother-in-law, Betty Johnson, letting her and the others know that she was “very unhappy, stressed, and anxious, and wanted to reconcile with Ahmad and re-adopt the sort of loving relationship they had when they first got together. Sale talked for two hours in some detail that was way too much information for Betty,” one of those family members says.
But still, another divorce seemed in the future for the Johnson dynasty.
Surprisingly, Woody’s mother continued to communicate with her ex-daughter-in-law, mainly because she felt a kinship with her granddaughters—Jaime, who suffers from lupus, and Daisy, who had been taking medication for a blood clotting disorder that began in her late teens when she suffered a deep vein thrombosis after a long plane trip to South America to visit a polo player she had been dating. Moreover, Betty had completely embraced emotionally disturbed and diabetic Casey’s adopted healthy daughter, Ava-Monroe.
When there was a party in the summer of 2012 for a gaggle of grandchildren—the next generation of the Johnson dynasty—Ava was included, and it’s believed that the de facto matriarch attended.
The event had been thrown by her youngest son, Christopher, at his home in Easthampton.
But, notes a family member who attended, “Woody wasn’t there, and it’s pretty clear he has no interest in recognizing Ava, or acknowledging her—that she’s just another thorn in his side concerning Casey.”
* * *
In the spring and summer of 2012, Woody’s life was wrapped up with the future of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for whom Woody had raised millions of campaign dollars, and the upcoming Jets season.
A few weeks before his sixty-fifth birthday, he was in Palm Beach for the annual meeting of NFL owners, and he was gloating. He had just authorized his team’s acquisition of the controversial Christian pigskin wunderkind Tim Tebow, the Bible-thumping quarterback who boasted that he had “a relationship with Jesus Christ.”
“TebowMania,” the media had called it, and it had swept the Western world, with supporters imitating what became the good-looking twenty-four-year-old’s prayer-like signature bow of victory on one knee.
Woody, the businessman, and his team executives, felt it was absolute brilliance to have acquired him. As they saw it, Tebow would sell everything from tickets to T-shirts to lucrative TV advertising, and the Jets would be closely watched from coast to coast.
But whether Tebow would help the team win games and finally get Gang Green to the Super Bowl was another story that didn’t even seem relevant.
To blunt criticism, Woody declared, “Our main line of business is winning games. It’s a good decision [acquiring Tebow]. I will take full accountability for that.”
But sportswriters and pundits saw Tebow as a polarizing force who had had a lucky streak during the Denver Broncos 8–8 2011 season—the same sad win-loss record as those same old Jets—and they were using the same description often used about the Johnson dynasty itself to characterize the Band-Aid heir’s team:
“The Jets are a dysfunctional team, bringing the circus to town,” declared the outspoken veteran New York sports radio commentator Mike Francesa.
The New York Post’s banner headline about the Jets and Tebow’s acquisition aptly declared: “Dysfunction Junction.”
But Woody’s sense was: “You can never have too much Tebow.”
Like Tebow and the Jets, Mitt Romney was a sure winner, a confident Woody was boasting. In the Hamptons during the Independence Day holiday of 2012—just four months before the November presidential election—Woody joined with several other conservative Republican billionaires—among them Revlon chairman Ronald O. Perelman and industrialist David H. Koch—to host fancy fundraisers that brought in at least three million dollars to Romney’s already bulging coffers of an estimated $100 million.
Woody was likely hoping that if his man won the Oval Office away from President Obama he would receive some sort of honorary position in the administration as a reward for all of his hard work bringing in stacks of campaign money. It had happened in the past. For his fundraising work for President George W. Bush, Woody got to serve on the President’s Export Council. An honorary position, its members advise on international trade, an area in which Woody probably had little interest, or knowledge. And he had been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group that consists of some 4,500 members. But both positions looked good next to his name in press clippings, and a new one with a Romney-Ryan administration would further add to his political power broker prestige.
While Woody could raise big money for Romney, there were entities in the media such as the snarky sports site Deadspin that questioned his political IQ. One such criticism surfaced in the wake of the 2012, 5–4 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare, with the surprising positive vote being made by the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Right after the decision Woody was the host for yet another Romney fundraiser. In introducing the candidate, the billionaire Republican asserted that Roberts gave Romney a rallying call.
“I think Judge Roberts did this intentionally,” declared Woody. “He’s really revved up our base from what we’re able to gather. He’s really revved us up.”
Deadspin made note of Woody’s words under a headline that proclaimed “Jets Owner Woody Johnson Is an Expert on Constitutional Law, in His Mind,” and went on to derisively call him “a complete moron” and “a complete dolt, or else he’s a demented would-be propagandist, who thinks his crackpot version of events will inspire his fellow big-money donors to donate even bigger money … Woody Johnson has checked out of reality.”
Woody and Romney made a good team and shared a billionaire’s personality trait: both were intensely secretive, especially about their finances, which was underscored when Romney sparked a campaign controversy by declining to disclose all of his tax returns and other details about his wealth. One area of dispute was Romney’s secret holdings in the Cayman Islands, similar to what had gotten Woody in a bind in the past because of his involvement with a tax haven in the Isle of Man that resulted in him having to ante up seventeen million dollars to the IRS. The New York Times chastised Woody’s candidate in a strong editorial headlined, “Mr. Romney’s Financial Black Hole.” Under pressure, he eventually offered up details about his 2011 return.
A curious thing hap
pened during Romney’s 2012 run for the White House job that surely must have rubbed his big money man, Woody, the wrong way. The same day that Obama publicly stated that he supported gay marriage, The Washington Post revealed that during Romney’s prep school days in the mid-1960s, he had attacked an effeminate classmate with a pair of scissors and cut off his recently bleached blond hair, an act that years later in the era of gay rights probably would be considered a hate crime.
Romney’s reported prank echoed the humiliation Woody’s late brother Keith had suffered from a few bullies in the mid-1960s at Millbrook School, the Johnson siblings’ prep school, when he was called names and made fun of because of his effeminate mannerisms. Moreover, Woody’s best friend, Guy Vicino, had been a flamboyant gay man who had died of AIDS, which had been devastating for Woody.
Unless Woody was completely insensitive to the past, Romney’s reported prank must have had him questioning the character of the man he hoped would be the next commander in chief, especially after Romney apologized for the detestable act, but also claimed, incredibly, that he didn’t remember it. But with Woody, a father who had cut himself off from a very troubled daughter, anything seemed possible.
As 2012 neared an end, it was mostly a professional washout for Woody. Despite his efforts as a GOP power broker, his vaunted candidate, Romney, for whom he had worked so hard, was soundly defeated by Obama, just as Woody’s previous Republican choice, Senator John McCain, had been tromped by the president four years earlier.
Woody must have been devastated by the victory of Obama, whom he detested, and it must have caught him by surprise, so confident was he and the Republican party as a whole of a Romney win.
In Woody’s eyes, Romney was a lot different than the way many people perceived, which was mainly as a straightlaced, rich, vanilla type of guy. “He’s very, very funny. He’s a riot. Mitt loves to tell a joke,” he claimed to a reporter during the failed campaign. Plus, he added, Romney “believes in the principles of the country”—despite the fact that in a private talk to fat-cat supporters, Romney had essentially written off as losers 47 percent of the country’s populace, much of the same group that would help to reelect Obama.
Moreover, Woody felt a Romney victory was more important than seeing his Jets have a winning season, which shocked sportswriters, and infuriated rabid Jets fans. He had offered his feelings about Romney versus the Jets to Bloomberg TV just a day after “Gang Green” was trounced by the San Francisco 49ers 34–0 in late September.
By mid-season, the Jets had won only three of nine games; the Sporting News in early November released a poll that rated Woody’s beloved coach, Rex Ryan, as the “most overrated coach in the NFL”; The New York Times soon followed with a major story, blaming Woody in part for the team’s “talent drain,” and calling his support of Tim Tebow a “publicity stunt” to counter the Jets’ “own miserable 2011 season.”
The Times headline declared, “In Analyzing Jets’ Failings, Start at the Top.”
Adding insult to injury, the Daily News ignited a firestorm in mid-November—with less than half the season still to go—when it quoted unnamed Jets players saying that Tebow was “terrible” and “nothing more than a gimmick.” The New York Post followed by calling Ryan “delusional” and describing the team as being in “a full-blown crisis,” and noted that Woody “adores Ryan and the attention he draws to the franchise, and had no interest in firing him” over the locker room catfights and mounting Jets losses.
Woody had been so involved with the Romney campaign that since late August he hadn’t met with the wolf pack of aggressive reporters who covered the Jets and who had become hypercritical of the team’s management and its embarrassing record. But with another explosive round of negative stories he spoke out for the first time a week before Thanksgiving, meeting with the press on the sidelines at his MetLife stadium.
He emphatically denied assertions that Tebow was hired for publicity value—and to sell tickets and “hot dogs.”
Criticizing the media, he called it a “phony story,” and claimed, “My job, one, two, and three, is to win games. That’s why I got into football.… That’s what my passion is. That’s what I want to do. It’s not to sell PSLs [personal seat licenses] or hot dogs.”
And, with a slap at the team, he declared: “I didn’t sign up for a 3–6 season. I’m not happy about it. Yet I am optimistic.” More losses were to come.
For Woody, the “same old Jets” refrain was surely ringing in his ears, and, worse, he had to face yet another four years of the same old Obama.
The disastrous, laughable, circus-like 2012 season—with the team failing to make the playoffs for the second year running, which is what the game’s all about next to the Super Bowl—must have been a nightmare for Woody Johnson.
He, who was so enamored and proud of being an NFL owner; he, who had turned a $635 million investment a dozen years earlier into a gold mine, earning him respect, identity, and social gravitas, was, at sixty-five, being laughed at and scorned behind his back by other football brain trusts, and publicly by a powerful, out-for-blood sports media.
The Jets’ rabid fans were quickly abandoning ship, underscored by a devoted cheerleader, a character known as “Fireman Ed,” who stalked out of MetLife Stadium with a promise never to return after many seasons of stoking the rabble.
Legendary sports announcer Marv Albert described one of the Jets’ final games of 2012 as “lots of empty seats.” This, however, probably put only a very slight dent in Woody’s billions.
Still, as the owner of the Jets, Woody had received more public criticism for his executive and leadership abilities than had any other member of the Johnson dynasty regarding their business interests.
The buck clearly stopped with Woody—not with his egotistical head coach of four years, Rex Ryan, or with his general manager and close associate of fifteen years, Mike Tannenbaum, who helped build the losing team with Woody’s money, but with no depth; nor with his failed offensive coordinator, Tony “The Wildcat” Sparano, who resembled a gum-chewing Yassar Arafat, or Woody’s bumbling, fumbling, interception-prone, benched-for-one-game, multimillion-dollar franchise quarterback Mark Sanchez; nor with his much publicized, but rarely played, backup, the God-fearing Tim Tebow, who had been hyped as the team’s Messiah. As Woody had stated, hiring Tebow was “a good decision.”
But was the bizarre refusal to let Tebow actually play with any frequency some sort of payback to embarrass him? In a franchise in which anything seemed to be acceptable, it was quite possible. Some conspiratorial types thought Tebow was mostly stuck on the sidelines, a clipboard holder, because he had helped kick the Jets out of the playoffs at the close of the team’s terrible 2011 season when he ran a twenty-yard touchdown for a Denver win. The Jets’ loss of that crucial game reportedly was so shocking to the divaesque Ryan that he thought he was having a heart attack when it was only a bad case of indigestion.
It was clear by the end of the 2012 season that the frustrated Tebow wanted a real football life for himself, far away from the Jets.
“They took a year out of his life,” declared the popular New York sports radio talk show host Steve Somers, clearly upset. “I will believe he was misled and lied to [about how he would be used]. Instead of us talking about how awful the season was … we’re talking about Tebow.”
The Jets management, he asserted, “did the Pinocchio with Tebow.”
At year’s end, The New York Times called the Tebow situation “a public relations fiasco perhaps unequaled in N.F.L. history … the combination of on-field fizzle and off-field frenzy has made the Tebow story an unmitigated disaster for the Jets.”
In the nation’s capital, where Woody Johnson’s political nemesis, President Obama, had to battle the GOP leadership to stave off the so-called fiscal cliff of 2012, the Redskins had a genuine winning rookie quarterback, Robert Griffin III (called RG3), who led them into the post-season. The Washington Post quoted an ESPN writer as declaring, “Clearl
y, the Jets are afraid of Tebow, afraid that he’d succeed. That, of course, would fuel a chorus of second-guessers, fans, and media types screaming that Tebow should’ve [been allowed to play more]. The Jets want no part of that cauldron.”
It all came down to Woody as the owner, the moneyman, the ultimate decision maker, who claimed he lived and loved football ever since his Tebow-like, bench-warming prep school days.
There were unrealistic calls from some in the sports media for Woody to put his losing team on the block. As Somers colleague, Evan Roberts, declared on popular WFAN radio: “The Jets need a new owner.… This franchise needs a cleansing.… Something’s rotten in Denmark.”
Woody’s Gang Green had become irrelevant, a laughing stock, They were, it seemed, like the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers, and Borat all morphed into one Barnum & Bailey sideshow.
At a press conference near the end of 2012, a defeated Rex Ryan was asked whether the season was the most bizarre he had ever lived through. His response, for once, was reasonably articulate, and to the point: “I would say that’s pretty accurate … and we’ve had some strange ones.”
Emotional, and appearing to tear up, he subsequently denied news reports that he wanted out unless “Mr. Johnson” anted up more of his fortune to build a better, winning team.
A day after the Jets mercifully finished 2012 with an embarrassing 6–10 record—Woody was conspicuously absent from the visiting owner’s box when the Buffalo Bills won—the owner began taking action; he started by firing Tannenbaum, but keeping Ryan on, at least for 2013, and more heads were expected to roll.
“Our 2012 season was a disappointment to all of us,” Woody said on the morning of New Year’s Eve, not meeting reporters face-to-face but rather by issuing a prepared statement. “My goal every year as owner is to build a team that wins consistently. This year we failed to achieve that goal.… Like all Jets fans, I am disappointed with this year’s results.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 44