by Myers, Gary
“I was hurt when Jerry said five hundred coaches could’ve taken that team to the Super Bowl. Are there five hundred coaches out there who could have made the personnel decisions and put together a team that won two Super Bowls starting from scratch?”
Jones’s perspective then was, “He knew that I knew other people could be successful coaching the football team. I feel some of his enthusiasm had diminished, and our differences were going to be magnified and very visible. The minute I saw we weren’t working together, I wanted to make a change. I didn’t want to invest any more time with him.”
Switzer took the Cowboys to the NFC title game in his first season, but after having beaten the 49ers the previous two years in the championship game, the Cowboys lost this time. Switzer did win the Super Bowl the next season when Dallas beat the Steelers, giving the Cowboys three titles in four years. If Johnson had remained, who knows how many they would have won? It wasn’t simply that Johnson was a better coach than Switzer, but with Johnson gone, Jones was no longer the general manager in title only. He was really the general manager. That was not good for the Cowboys.
“There is nothing you can trade me for having those five years we had together and what we went through together and how it worked out,” Jones once said. “There is nothing you can give me to have one more day of it.”
If time heals all wounds, it also changes perceptions. Nearly twenty years after their painful and public divorce, Jimmy and Jerry are buddies again. Jones sends his private plane to Florida to pick up Johnson so that they can meet in Las Vegas for big boxing events, one of Johnson’s passions. It’s just that they couldn’t stand the sight of each other after working together for five years.
“It wasn’t really a me and Jerry thing,” Johnson now insists.
When Jones bought the Cowboys, in addition to saying how valuable Johnson was to the franchise, he insisted he would not have bought the team if Johnson was not going to be his coach. Maybe he wouldn’t have bought the team if Bright had insisted that he keep Landry, but there was no way Bright was going to make that a condition of the sale. He disliked Landry. But the idea that Jones was going to give up his dream of owning America’s Team if his former teammate and casual friend from Arkansas was not going to be the coach was never put to the test. We will never find out. But it’s hard to fathom Jones walking away from the deal if he couldn’t get Johnson. As he said, there were five hundred coaches out there who could have had the same success.
Two decades later, Johnson says he was going to leave the Cowboys before the 1994 draft even before the blowup with Jones. Is that revisionist history? Johnson saving face? There was never any indication he was going to leave until Jones insulted him that night in Orlando.
“I’ve always been kind of a gypsy. I never stayed anywhere longer than five years. I was ready to move to south Florida,” Johnson said. “I’d already bought a place in the Florida Keys.”
He said he had his Corvette driven from Dallas to Atlanta for the Super Bowl so that it was closer to its final destination in the Keys. The driver was William Wesley, who years later became known as World Wide Wes. He became close to many NBA stars, including LeBron James. “I put him on our sideline. Look at the picture when they are throwing the Gatorade on me in the Super Bowl in Atlanta,” Johnson said. “He’s got a coat and tie on. He’s right there next to me on the sideline.”
That was Johnson’s way of saying he was gone from the Cowboys. If the Corvette was headed to his home in Tavernier, so was he. At the time, the thought was that Johnson would get antsy after making a run at a third consecutive title. But now he says he was planning to leave even before that night in Orlando. What would have happened if Jones hadn’t said some silly stuff in the bar at 3 a.m.?
“I’d have left,” Johnson said. “I already had it marked on the calendar when I was leaving before that even happened. I was going to give them time to prepare before the draft. And I think that probably had a little bit to do with Jerry’s attitude. Kind of like a jilted lover. I don’t think he knew it. He might have sensed it.”
The Cowboys’ headquarters is a sprawling one-level building. Jones occupied Tex Schramm’s old office on the management side of the building. Johnson had Landry’s old office in the football operations side of the building. The place was not big enough for the two of them to coexist.
If Johnson was indeed not planning to come back in 1994, it would have made more sense for him to walk away right after the Super Bowl the way Bill Walsh did with the 49ers after beating the Bengals in January 1989. “The only thing I hate about it is I think it really put a bad taste in the mouths of all the players,” Johnson said. “Troy and I have talked about it. Michael and all of them. They felt not only did I leave Jerry, I left them. So with the players, I think it really strained the relationship. Troy comes down here to the house on occasion. We spend a lot of time together. One night he even got almost angry talking about it. That’s the only thing that I regret.”
Ultimately, the egos of Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson tore the Cowboys apart. Switzer won a Super Bowl, but Dallas won despite the coach, who was just a caretaker. Jones and Johnson had a great thing going. The Cowboys of the ’90s might have been remembered as the best team of all time if they had been able to keep the management infrastructure in place.
“I was ready to leave,” Johnson said. “I had done my deal. I was ready for something else.”
He had done his deal. The Herschel Walker deal. The greatest trade in NFL history. The deal of the century.
Sean Payton, Roger Goodell, and Drew Brees were all smiles the morning after the Saints defeated the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami following the 2009 season. Just two years later, Goodell suspended Payton for the entire 2012 season after a league investigation determined the Saints had been setting bounties on opposing players for three seasons and Payton didn’t stop it. Getty Images
Joe Gibbs might have done the best coaching job of his Hall of Fame career late in the 2007 season after Sean Taylor, his best defensive player, was murdered in a home invasion. Gibbs prevented his players from emotionally falling apart, and they honored the memory of their teammate by making a run that earned them a playoff spot.
Courtesy of the Washington Redskins
Robert Kraft thought he hit the lottery when he bought his hometown Patriots in 1994 and inherited iconic coach Bill Parcells. He soon found out the view of Parcells up close was much different from what he saw from a distance as a Patriots fan.
John Iacono/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images
Kraft really wanted to promote Bill Belichick when Parcells left for the Jets in 1997, but felt he needed a clean break from the Parcells regime, so he hired former Jets coach Pete Carroll, at the time the defensive coordinator of the 49ers. Kraft was very fond of Carroll, but the team regressed in each of his three seasons and Kraft fired him and finally hired Belichick.
Sporting News via Getty Images
Kraft and Belichick lifted three Super Bowl trophies together as New England dominated the early part of the new millennium. But the Spygate scandal in 2007 rocked the Patriots and led to Kraft calling Belichick a “real schmuck,” when Belichick told Kraft the surveillance was not much help to New England.
Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images
Lawrence Taylor tested the patience of Bill Parcells with his drug issues, but the greatest defensive player in NFL history and one of the best coaches of his era were quite a team. Parcells would not have won two Super Bowls without LT, and Taylor might have only been great instead of incredible if he didn’t have the Tuna pushing him. Getty Images
It was a proud day for Tampa coach Tony Dungy when President Bill Clinton visited the Bucs in 2000. Dungy and his thirteen-year-old son, James, presented Clinton with a Bucs T-shirt when he stopped by training camp for a surprise visit. Five years later, not far from where he met the president, James Dungy committed suicide by hanging himself in his apartment. Getty Images
Eagles coach
Andy Reid and former Bucs and Colts coach Tony Dungy shared an interest in Michael Vick after he was released from prison on 2009. The problems Reid and Dungy had with their own sons helped lead them to Vick. They knew Vick needed a second chance. And Vick eventually led Dungy and Reid to each other.
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Eagles
Broncos quarterback John Elway and coach Mike Shanahan celebrate the Broncos’ victory over the Packers in Super Bowl XXIII. The next year, they would beat the Falcons and their nemesis, Dan Reeves, in the Super Bowl in the final game of Elway’s career.
Copyright © Eric Lars Bakke/Denver Broncos
When Jimmy Johnson was hired to coach the Cowboys in 1989, his only assets were Herschel Walker and the first pick in the draft. He selected Troy Aikman in the draft, but a little over one month into the season he traded Walker to the Vikings in a cleverly constructed one-sided deal that helped turn the Cowboys into Super Bowl champs. Johnson used one of the picks to move up in the 1990 draft to take Emmitt Smith, who finished his career as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher. Getty Images
Broncos coach John Fox was thrilled to ride the wave of Tebowmania into the 2011 playoffs with a series of incredible last-minute victories. But John Elway and Fox acted quickly to trade Tebow to the Jets after they signed Peyton Manning, who had been released by the Colts. Copyright © Eric Lars Bakke/Denver Broncos
Fox jumped around Elway’s office as Manning was telling Elway he had decided to sign with the Broncos after the Colts released him. Fox knew the pressure was now on him to make it work with one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, but it was a challenge he was eager to accept.
Copyright © Eric Lars Bakke/Denver Broncos
Dick Vermeil turned around a moribund program in Philadelphia, but burned himself out doing it. He quit the Eagles after the 1982 season to regroup, which took much longer than anticipated. After turning down several opportunities, he accepted the Rams job in 1997 and won the Super Bowl in his third season.
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Eagles
Jets coach Rex Ryan and Mark Sanchez have enjoyed a father-son relationship, but Pops wasn’t too happy when his quarterback was caught eating a hot dog on the bench during a 2009 game in Oakland, which Ryan considered a sign of disrespect to the Raiders. Sanchez had to be a little confused when Ryan traded for Tim Tebow in 2012, less than two weeks after Sanchez signed a contract extension. Boston Globe via Getty Images
Giants coach Tom Coughlin puckers up and plants a kiss on the Vince Lombardi Trophy after New York defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI, the second time in five seasons Coughlin defeated Bill Belichick in the Super Bowl. After the game, Coughlin was hugging Flava Flav, a hip-hop star he had never heard of before wrapping his arms around him. Getty Images
TRICK OR TREAT
Mike Shanahan had nowhere to turn. He was stuck right in the middle of one of the most bitter coach-quarterback feuds in NFL history: Dan Reeves versus John Elway.
It’s virtually impossible to succeed if the coach and the quarterback have little use for each other. You can have the creative tension that existed between Bill Walsh and Joe Montana and still win because of the respect they had for each other. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady don’t have to spend their summer weekends sailing on the waters off picturesque Cape Cod to win three Super Bowls, but no coach and quarterback think more alike. Jimmy Johnson and Troy Aikman were sparring partners until Johnson, who has an affinity for fish tanks, realized that Aikman was becoming interested in having his own aquarium. “I have a saltwater fish tank Jimmy helped me put together,” Aikman said. They bonded over goldfish and guppies and won two Super Bowls together.
It’s not necessary for the coach and the quarterback to find a hobby that each enjoys so that they have something to discuss while dissecting the game plan, but they can’t be stabbing each other in the back. Few situations have been as contentious as Reeves and Elway. One of the great achievements in the 1980s was Denver getting to three Super Bowls with Elway and Reeves barely being able to stand the sight of each other. Of course, they lost all three of those Super Bowls over a four-year period to the Giants, Redskins, and 49ers by the combined score of 136–40. That was humiliating and an unsightly blotch on Elway’s record that was not erased until the final two years of his career.
Elway once described his relationship with Reeves as “the worst.” He didn’t like his offense. He didn’t like him. Reeves’s conservative style would keep Elway handcuffed until the fourth quarter, when he would let him loose and tell him to go win the game. Elway invariably responded to the pressure by bailing out Reeves and rallying Denver to a victory. A story in Sports Illustrated during training camp in the summer of 1993, the Broncos’ first after Reeves was fired, said Elway had rallied the Broncos to thirty-one game-saving drives in the fourth quarter in the ten years he played for Reeves. “That was our philosophy,” Elway said.
Elway, who had the greatest arm the NFL has ever seen, was naturally frustrated. His statistics were dwarfed by those of Miami’s Dan Marino and Buffalo’s Jim Kelly, the other two future Hall of Fame quarterbacks from the quarterback class of 1983, and that bugged him. If Reeves had let Elway be Elway, he could have been setting all those passing records instead of Marino. Then again, Marino made it to the Super Bowl in his second season and lost, and that was his only appearance during his sensational seventeen-year career. And he played for Don Shula, the all-time winningest coach in NFL history.
“The last three years have been hell,” Elway told Sports Illustrated that summer. “I know that I would not have been back here if Dan Reeves had been here. It wasn’t worth it to me. I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t any fun, and I got tired of working with him.”
When Reeves was informed at the Giants’ training camp of Elway’s remarks, he responded, “Just tell him it wasn’t exactly heaven for me, either. One of these days, I hope he grows up. Maybe he’ll mature sometime.”
Shanahan was the offensive coordinator at the University of Florida when Reeves hired him to be his quarterback coach in 1984, Elway’s second year in the league. The Broncos had pulled off a spectacular trade one week after the 1983 draft to acquire Elway, considered the greatest quarterback prospect of all time. The Colts had the first overall pick, but Elway was adamant that he wouldn’t play in Baltimore. It had nothing to do with the city or the team. He didn’t want to play for volatile coach Frank Kush.
Elway’s father, Jack, the head coach at San Jose State at the time, steered his son away from Kush. Colts general manager Ernie Accorsi knew his team needed an elite quarterback to have any chance of winning a championship and didn’t want to trade Elway, whose only viable recourse would be to sit out the year and wait for the 1984 draft. Elway became an outfielder in the New York Yankees system—he spent six weeks playing minor league ball for the Yankees after his junior year at Stanford—and threatened to play baseball that summer and take the year off from football. That was not what Elway wanted—he knew his future was not in baseball—but he had no desire to play for the Colts. Accorsi was prepared to call his bluff.
“I had made up my mind unless I got the greatest compensation in the history of the league—three number ones, with two in one year, and two number twos—I wasn’t going to make the trade,” Accorsi said.
Elway put together a wish list of ten teams. The Cowboys were on the list, but Accorsi asked Tom Landry, Tex Schramm, and Gil Brandt for future Hall of Fame defensive tackle Randy White, a local Baltimore favorite who had played at the University of Maryland; quarterback Danny White, who had guided Dallas to consecutive NFC championship games in his first two years after taking over for Roger Staubach; and two number one picks. It couldn’t hurt to ask. Dallas thought about it but ultimately refused to part with Randy White, and that ended the talks.
The Chargers and Raiders put together impressive offers. San Diego owned three number one picks (the fifth, twentieth, and twenty-second) but would not give up the best of the three. Deal kil
ler. The Raiders, selecting twenty-sixth, needed a higher pick to satisfy the Colts. They thought they had a deal completed to acquire the Bears’ pick at number six, which they would have sent to Baltimore along with their other choice. But when the Bears demanded defensive end Howie Long in return, the Raiders dropped out. If Accorsi had gotten Chicago’s pick, he was going to draft Marino.
The 1983 draft started at seven in the morning. Before things got under way, Colts owner Robert Irsay came to Accorsi with a trade proposal he had just received from New England: All Pro guard John Hannah and a swap of first-round picks. The Patriots were picking fifteenth. “I told him there would be two press conferences: one to announce the trade, one to announce my resignation,” Accorsi said.
Five minutes before the draft started, Accorsi told Irsay his plan.
“I’m going to take Elway one second after seven,” he said.
“Go do what you want to do,” Irsay replied.
Accorsi picked Elway and was willing to wait him out. Nothing against the kid, but Accorsi was protecting the franchise. That became irrelevant one week later. Accorsi was sitting on his couch watching an NBA playoff game on television when it was announced that Irsay had traded Elway to Denver. “I called Frank Kush and asked if he was watching because I think they just traded the quarterback,” Accorsi said.
In return, the Colts received tackle Chris Hinton, who had been picked three spots behind Elway, veteran quarterback Mark Herrmann, and a number one pick in 1984, which the Colts used on guard Ron Solt. In addition, Denver owner Edgar Kaiser agreed that the Broncos would play the Colts in preseason games at Mile High Stadium in 1984 and 1985. That meant a lot to Irsay. His fifty–fifty share of the gate receipts was worth $800,000.