Men Will be Boys

By Paul A. Witteman

SOMETIMES IT DOESN'T PAY TO BE A winner.

Just ask Jimmy Johnson, who coached the Dallas Cowboys to overwhelming victories in the past two Super Bowls, then suddenly found himself out of a job last week. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones insisted that the decision to have Johnson disembowel himself was agreed upon "mutually." Johnson, for his part, embraced his old Arkansas college roommate and insisted to the press, "I can sincerely tell you that I feel better today about Jerry Jones as a friend than I have in our entire relationship."

Off camera, Johnson was a bit more candid. "When you have two people as driven and somewhat egotistical as we are, going as we've been for the last five years, you're going to have a natural situation that will be contentious," he told TIME. Tensions started growing at the end of the first two years, he said, as Jones became less preoccupied with the business operation and more with on-the-field matters. "Without question ((Jones)) wanted to be more involved, and I'm accustomed to doing things a certain way. And so that's where it ended up being a problem."

If there is a lesson to be learned from what occurred in a compound the Cowboys call Valley Ranch -- which, naturally, is neither a ranch nor in a valley -- it is not that football has at last been put into proper perspective in Texas. That will not happen in anyone's lifetime. Rather, it is that old- fashioned hubris, envy and ego are as much a part of running a professional football team as calling draw plays on third down and getting dunked with Gatorade.

During their playing days together at the University of Arkansas in the mid- 1960s, Johnson and Jones were not overburdened with talent. Instead, they played clever, which got them as far as the Razorbacks' starting lineup. Then Jones got into oil. In a substantial way. Twenty-five years later he was able to part with $140 million, give or take, in exchange for ownership of the Cowboys. Johnson, on the other hand, slid into coaching, where the remuneration was more modest but the skills perfectly suited to his driven personality. After five years at Oklahoma State, he moved to the University of Miami, where he brought home a national championship in 1988.

The next year Jones asked Johnson to take charge of the Cowboys, replacing the legendary Tom Landry. One of Johnson's first moves was to cut his wife of 26 years. They had long been having problems, but the move to Dallas provided a final push. A spouse, Johnson reportedly told friends, had value to a college coach who needed to make nice with the parents of recruits. To a coach in the pros she was irrelevant.

^ An owner, however, is not. Especially an owner like Jones, who liked to think he had as keen a sense for the nuances of the sport as the man he had hired. And especially on a team that, unlike most in the N.F.L., has no intervening front-office executive -- a general manager or player-personnel chief -- to act as buffer. "I'll try to be very subtle in my influence," Jones said before a college-player draft. "I can handle Jerry," Johnson replied. Both were wrong.

It didn't seem to matter during the early, difficult years. Johnson's first Cowboys team finished 1-15; the next year the Cowboys were 7-9. When Dallas made the playoffs in year three, cracks began to appear. Jones and Johnson began squabbling like tots competing for Tinkertoys. Johnson sulked when Jones brought celebrities like Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia onto the field during games at Texas Stadium. After the team's first Super Bowl victory, Jones wrested the championship trophy from Johnson's hand. Troy Aikman was throwing the touchdown passes, and Emmitt Smith was running over defenders. To Jones that was confirmation of his genius as a judge of talent. To Johnson it was affirmation of his skill at devising and executing a perfect strategy.

After the Cowboys' second Super Bowl victory, in January, the tensions boiled over. At an N.F.L. owners' meeting in Orlando two weeks ago, Jones was reportedly offended at Johnson's tepid response to a toast he proposed. Later, after some drinks, Jones pouted that there were "500 coaches who could have won the Super Bowl with our team." Johnson admits, "I got my feelings hurt by some of his comments," but says the incident was ultimately "beneficial" because "it forced Jerry and me to sit down and be candid about our feelings."

If Jones was looking to assuage Johnson's feelings, he didn't do it by his choice of a replacement. A day after saying goodbye to Johnson, Jones hired Barry Switzer, Johnson's old cross-state rival from Oklahoma University. Switzer, who led Oklahoma to three national championships but left under a cloud of scandal in 1989, has been out of coaching for five years and has never coached in the pros. He is expected to be a more manageable underling for Jones. "Now that the door's open," says Johnson, "he ((Jones)) may become more involved. Switzer will obviously do a lot less than I did."

Johnson, who claims he contemplated "walking away and heading for the beach" even before last week's confrontation, plans a long rest in South Florida before resurfacing, probably as a TV commentator. Switzer, meanwhile, could hardly contain his ecstasy during an overheated press conference after his hiring. "I thought my time had passed," he said. "Who wouldn't want to be a Dallas Cowboy?"

Tell him, Jimmy.

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Houston