In person, Jimmy Johnson looks no different than on television. His hair really is as unmovable as Tom Landry's hat ever was. The Dallas Cowboys coach twists, moves, turns around, spins, and the hair stays put, as disciplined as, well, as the football team Johnson has built. No matter what he does, no matter where he goes, his hair and his Cowboys behave.
For proof of that, look at where the Cowboys - and the hair - are again this year: playing in a second straight Super Bowl as prohibitive favorites over the Buffalo Bills. Their march through the NFL regular season was as methodical and successful as it was a year ago. They lost their first two games primarily because of the absence of running back Emmitt Smith, and then rattled off 12 wins in their last 14 games. The postseason was more of the same. A relatively easy win over the Green Bay Packers followed by another relatively easy win over the San Francisco 49ers. This isn't America's Team, this is the Universe's Team.At the forefront of it all is Johnson, the coach/mad scientist who in 1989 took over a team that went 3-13 the previous season - Landry's last in Dallas - and promptly steered it to a 1-15 finish. A lot of NFL critics thought that was the end of that, just another sad example of a college coach biting off more than he could chew. Maybe Johnson could win a national championship and finish No. 2 in the nation twice during a five-year span at the University of Miami, but that was amateur ball, and this wasn't.
Johnson wasn't even smart enough to hang on to Herschel Walker, the Cowboys' workhorse running back who was traded to Minnesota early on in that 1-15 1989 campaign.
But as it's turned out, Johnson saw more of the chessboard than the rest of the league combined. The aftermath of the Walker trade is Exhibit A. No less than four players who will be starting in Sunday's Super Bowl can trace their Cowboy lineage back to that Walker trade, and that includes Smith, the three-time NFL rushing champion. A fifth Dallas player acquired as a result of that trade, cornerback Clayton Holmes, might be starting as well if he wasn't injured.
As impressive as the Walker trade has been for Dallas, however, if you mention it to Johnson - as a reporter did during Wednesday's Super Bowl media briefing - he will downplay its importance.
"The Herschel Walker trade played a big part in us obtaining five or six players that are of excellent quality," said Johnson. "But a lot of people look at that as the single most important thing for us being in a second Super Bowl. I think that is completely, completely wrong. We've made 40 or 50 trades in a five-year period. The single most important thing we've done is surround ourselves with outstanding people. We have winners around our organization. And the other thing on the Herschel Walker trade, it's one thing to get half a dozen picks. But if you pick a bunch of schmoes, you're not going to win a game. You do have to have some expertise in picking players that can win . . . we've probably made more than our share of good moves."
Either that's putting it mildly or Johnson is the luckiest coach in football.
You name it, the Cowboys have won it. They were 7-9 in 1990, Johnson's second season, then 11-5 his third season, 13-3 last year when they were the champions of Super Bowl XXVII, and now they're coming off their 12-4 1993 campaign and finding themselves in a second straight Super Bowl. In postseason play the Cowboys are 6-1 under Johnson, and counting. In Sunday's game they're 101/2 point favorites over the Bills.
Johnson is the chief architect of all this success and not only does he knows it, he knows why. He makes no pretense that he is some kind of miracle worker. On the contrary, he insists the Cowboys are where they are because of who they are. All he'll take credit for is getting the right people in the right places.
"I try to gain as much information about every individual (the Cowboys acquire) that I can get," he said Wednesday. "I personally talk to not only the player but his coach, his trainer, his strength coach. I've had many a session sitting down with a college strength coach talking about a players' work habits. I read everything I can read about the guy from the press guide to see what kind of pedigree he's got. I have film graders that are high school coaches that are in our office that we pay an hourly wage, and we give them tapes of games and we give them numbers. We don't give them names. Without any prior knowledge of this particular player, they do an evaluation. Good, bad, whatever. He does this. He does that. They don't know if he's Charlie Ward or Joe Schmoe. On top of that, I watch tapes of players myself. I try to filter all of this in and make a decision."
Johnson does not talk about this subject dispassionately. Burnout is obviously not his problem. From the business of trades and player evaluation he moves easily into his philosophy about the most important ingredient on a team (quarterback) to the second most important ingredient (the defensive line), and so on.
He might dislike press conferences as much as the next coach. He might think of them as a necessary evil, just another hassle that keeps him out of the film room. But, still, when the subject is football, he warms to it. It's as obvious that he cares about football as much as it's obvious that he cares about his hair. In both areas, this is a man who leaves nothing to chance.