DALLAS — Winston Churchill told us more than a century ago that history is written by the victors. But he was slightly off when it comes to the Dallas Cowboys and the famous breakup between Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson. History is also written, it turns out, by those who stick around.
For the last 28 years, plenty of stories have been offered as to how it all went down in the spring of 1994 — why in the world a team that had just won two Super Bowls with a young roster poised to capture more could come unraveled at the very top of the organization? It’s a story that has been dissected many times, not just because it is one of a kind (coaches don’t get fired or walk away at the height of their team’s success) but because of how the winning suddenly stopped for the Cowboys two years later.
An organization that competed in eight Super Bowls and 16 NFC (or NFL) championship games in a 30-year stretch has now gone 26 without a sniff of either.
As a Fox broadcaster, Johnson has occasionally weighed in from a distance with his thoughts about how it all fell apart. But for the most part it has been Jones’ constant presence in our world that has written the history. Now a new Johnson memoir — “Swagger: Super Bowls, Brass Balls and Football” written with longtime South Florida columnist Dave Hyde — offers Jimmy’s version of the divorce that rocked Valley Ranch.
At one point, Johnson lays out in print how his contract gave him control over assistants, trainers and everything connected to the football side of the organization. That became the greatest sticking point as the team was accelerating from 1-15 to Super Bowl-ready in an unimaginably short time frame. Jones wore the title of general manager as soon as he bought the team and got rid of Tex Schramm. But he had granted Johnson most of the power that normally comes with it.
Jones has a tendency to gloss over these facts, but those of us who were around remember the way it was. The week before the first San Francisco championship game I was talking to my fellow beat writer Ed Werder in the halls of Valley Ranch when Jones walked by and asked what we were up to. We said we were just discussing if the Cowboys win and go to the Super Bowl whether or not Jones would have his own table for media sessions.
”I don’t know," Jones said, “what do other general managers do?"
Werder burst out laughing and Jones had a sly grin on his face. Once Johnson was gone and Barry Switzer had arrived, that all changed, of course. Subsequent coaches have never held the kind of power Johnson wielded in the early ‘90s.
A year later as the team was getting ready to play Buffalo a second time, Johnson wanted to show me the clauses in his contract that gave him the power Jones was arguing belonged to the owner-GM. In fact, we had to go into Norv Turner’s office because he was using Jimmy’s contract as a basis for his negotiations with Washington at the time. As I walked in and Johnson looked through the contract for the pertinent clause, the head-shaking look on Norv’s face said plenty about the dysfunctional relationship that was piloting America’s Team to another Super Bowl.
But Johnson‘s book says little about how badly he wanted out, how he had his Corvette driven to Atlanta for that Super Bowl so he could drive to South Florida and buy property there and set the stage for his life after the Cowboys. In the two months between the Super Bowl and the owners’ meetings where Jerry made the infamous “500 coaches could win with his team” remark in front of Werder and Rick Gosselin, Johnson had done no preparation for a draft he was hoping to escape. He just didn’t know how it would happen.
Jerry’s boast, after being shunned at a toast he offered to Johnson and the Wannstedts and Turners at the owners’ meeting, provided the exit ramp. A few days later and $2 million richer, Johnson was out. As Johnson says in the book, “I’m not blameless here."
The one line from Johnson’s book likely to trouble Cowboys fans (and former players) the most might sound harmless to some: “My departure was best for both Jerry and me."
Johnson wanted out. He had won. He would try to win again in Miami and fail, but winning a third time in Dallas, possibly being the only NFL coach ever to win three in a row, was not enough of a lure to keep him in a job that had lost its luster with the departure of favorite assistants while Jones offered him new contracts that marginalized his power.
And Jones was right that, by 1994, a lot of coaches could win with Dallas’ current talent. Switzer did. But he was wrong about his belief that, by watching Jimmy, he had learned all there was to know about building and maintaining rosters and coaching staffs.
Johnson’s book makes clear that his untimely departure made two people at the top of the Cowboys’ organization very happy. And tough luck to everyone else.
