Jimmy Johnson won two Super Bowls coaching the Cowboys to certify the most glorious days of “America’s Team,” so Dallas fans might rightly lay claim to him. Then again a younger generation of football fans knew Johnson mostly as a fixture of Fox Sports’ NFL coverage for 31 years until his retirement this week — and it’s fair to say this man is the rare champion and Hall of Fame coach perhaps just as accomplished in his later career in broadcasting.
But his Miami years — as the only man to head coach both the Hurricanes (in 1984-88) and the Dolphins (1996-99) — marked some of his best and most emotional times, his greatest joy but also his deepest pain.
We will admit to some parochial prejudice on this front, but make the case unabashedly that Johnson retires this week, at age 81, with a place secure among the greatest winners and biggest figures in the history of South Florida sports. Johnson was the first football coach to win both a Super Bowl and a college national championship, and still is one of only four in that rare club.
But it was his time in Miami that bookended his coaching career.
Johnson followed Howard Schnellenberger at UM and cemented the foundation of the Canes’ glory years. He won the 1987 national championship, finished No. 2 in ’86 and ’88 and fashioned a 44-4 record his last four seasons … and also gifted next coach Dennis Erickson with much of the talent that helped Miami win additional national titles in 1989 and ’91.
As much as the winning on the field, though, the attitude Johnson created defined that Hurricanes era and still resonates, with every UM coach since trying to harness its power.
Johnson was the father of swagger. If The U invented that, like the T-shirts declare, J.J. was the creator. Braggadocio and cockiness were things he encouraged in preening, bellicose players such as Michael Irvin and Bennie Blades. A well-timed penalty to make a point had its place.
Johnson’s Canes were hated and booed on the road (the trips to Notre Dame were epic) and loved every minute of it. On his own campus Johnson sparred with then-UM president Tad Foote about his players’ more-than-occasional run-ins with campus cops. Sports Illustrated even called for UM to disband what was seen then as a renegade football program led by a coach playing by his own rules.
Hired from Oklahoma State, coaching Miami was then the pinnacle of Johnson’s coaching career, his first big break, and he took full advantage of it to the degree that five years later, Jerry Jones lured him to Dallas to replace Cowboys legend Tom Landry.
“I used to say the most fun time of my life was those five years at the University if Miami,” Johnson told us a few years ago as he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “It was that way for a long time.
” If I might be very personal for a moment, covering Johnson’s five seasons as a full-time Hurricanes beat reporter was the big break in my own career, leading to a promotion to columnist a few years later. Johnson was a delight to work with, and my respect for him is immense.
Fox TV would become the joy for Johnson that topped even his UM years.
Johnson this week called Fox tenure “the most fun I ever had in my career.” He loved the Fox family, with Terry Bradshaw and Jay Glazer in particular becoming two of his dearest friends. Coaching could be brutal and a grind in a way that broadcasting never was. Johnson always said losing hurt worse than winning felt good — like that 86 national championship game loss to Penn State, with probably his greatest Canes team. In a broadcast booth, Johnson never lost. He retired unbeaten. The losses that hurt most weren’t all on a football field, of course. Some of those were what made his Dolphins years bittersweet, and he would never coach again after that.
His Fins years were a success. His teams went to the playoffs three straight seasons. And the players he drafted included future Hall of Famers Zach Thomas and Jason Taylor as well as stars such as Daryl Gardener, Sam Madison and Patrick Surtain.
But the years of traveling and being away from family had taken its toll on Johnson. It led to a divorce, and to a relationship with his two sons that needed some time to repair. He missed being with his elderly parents as they aged and passed away. Then-Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga insisted Johnson fly to his mother’s funeral on his private jet, and it was there Johnson decided to stop coaching.
“I mainly retired because of family,” he says. “I spent so little time with my two sons, and one had really struggled. And then I was with the Dolphins when my mother passed away. That was the realization then that I’d missed so much family time.”
One son, Chad, saw his life engulfed by alcohol. He had been a successful stockbroker but ended up estranged from his family and living in his car. For more than 20 years he was slowly slipping away until finally getting himself straight.
“I’m more proud of what Chad has accomplished than anything I ever did,” says the father.
Johnson retires now to the home in the upper Florida Keys he shares with wife Rhonda, and to an avid fisherman’s life on a boat named The Three Rings, trying to coax mahi-mahi on board.
If that sounds like an idyllic retirement, he has earned it. When I say Miami was home for the best times of Jimmy Johnson, I don’t just mean the Hurricanes national championship that jump-started his coaching career and forged his reputation.
I mean the Dolphins days that would end that coaching career with a personal epiphany as he discovered while attending his mother’s funeral that there was more to life and to happiness than the sport that had defined him.
OPINION By: GREG COTE/Miami Herald