The Rise and Fall of a Gangsta Coach

“I’ve had my time in the sun,” Johnson said, “my time in the spot-light. Now I want to spend time with my family.”

Johnson’s fall was treated almost elegiacally by the networks, some of which carried the press conference live, including Johnson’s swallowed sobs and emotional hugs with the team owner. You would have thought, if you knew no history, that this was a case of a man stepping down after long, arduous, and honorable service. And you almost expected someone to start reading from Housman or Yeats.

In truth, Johnson had been at Miami all of four years. This was his fourth head coaching job. The others he held for five years each. Two of those positions were in the college ranks; two with the pros. One of Johnson’s college teams, the University of Miami, won a national championship. The Dallas Cowboys won back-to-back Super Bowls while he was head coach there.

The Johnson legacy (a word that seems to get a lot of play these days) will not, however, focus on his root-lessness or his ability to win championships. As the mists of sentimentality surrounding his departure dry up, and Johnson’s career is viewed clearly, he will be properly remembered as football’s first gangsta coach.

It has been a long time since anyone believed in the business about football building character. This was never true in the pros, and if it ever was in the college game, Steven Spielberg could make a soft focus movie about those times, with Tom Hanks playing a coach. Coaches, especially, understand that their obligation is to win games, and they do whatever it takes and hope they don’t get caught. If a player can help him win, a coach is willing to overlook a few character flaws.

What made Johnson different, made him a pioneer when he was rolling up a big record with the Miami Hurricanes in the ’80s, was that he put together a team of many thugs and some felons and made no apologies. He avidly recruited the hard cases. The Hurricanes liked to think of themselves as “outlaws,” and they once showed up for a bowl game, with the national championship at stake, dressed in combat fatigues to symbolize, one supposes, the fact that they were “on a mission.” They lost the game.

But the rot went deeper than the tasteless clothes off the field or taunting and strutting on it. Several of Johnson’s players had serious run-ins with the law and were involved in various scandals. The football program was considered by many to be out of control. However, the year after the combat fatigue incident, the team had another chance to win the national championship and, this time, delivered. After one more year, Johnson left Miami and the college game, with its fussy, if indifferently enforced, standards and went to the pros. The Dallas Cowboys were not required to attend classes or graduate. They were paid above the table, and handsomely, to win.

They were pros.

But it quickly became evident that Johnson preferred the same kind of players in the pros that had worked for him in college. Johnson won a Super Bowl in his fourth year at Dallas. But his players were frequently in trouble with the law and often suspended for violations of the league’s drug policies. After his second Super Bowl, he left the team in a dispute with the owner, Jerry Jones. They were unable to share the glory. Johnson did television for a couple of years until the call came from Miami.

He promised the city, and his new owner, a Super Bowl. Promised to develop a running game to complement the passing of quarterback Dan Marino, the team’s aging star. Inevitably, he brought in his kind of players.

These included Lawrence Phillips, a running back best known for dragging his girlfriend down a flight of stairs while he was a player at the University of Nebraska. Phillips was suspended for a few games and given the usual classes in “anger management,” which, typically, he seems to have flunked. After he was cut by the pro team that drafted him — good runner but too hard to handle — he made his way with almost biblical inevitability to Miami. Johnson seemed to feel he could get players like Phillips to perform for him and what they did with their free time was their own business. And why not? It had worked before.

But it didn’t work with Phillips, who got in trouble with the law and was, eventually, cut. Still, Johnson didn’t give up. In last year’s college draft, he took a player named Cecil Collins who had been convicted of twice breaking into women’s rooms and fondling them. Collins was a fair runner but by the end of the season he was in jail. The Dolphins still had no ground game and Marino’s arm was dead. The team was humiliated in the playoffs and Johnson made his emotional exit.

The surprise was not that he left — he had a history of doing that — but the mood of his departure. The tears and honorifics seemed out of place, at first. But, on reflection, perhaps not. Johnson, like other coaching legends, left his mark. Because of him, the game will never be the same. The gangsta act has become an accepted part of football, less controversial than instant replay. Fans expect taunting and strutting and trash-talking. Players routinely get into trouble with the law for a variety of offenses, including knocking their girlfriends around. This season, a member of the Carolina Panthers did manage to raise eyebrows by (allegedly) killing his pregnant girlfriend.

So in the end, maybe this was another take on the old melancholy tale. Jimmy Johnson looked around and realized that the other guys were signing actual killers. He was no longer an innovator. The game had passed him by.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is the author of Alabama Showdown: The Football Rivalry Between Auburn and Alabama.