I never coached a national college champion. I never built a Super Bowl winner or feuded with my team’s owner in a way that still resonates. But I wrote a book as if I did.
Former Dolphins and UM coach Jimmy Johnson talked to me. I typed like him. It’s an odd form of literary ventriloquism called “ghostwriting,” where he spoke about the heights of winning it all and the depths of a father’s raw tears, and I tried to capture that voice in all its variations.
“SWAGGER,’’ the book is called, and go ahead, judge it by the cover in capital letters and Jimmy’s football face with three championship rings on his hands. That’s him.
Of course, as soon as that photo was shot, off came the rings and the stern face, and he looked at the ocean outside his Islamorada home while opening a Heineken Light and holding out another.
“Want one?” he said.
That’s him, too. Here’s the thing when you write a book with someone, when you talk for hours and open closed doors and the subject is as wonderfully complicated as Jimmy: You end up either hating each other or becoming friends sharing a cold one.
Not everyone has the smarts to build championship teams. No one had the personality to do it like Jimmy, either, as his 1988 Miami Hurricanes and 1992 Dallas Cowboy were voted the first- and third most-hated teams in sports by a Sports Illustrated poll.
“How did the Detroit Pistons get in there at No. 2?” he said.
He talked of the psyche behind those teams. He talked of hating the person he became as a champion coach. He talked of standing over his mother’s coffin later as the Miami Dolphins coach, of saying how he needed to love the people who loved him and ...
“Hey, we got a fish on,’’ he said, interrupting his talk from his 39-foot boat.
It was a tuna, a small one, but it told of the world he invited me into. Another time, we talked on a private plane to Tampa, where he gave a speech to a trucking company. And there was a retirement party for a friend at his Key Largo restaurant, The Big Chill.
We walked through one morning at an annual marine flea market in Islamorada, and he stopped to ask how much a fishing rod cost.
“For you it’s $200, you rich bastard,’’ the proprietor said.
He returned a little later to buy it.
“Someone bought it for $75, you cheap bastard,’’ the man said.
He loved that personality and laughter. He had fun as a coach, no matter how it looked at times, until the final years with the Dolphins. That became his first job, he said. He still went to the playoffs three times in four years and won twice as many playoff games (two) as the three years before him or the 21 after him.
There remain two Jimmys in some manner, too, both equally real and neither exclusive to the other. There’s the public figure, the Hall of Fame coach and television personality who can light up a room just by walking into it and saying his opening, “Whatcha got going on?”
There’s also a loner, a man who is fine going a week without seeing anyone other than his wife, Rhonda. He once went to a big party thrown by Jerry Jones in the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium and found an empty room to sit out the party until it was time to leave.
His contorted relationship with Jones and the manner their Cowboys dynasty ended is the chapter that has Dallas talking. But the chapter of his son Chad’s battle with alcoholism, of the darkness around them and the way Chad overcame it ― that’s the story he’s most proud of.
It’s been 23 years since he retired, and NFL coaches and executives still beat a path to the Keys to pick his mind. He talked with Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel this summer. He addressed the Miami Hurricanes, coached by his former player, Mario Cristobal.
“I used to think coaching at Miami was the happiest I’ve ever been,’’ he often says. “But this chapter in my life, right now with Rhonda and my sons and their families — I’ve never been happier.”
There’s still swagger in his step. But it’s a swagger with time to relax by the ocean with a cold one. It was my fun to share the view, too.
