After finding peace with a personal life no longer out to sea, Jimmy Johnson can soak in his Hall of Fame moment
OFF THE COAST OF ISLAMORADA, Fla. – As he sipped on a Heineken and peered at the surroundings from the cockpit of his swanky sport fishing boat, the smaller vessel from his “Three Rings” collection, Jimmy Johnson was clearly in his element.
We were more than 25 miles from land. Johnson occasionally punched a few buttons on the high-tech navigation system, allowing the boat to troll on auto-pilot. Three fishing rods cast from the deck in the back. All around, deep blue water. The warm glow of the sun. A perfect place to pick the brain of one of the most successful coaches in football history.
Several people from the football universe can tell you about this, too, having trekked to the Florida Keys to connect with Johnson, some for multiple excursions that tend to be a mix of relaxation, reflection and shop talk.
Bill Belichick has been a repeat visitor. Same for Troy Aikman and Dean Spanos. Bill Parcells has been here. Urban Meyer. Manny Diaz. Jason Garrett. Kliff Kinsgbury. Matt Rhule, the Carolina Panthers coach, came with his new general manager, Scott Fitterer.
Johnson, 78, poised for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday, is like a real-life Yoda – that fictional Jedi Master from the "Star Wars" classics, who was so wise, powerful and deeply connected to "The Force” – with no shortage of insight to share.
“They know I’m going to give it to them straight,” Johnson told Paste BN Sports.
“At one time it was owners and GMs coming, wanting me to come back to coaching. Now it’s coaches."
Even power brokers from other sports have come calling, including R.C. Buford, who has risen from GM to CEO of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs.
Buford, Johnson recalls, came with an easel and organizational flow chart.
“I said, ‘R.C., you are worse than Belichick!’ ”
Johnson teased that while he is most interested in fishing and having a few beers, Belichick typically prefers to talk football all day.
Understandable, given the track record. Johnson won back-to-back Super Bowls before his unceremonious split with the Dallas Cowboys in 1994. And with the national championship he won at the University of Miami (Florida), he is on a short list with Barry Switzer and Pete Carroll as the only coaches to win a Super Bowl and a college crown.
“Jimmy Johnson is a guy that you don’t realize until you’re with him, the genius behind him,” Meyer, the new Jacksonville Jaguars coach, told Paste BN Sports during a chat last week at training camp. They struck up a friendship as colleagues at Fox Sports, for whom Johnson has served as an NFL studio analyst after retiring (both times) from coaching. Meyer worked for the network as a college analyst before making the leap this year to the NFL.
“We had two phone calls that helped me make a couple of decisions,” Meyer said, alluding to his coaching comeback. “I don’t want to get too deep into what we talked about, but there are only so many people you can do that with. If you ask for too many opinions, you get diluted. I’ve told our players that. Your circle of trust has to be very tight. Jimmy is in that circle for me. So, I really appreciate him.”
Johnson is planning to take up Meyer’s offer and speak to the Jaguars during training this month. But first, there’s the matter of his Hall of Fame induction in Canton, Ohio.
Before this week, Johnson had only been to Canton once. He didn’t come for the inductions of Aikman, Michael Irvin or Emmitt Smith – the so-called “Triplets” of Cowboys lore. His lone Hall experience came in 2017, when, coincidentally, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones happened to be inducted. Johnson wasn’t there to support Jones, who still hasn’t put the former coach in the team’s Ring of Honor – though he pledged before Thursday's Hall of Fame Game to do so.
He was there as presenter for the induction of former defensive end Jason Taylor, whom he drafted and tutored on his final coaching stop with the Miami Dolphins. Now it’s his turn.
“This is for the people who helped me along the way,” Johnson said.
The ceremony was delayed a year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, after his selection was revealed in early 2020 when Hall of Fame president David Baker walked onto the Fox set and surprised him during halftime of an NFC playoff game.
“Listen, I had my moment on Fox," Johnson said. "We had 35 million people watching during that playoff game.”
Johnson laughed when reminded that a few years ago he told me, “I don’t give a flying (expletive) about making it to the Hall.”
Well, Jimmy, whatever. Here you go.
“I don’t mean to make small of it,” he said. “It’s a helluva honor. But none of us ever accomplish anything by ourselves. That’s why individual awards never meant a whole lot to me.”
A few weeks ago, Aikman and others from the Cowboys’ Super Bowl units – then-assistant coaches Dave Wannstedt, Tony Wise, Norv Turner and publicist Rich Dalrymple – were out on the water with Johnson, celebrating his Hall call.
“We laughed … had a great time,” said Johnson, who built his current oceanfront home 26 years ago and lives with his second wife, Rhonda Rookmaaker. “It allowed us to enjoy some of the moments we missed. I told them, ‘We were so obsessed, driven to get better.' Even after winning the first Super Bowl, it was hit the road and go looking at prospects. Free agency. Get ready for the draft. That’s why moments like we had (in early July) almost let us catch up.”
'Glad that son of a (expletive) was over'
Let Johnson take us back to that period in 1994, when he bolted from the Cowboys with a “mutual agreement” to separate from Jones, his former offensive linemate and road roommate at the University of Arkansas, in a classic case of clashing egos.
“I always felt like I had to outwork everybody,” Johnson reflected. “It wasn’t easy. That first Super Bowl, it worked out. Great. That second Super Bowl? It was a relief. Just glad that son of a (expletive) was over. I had worked so hard. I wanted a break.”
The gregarious Johnson is quick to laugh at himself these days, including the frequent times he’s cutting up with close pal Terry Bradshaw on and off the Fox set. During his heyday as a coach, though, he could be rather cold-hearted. Johnson once cut a marginal Cowboys player for falling asleep in a meeting. At one of his first minicamps, he derided a player who suffered from asthma and had trouble breathing while running wind sprints, yelling, “The asthma field is over there!”
Yet for as long as I’ve known him – in 1989, when he took over the Cowboys, I worked as editor for the team-owned newspaper, Dallas Cowboys Weekly – the man with a psychology degree has also revealed a sensitive side.
This comes bursting through as he sat on the boat, reflecting on life and the career that led to the bronze bust. It is not about the games.
'I would lay in bed at night, crying'
“I retired twice – once from Dallas, once for good from the Dolphins,” he said, alluding to the five-year stint with the Cowboys and a four-year tenure in Miami that ended after the 1999 season. “The No. 1 reason I retired: I never had any family life.”
Johnson and his first wife, Linda Kay, had two sons, Brent and Chad. The boys grew up playing football, like dad. Yet the father-son relationships were strained.
“I never saw either one of them play in a game,” Johnson said.
Never? Imagine that.
“Brent not only played in high school, he played on scholarship at the University of Texas. And I never saw him play in a game. Not one game,” said Johnson, who divorced his first wife in 1990. “I always felt like I needed to be working.
“You know me,” Johnson added. “I lived three blocks from the (Cowboys) complex. Some coaches could delegate and go home at night and all that stuff. But when I was coaching, I was responsible for personnel, and it was a year-round job. And again, I always felt like I needed to outwork everybody."
That only begins to address the regret that he has had to come to grips with.
“My youngest son had alcohol and drug abuse,” Johnson said, referring to Chad. “For 10 years, he was on the street. And I didn’t even know it. I knew right then I needed to be with my family.”
Johnson was frustrated when, during his Dolphins years, he discovered the depths of Chad’s issues, unable to prescribe the types of solutions he can easily offer coaches and GMs about occupational challenges, such as evaluating talent or managing a salary cap. Dealing with substance abuse was totally out of his league.
“I would lay in bed at night crying, because I didn’t know what to do,” Johnson said. “I’d tell Rhonda, ‘I’d give a million dollars for somebody to clean him up. I don’t know what to do.’ "
He lost his mother, Allene, in December 1998, which further hammered home the point that there is more to life than work, more than football, more than chasing championships. She was 77, the first person close to Johnson whom he lost. At the funeral, a day after Johnson coached in a Monday night game against Denver, his sons saw their father cry for the first time.
He remembers the support from then-Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga, who flew Johnson to Port Arthur, Texas, in his private jet for the funeral. And despite all that has been said and written about his beef with the Cowboys owner, Johnson points out the gesture from Jones, who had food delivered to the home as the family mourned.
“I saw Mother lying in a casket and it hit me: ‘What did I miss? What am I doing? I’ve had all this success. I’ve got all this money. And I don’t even know my family.’ So that’s when I knew, then and there, I was gone,” Johnson said.
A little more than a year after his mother passed, Johnson gave up coaching for good – without letting Huizenga talk him out of it again, as was the case when Johnson contemplated retiring shortly after her death.
“He said, ‘You want to hire this guy, Wannstedt? Let him coach the away games,’ " Johnson recalled of the conversation.
“I swear he told me that. I said, ‘Wayne, I can’t do that. My name’s on it. I’ve got to do it the right way.’ "
As Johnson remembers, the pitch went on like this...
Huizenga: “When’s the season over?”
Johnson: “Maybe January.”
“When’s it start back?”
“Training camp, end of July.”
“You leave this complex in January and don’t you show up again – other than to run the draft – until the end of July.”
“Wayne, it don’t work that way.”
Johnson has had no urge to return to coaching since he walked away, content to share his insight with a new generation of coaches and GMs and to wax poetic on the Fox set – which last year meant joining the show with a remote setup from his own home. There’s the water, the boats and fishing.
But the best thing about Johnson’s life these days comes with Brent and Chad.
Repairing, renewing relationship with sons
“The good part of the story is that Chad cleaned up,” Johnson said.
And not only that. Chad established a drug and alcohol rehab center in St. Petersburg, Florida, called Tranquil Shores. He’s married with his wife expecting a baby, and in the process of building a similar facility on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, which is where Brent has settled with his wife and their kids.
“Chad has had so much success with Tranquil Shores that people have tried to buy his facility,” Johnson said. “And he won’t sell it because he has a counselor for every four clients. ... His success rate on rehabbing is great.”
Johnson beams when talking about the reason he says that Brent (who had the highest GPA among student-athletes while at Texas) has become "Mr. Mom.” Belinda Johnson, who met Brent when they were both in law school, has soared professionally. In 2020, she retired as the COO of Airbnb, for which she remains on the board of directors. Like notables in the coaching world, she has discussed potential next moves with her father-in-law.
“To see the boys and their families do well is phenomenal,” Johnson said. “Had it not turned out the way it has, it would have been a disaster, and I would be in a severe state of depression because I would be thinking it was my fault.”
Thinking he could have done more…
“And I should have,” he interjected. “It turned out well, and our relationship is fantastic. But I missed out on a lot.”
Forgiveness is part of the equation, too, from the perspective of the sons – and for Johnson in looking in the mirror.
“I’m trying to make up for it now,” he said. “Brent and Chad have both told me many times, ‘Dad, we understand. By you doing what you did allowed us to enjoy things we never would have experienced. And maybe we would have never been where we are today if you hadn’t done what you did.’ So, they understand. But it wasn’t easy.”
Finding peace
What’s easy for Johnson is a lifestyle that allows him to spend so much time on the water. He’s come a long way since growing up in Port Arthur, when his father had a wooden boat, or when he would water ski off Galveston Beach. Now it’s about fishing, with so many tall tales.
Johnson went out alone on his boat one day and came back with 49 fish.
“I got back to the house and it’s dark,” Johnson recalled. “Rhonda felt so sorry for me as I’m out there cleaning fish. I said, 'I ain’t ever doing that again.' Never ever again! So now, I’ll keep four or five, enough for dinner, and that’s it.”
Of course, it’s the challenge of the big ones that has Johnson sounding as stoked as he would be after winning a big NFC East game. It’s no wonder that his tackle shop, with hundreds of rods and reels in the guest house adjacent to his home, looks like it can fill a fishing pro shop. He said he’s caught five blue marlins, each weighing between 250 and 300 pounds – all while fishing alone.
“The first one I caught, I was so excited,” he said. “I went out at daylight. Being a sportsman, normally on a blue marlin, you let ‘em go, let ‘em fight another day. But that one died, so I put it on the boat and downed three beers on the way back in. I called my buddies, ‘Come on, I want you to see what I caught!’ I was back at the dock at 9:30 in the morning.”
Undoubtedly, Johnson is at peace. This is the sweet spot that Huizenga called QTL – Quality Time Left.
“I love it out here,” he said. “Some days, it’s so still that a rock can make a ripple.”
With or without the Hall of Fame nod, he shows no worries.
“Right now,” Johnson added, “the only thing I’m really concerned with is staying here as long as I can. Which, at 78, I know it’s not going to be much longer.”
Follow Paste BN Sports' Jarrett Bell on Twitter @JarrettBell.