Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (20 page)

Johnson liked the Vikings’ offer better than Cleveland’s. He called Accorsi after getting the Minnesota proposal and told him he was making the trade with the Vikings. The deciding factor was Cleveland not having a first-round pick in 1990. “That was an important pick for us,” Johnson said.

He called Lynn and told him they had a deal. Johnson knew from the moment Lynn made the proposal that he would release all the Vikings’ players and take all the draft picks. There was no reason to tell Lynn.

“If I cut them all, he would get nothing and I’d just get all
these picks,” Johnson said. “So I didn’t say anything about it, but I knew what I was going to do. For that reason, even though the players were the best players we had, like David Howard and Jesse Solomon, I wouldn’t let our defensive coaches start them because if they started for us, the fans would fall in love with them, our coaches would fall in love with them, and I wouldn’t be able to pull off the deal. So I told them they have to be second teamers, so don’t put them in until the second quarter even though they are our best players.”

Lynn visited Walker’s home in Dallas to ease any concerns he had about coming to Minnesota. The Cowboys kicked in $1.25 million as a going-away present. “I’m out of here, but I got a lot of good memories,” Walker said as he was packing his bags in the Cowboys’ locker room.

The Vikings had nine Pro Bowl players in 1988, and they judged Walker to be the piece to put them over the top. “When I went to Herschel’s house in Dallas, I told him if we don’t win the Super Bowl in the next two years, this deal has failed,” Lynn told the
Boston Globe
a few days after the trade. “This was all done to win a Super Bowl. Our coaches told me this is what we needed, a back that could really produce, so that’s what we got for them.”

As part of the trade agreement, the Vikings could not sign any of the players they traded to Dallas if Johnson released them, and Dallas would not receive the corresponding Vikings draft choices if it traded one of the players. When Nelson refused to report, Johnson wanted to trade him. The Chargers were offering a fifth-round pick. Johnson was not going to trade Nelson and forfeit the second-round pick he was attached to in the trade. Cutting Nelson would not benefit the Vikings, either, because they couldn’t sign him. Johnson had Lynn backed into a corner. In exchange for Minnesota waiving the no-trade agreement regarding Nelson, San Diego’s fifth-round pick was sent to the Vikings. In return, the Vikings sent their sixth-round pick to Dallas. The Cowboys still received the second-round pick for Nelson. The
Walker trade just kept getting better. Johnson thus squeezed another draft pick out of the deal for a player he had no intention of keeping.

Walker got off to a fast start for the Vikings, rushing for 148 yards on 18 carries in his debut against Green Bay at home. On his first rushing attempt late in the first quarter, he ran for 47 yards. Minnesota defeated the Packers. Lynn was looking good. That turned out to be the highlight of Walker’s season and his short Vikings career. He rushed for just 669 yards in eleven games in 1989. The Vikings finished 10–6 and won the NFC Central in a tiebreaker over the Packers, giving them a bye in the first round of the playoffs. But they lost in the divisional round to the 49ers. Walker obviously was not all that was missing in the Super Bowl puzzle for Minnesota.

Dallas finished the season with one victory. If Johnson had not taken Walsh in the supplemental draft, he would have owned the first pick in the 1990 draft and could have drafted Southern Cal linebacker Junior Seau or defensive tackle Cortez Kennedy, who had played for Johnson at the University of Miami. But he wasn’t complaining. He soon would trade Walsh to the Saints for three premium picks, and he had the incredible haul from the Walker trade. Lynn was counting on the Cowboys keeping the players, but the reason Johnson traded Walker was to speed up the rebuilding process through the draft. He liked the Vikings players, but not enough to keep them instead of the picks he would receive by cutting them.

“At the end of the year, I told Mike, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get anything; let me give you a couple of late picks and let us keep these players,’ ” Johnson said. “He said they were just getting beat up for the trade already and he said, ‘Jimmy, I’m getting just killed up here.’ He said, ‘I can’t do it. You just got to keep the players.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to keep the players.’ So he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and I sent a certified letter to him and the commissioner, saying all these players were released
as of this date and the only person that could stop that release of those players was Mike Lynn of the Minnesota Vikings. It was right at the end of the season.

“After I sent the certified letter to the commissioner and to him, Mike called me; he said, ‘just help me out,’ ” Johnson said.

Johnson had cut Stewart in November but now had Lynn in a bind once again. If he released the players, Lynn would lose all the draft picks. Johnson gave him a chance to save face, but barely. One month after the season, Johnson and Lynn came to an agreement: Dallas sent its third-round picks in 1990 and 1991 and its tenth-round pick in 1990 to the Vikings and kept Solomon, Howard, and Holt and all the conditional picks from the original trade.

Advantage: Dallas

Big advantage: Dallas

“I thought of the players that we sent them; they would keep a number of those players,” Lynn, who died in July 2012, once told the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
. “So I thought the number of draft choices would not be as great as it was.”

The Vikings finished just 6–10 in 1990 and 8–8 in 1991. Walker rushed for 770 yards in his first full season in Minnesota and 825 yards in 1991. The 1,595 yards was barely more than he’d had in 1988 for a very bad Cowboys team. Incredibly, the Vikings cut Walker in May 1992, less than three full years after making the worst trade in NFL history. They were 21–22 with him. Lynn lost his power in Minnesota on January 1, 1991, when Roger Headrick became the team’s president and CEO.

On the twenty-year anniversary of the trade, Lynn told the
Star Tribune
that he had “no regrets” about making the Walker deal. “I did what I thought was the right thing at the time,” he said. He still hadn’t figured out why the trade went so badly for the Vikings. “It’s been a mystery to me all along what happened,” he said. “All that we lacked on that team was a big back. Herschel was the best big back in the league. He gained 1,500 yards
the previous year. He was in marvelous shape when he got here. It would have worked out.” He went on to say, “Everybody sure thought it was a great trade that day. But something happened. I don’t know what it was, but whatever he had, he didn’t have it any longer. It was like a great horse not having it. Just gone overnight or in a week.”

After he was released by the Vikings, Walker signed with the Eagles and rushed for 1,070 yards in his first season in Philadelphia. He played three years with the Eagles and then spent one year with the Giants before returning to finish his career with the Cowboys in 1996 and 1997. By then, Johnson was no longer with the Cowboys. He had only sixteen carries in those two years; his primary job was returning kickoffs.

Were the Vikings better off without Walker? They were 11–5 and won the NFC Central in 1992. Terry Allen took over at running back and rushed for 1,201 yards. He was a ninth-round draft pick in 1991 who rushed for 563 yards backing up Walker in his rookie year.

All those picks burned a hole in Johnson’s pocket. He turned the Walker trade into a cottage industry, making fourteen trades with the assets he’d picked up from Minnesota. In some form, almost sixty players were affected by the Walker trade. It usually takes a few years to evaluate a trade fully. Because the Vikings didn’t even have Walker for three full seasons—that still seems unimaginable considering how much they gave up to get him—the trade was completely lopsided.

By the ’92 season, all the Vikings had left to show for the deal was wide receiver Jake Reed. The Cowboys had running back Emmitt Smith, safety Darren Woodson, defensive tackle Russell Maryland, wide receiver and cornerback Kevin Smith, and cornerback Clayton Holmes. Johnson used picks from the Vikings to maneuver into position to draft those players. He traded every one of the Vikings’ picks to move up or move down. Smith, of course, was the biggest addition. Johnson, who didn’t have his own number
one in 1990, used the Vikings’ pick, the twenty-first overall, in a trade to move up four spots to the Steelers’ slot at number seventeen to take Smith, who retired as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher.

“There’s no way that you could actually say here’s what we got for those players for Herschel because I made half a dozen other trades with those picks that I got,” Johnson said.

By 1991, the Cowboys were in the playoffs. The next year they won their first Super Bowl since the 1977 season. And then they repeated in 1993, Johnson’s fifth year in Dallas. Johnson and Jones had built a minidynasty. Despite major free agent losses, the Cowboys were incredibly deep and young with Aikman, Smith, and Irvin—the Triplets—along with Woodson and a defense that was fast and quick. All Jones and Johnson had to do was keep the core intact and happy and they might have won another two or three Super Bowls in a row. They were that good. They were that much better than anybody else. As it turned out, the most unhappy person was Johnson.

Dallas wasn’t big enough for Johnson and Jones to coexist after they had all that success. There wasn’t enough credit to satisfy both of their Super Bowl–size egos. At the league meetings in Orlando in March 1994, Jones minimized Johnson’s contributions, claiming that “five hundred coaches” could have won those Super Bowls with the Cowboys’ talent. Of course, it was Johnson, not Jones, who had accumulated all that talent. He was talking at 3 a.m. in a hotel bar and might have been better off going to bed. He revealed in that chat with two reporters from the
Dallas Morning News
that he was thinking about firing Johnson and hiring Barry Switzer, the former Oklahoma coach. Earlier in the evening, Jones felt he was snubbed by Johnson at a league party. No rich man likes to be shown up by one of his employees.

Considering that at that point only Vince Lombardi, Don
Shula, and Chuck Noll (twice) had repeated as Super Bowl champions, it appeared that Jones was letting his heart do the speaking instead of his head do the thinking. Just five years earlier, he had declared that Johnson was worth more than five first-round picks and five Heisman Trophy winners, and now, after Johnson had helped resurrect a dormant franchise and put a lot of money in Jones’s pocket, all of a sudden five hundred coaches could have done the same thing. Once again, he had made a ridiculous statement.

Obviously, when Jones’s comments were relayed to Johnson in the morning, his well-coiffed hair started doing backflips. He stormed out of the meetings in Orlando, got in his car, and headed south to his home in Tavernier in the Florida Keys. One week later, he demanded that Jones settle the final five years of his ten-year contract and walked away with a check for $2 million. Jones hired Switzer just as he’d promised. Johnson gave up the chance to be the first coach to win three consecutive Super Bowls.

That summer, Johnson was sitting on his boat docked 30 feet from his back door loving life. The sun was shining, the wave runners were humming, and the fish were sure to be biting. The Heinekens were cold.

He was stung by Jones’s words four months earlier. How could he possibly think five hundred coaches could have done what he did? Take over a 1–15 team and win the Super Bowl in his fourth and fifth years? Make the greatest trade in NFL history by dealing off his only star player? Was he kidding?

“I really feel like I had accomplished a tremendous amount in five years. I was very proud of it. To be sloughed off like I was, it hurt,” Johnson said that day. “Just tossing out that he could hire anybody to coach this team to win the Super Bowl bothered me. It bothered my ego. I put together a team that won two Super Bowls. Evidently, he doesn’t appreciate that. What else could I do for the guy?

“I was hurt when Jerry said five hundred coaches could’ve taken
that team to the Super Bowl. Are there five hundred coaches out there who could have made the personnel decisions and put together a team that won two Super Bowls starting from scratch?”

Jones’s perspective then was, “He knew that I knew other people could be successful coaching the football team. I feel some of his enthusiasm had diminished, and our differences were going to be magnified and very visible. The minute I saw we weren’t working together, I wanted to make a change. I didn’t want to invest any more time with him.”

Switzer took the Cowboys to the NFC title game in his first season, but after having beaten the 49ers the previous two years in the championship game, the Cowboys lost this time. Switzer did win the Super Bowl the next season when Dallas beat the Steelers, giving the Cowboys three titles in four years. If Johnson had remained, who knows how many they would have won? It wasn’t simply that Johnson was a better coach than Switzer, but with Johnson gone, Jones was no longer the general manager in title only. He was really the general manager. That was not good for the Cowboys.

“There is nothing you can trade me for having those five years we had together and what we went through together and how it worked out,” Jones once said. “There is nothing you can give me to have one more day of it.”

If time heals all wounds, it also changes perceptions. Nearly twenty years after their painful and public divorce, Jimmy and Jerry are buddies again. Jones sends his private plane to Florida to pick up Johnson so that they can meet in Las Vegas for big boxing events, one of Johnson’s passions. It’s just that they couldn’t stand the sight of each other after working together for five years.

“It wasn’t really a me and Jerry thing,” Johnson now insists.

When Jones bought the Cowboys, in addition to saying how valuable Johnson was to the franchise, he insisted he would not have bought the team if Johnson was not going to be his coach. Maybe he wouldn’t have bought the team if Bright had insisted
that he keep Landry, but there was no way Bright was going to make that a condition of the sale. He disliked Landry. But the idea that Jones was going to give up his dream of owning America’s Team if his former teammate and casual friend from Arkansas was not going to be the coach was never put to the test. We will never find out. But it’s hard to fathom Jones walking away from the deal if he couldn’t get Johnson. As he said, there were five hundred coaches out there who could have had the same success.