Related Links: J.J. resigns as Dolphins coach; Wannstedt promoted Jaguars roll over Dolphins in record-setting rout Audio: Jimmy Johnson announces his retirement Real | Windows Media Audio: Johnson says he has had his time in the sun Real | Windows Media Audio: Johnson on fond memories Real | Windows Media Audio: Johnson says his final thanks Real | Windows Media Forum: Does Jimmy Johnson belong in the Hall of Fame?
	T O P   N E W S

Some made. Others avoided.

And that in very short order brings us to Jimmy Johnson and Dave Wannstedt, the once and present coaches of the Miami Dolphins, two men who during their combined 20 seasons in the NFL managed to stay mostly on the plus side of the ledger book in which life's mistakes are indelibly recorded.

Mostly, but not always, the two might agree in perhaps more candid moments.

Arguably the most notable mistake Johnson ever made was departing the Dallas Cowboys in the spring of 1994, a hasty departure that in the view of this reporter cost one of the best football minds I've ever encountered a spot in the Hall of Fame. It's hard to believe, looking back on Johnson's career in the NFL, that he toured the league's sidelines for only nine seasons, won just 89 games. So uncanny an evaluator of talent has Johnson been, so thorough a knack for game planning and preparation has he exhibited, that it seems the native of Port Arthur, Texas, has been around forever.

Truth be told, he was the NFL equivalent of a supernova, the star that flashed brilliantly for too short a period and then was reduced to a burned out ember.

Of course, it didn't have to be that way.

Instead of being just an accidental tourist to professional football, Johnson could have become a fixture. Instead of being recalled as the innovator who redefined an era by emphasizing speed on defense and power on offense -- basically the opposite of what everyone else was doing when he entered the NFL in 1989 -- the memory of Johnson for many fans will be of a man who introduced hair spray to his profession. A third consecutive Super Bowl victory in 1994, certainly a goal within the grasp of the Dallas Cowboys team he built in his image, would have catapulted Johnson into the elite class.

There are currently a dozen coaches in the Hall of Fame. Odds are Johnson was superior to most of them. Odds also are that he will never join a roster of enshrinees that includes contemporaries like Joe Gibbs and Bill Walsh and Chuck Noll, even if he probably belongs in such lofty company.

On the night of March 21, 1994, at that year's league owners meeting in Orlando, Fla., the fates conspired to probably keep Johnson from ever being recognized as perhaps the best combination scout and coach in the modern history of the game. It was an evening when the always volatile mix of booze and ego forced a showdown between Johnson and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. It was, unfortunately for both men, one of the few battles that Johnson could not win merely by outscheming an opponent.

During a league-sponsored function at one of the Disney theme parks, a slightly inebriated Jones happened upon the table at which were seated Johnson and several close friends. Hoisting a plastic glass filled with beer, the owner bellowed a toast, "Here's to the Dallas Cowboys and here's to the people who have made it possible to win two Super Bowls."

Though Johnson raised a glass filled with his trademark refresher, a Heineken over ice, an awkward silence enveloped the table. Seated next to Johnson was good buddy Bob Ackles, a terrific personnel director who had been fired by Jones. Next to him was Brenda Bushell, recently axed as Dallas' television coordinator. What even the owner didn't realize was that Johnson had been in the middle of regaling those at the table with a tale of how he had made a trade the previous year without Jones' approval.

The tension, even to the media interlopers on the fringe of the incident, was palpable.

Angered by what he considered a half-hearted reception to his presence and the limp manner in which the crowd reacted to his toast, Jones slammed down his beer and left.

"You damned folks," he yelled, turning away, "just go the hell on with your damned private party then."

Hours later, surrounded by some writers at a hotel bar, Jones told the scribes he was seriously thinking of firing Johnson. No one, this reporter included, knew if it was the owner, or the Scotch he'd been firing down, doing the talking. No one knew if the comments were on or off the record. But the drinks got lots stronger and so did Jones' bluster. He vented about how Johnson got all the credit, threatened to go right to the coach's room and fire him on the spot. At about 4 a.m., when Jones opined he "could find 500 coaches" who would kill for the Cowboys' job, the reporters began to politely excuse themselves and hustle to their laptop computers to chronicle the wacky and sleepless night.

Little did anyone realize it was the beginning of the end for what could have been the last legitimate NFL dynasty. By the next morning, Johnson, apprised of Jones' comments, had bolted Orlando. Within a few days, he was gone. Nearly six years later, you'd likely have to hold a gun to the heads of both Johnson and Jones to get them to admit they each should have swallowed some pride for the sake of more Super Bowl championships. That neither did should, in retrospect, haunt both men, but especially Johnson.

Alliances in the NFL are most often unholy, marriages of convenience in which the parties stay together for the sake of the kids. In this case, the kids are 300-pound linemen, of course. But had those two Dallas superegos found even the most pragmatic excuse for continuing an already uneasy coexistence, they might have made history. Certainly they would have won another NFL championship or two.

Johnson went off to television for a couple years, and Jones went off to squander high-round draft choices. Both were blind to the fact they needed one another. Even with their success under Barry Switzer for a time, the Cowboys haven't been the same. Neither has Johnson, who promised a Super Bowl to the fans of South Florida but in four seasons couldn't even produce as good a record as predecessor Don Shula posted in his final four years with the Dolphins.

It's difficult to blame Johnson for not wanting to tolerate Jones' antics any longer, but had he just found a way to suck it up a while longer, he would have written his ticket to Canton. Every genius has the kind of fatal flaw the Greek tragedians wrote about, however, in his unique gene pool. Johnson was a genius, to be sure, and he shared the fatal egotism with his boss.

I first met Johnson back in the late 1970s, when he was the defensive coordinator for Jackie Sherrill at the University of Pittsburgh. From the outset, it was obvious he was a brilliant tactician and even better judge of meat on the hoof. Said Sherrill on Sunday, a few hours after Johnson's final retirement announcement: "He had the best eye of anyone I've ever seen. He could look at a guy and know immediately if he was a player or not. Man, he had a gift for picking them out."

Indeed, at both Dallas and Miami, the coach typically got his entire staff involved in scouting. Assistants would bounce around the country in private jets, unsatisfied with merely relying on the comments from the scouts, anxious to grab first-hand knowledge of that year's prospects. The process was innovative, and it was hands-on, and it was quintessentially Johnson.

A man who believed that it was always better to do things yourself than to delegate, Johnson ran his team's drafts as if the term "laissez faire" never existed. He wheeled and dealed on draft day, cutting trades that no one else seemed able to consummate, and he reveled in it. And when it was time, in 1993, to counsel his buddy Wannstedt about the various head coaching opportunities being pitched to him, it was a philosophy Johnson hammered home to his protégé.

"Jimmy was a big believer in the theory of controlling your own destiny," Wannstedt noted recently. "He just figured that coaches get fired because of players, so they should have the right to pick the players who eventually would get them fired."

After winning their second Vince Lombardi Trophy, the two J.J.s could have had a few more if they would have stuck together.(AP)

A good man and a solid coach whose reach exceeded his grasp, Wannstedt was hand-picked by Johnson. He will not, at the behest of Wayne Huizenga, though, be as hands-on as his former boss. It took one bad experience, it seems, for Wannstedt to have discerned his strengths, none of which lie in the area of player personnel decisions. It took one awful experience, coming back to the sideline for the '99 season after he had originally decided last spring to resign and spend more time with his family, to chase Johnson away, this time for good.

To help protect the line of succession, one that decreed Wannstedt supplant him, Johnson agreed Sunday to stay on the Miami payroll in some nebulous role that will draw him to the office at most a couple times per week and maybe for the draft. Wannstedt would do well to prevail upon Johnson's expertise in the area of personnel. Also, we have learned that deposed Pittsburgh Steelers personnel man Tom Donahoe, a close friend of Wannstedt, figures to soon be employed by the Dolphins.

Johnson would do well to never again entertain the thought of unretirement and to, with time on his hands now, realize just what he walked away from at Dallas in 1994.