- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
- Messages
- 123,270
JJ suffers as if trade had never happened
By Buck Harvey
12:01 AM
ARLINGTON — The Cowboys couldn't win a game, and Jimmy Johnson saw no way out. During a lunchtime jog with his staff, he tossed out an idea.
“We could trade Herschel Walker,” he told his assistants, and Johnson remembered in his book the way they looked at him.
“About the same way I'd taken it,” Johnson wrote, “when Jerry Jones first told me he was interested in buying the Cowboys.”
This is how the change began in 1989. Johnson would put together a confusing and stunning trade package, and his reputation was made because of it.
Jones, not so much.
The Vikings come to North Texas on Sunday looking the way the Cowboys did a quarter of a century ago. Now they are the ones with the super-human runner and seemingly no way out. And when the NFL trade deadline passed last week, and Adrian Peterson's name was thrown around, the memories of 1989 were revisited.
By Walker, too. “I don't think a trade like that will ever happen again,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I think Jerry Jones was very smart in doing that.”
Walker credited Jones when few others do. Johnson's version stands up, and this goes back to his 20-year-old book, “Turning the Thing Around.”
The year before Johnson and Jones arrived in Dallas, Walker was the lone bright spot. He gained over 2,000 yards in rushing and receiving for a team that won only three games.
But he didn't fit as well in the new-era offense. “We had no intention of building our offense around Herschel,” Johnson wrote in his book.
So after the jog, Johnson approached Jones. While Johnson said Jones “trusted me on the technical part of such a trade,” Jones was concerned about the public's reaction.
Jones, wrote Johnson, knew his fan base “liked stars.” Jones has continued to operate based on that belief.
Johnson went ahead, and Jones had a role. He contacted Walker's agent to make sure there would be a smooth separation; he wrote a check to Walker for $1 million to make it smoother.
When the deal was announced, the details were complicated — even to the Vikings' general manager, Mike Lynn. The Cowboys had obtained five players from Minnesota, and they could either keep them or turn them into draft picks if they released them.
Lynn figured talent-poor Dallas would need the players. Instead, said Johnson, they “were essentially straw men, disguising what I really wanted ... I wanted the draft picks.”
Maybe everyone should have seen what was happening. But the draft picks were just numbers then; no one knew Emmitt Smith and Darren Woodson would be among them. And Johnson and Jones, cast as the bumbling heirs to the Tom Landry dynasty, had no credibility.
Given that, the reaction was based on personalities. “I think (Lynn) beat the stuffing out of the Cowboys with the deal,” wrote a Washington Post columnist.
“Love that steal for Minnesota,” a Dallas Morning News columnist wrote. “See you in the end zone, Herschel. See you later, Dallas. Much later.”
The days that followed only heightened criticism. Walker gained 98 yards the first two times he touched the ball for the Vikings, and the Cowboys lost the next weekend on their way to a 1-15 record.
Still, as Johnson wrote, “Jerry Jones and I knew, at the moment we traded Herschel Walker, that the turn was then inevitable, that the beginning was ending. But nobody else knew or believed, because nobody else knew me.”
Nobody else knew “me.” And as Dallas made 51 trades in five years, everybody came to see Johnson as the calculating, fiery reason the Cowboys turned the thing around.
He wouldn't have as much success later with the Dolphins; no one gave him a Herschel-like gift there. But what he did in Dallas lives on, to the Fox studios and beyond, where his Super Bowl legacy is cemented.
Jones has tried to suggest he was in charge all through his ownership. A year ago this month, Johnson swatted that down as “completely a bunch of crock.”
His tone had substantially changed since he wrote his book.
But Jones' stature hasn't. It's as if he's stuck in 1989. No one believed he could get it right then, just as no one does now.
By Buck Harvey
12:01 AM
ARLINGTON — The Cowboys couldn't win a game, and Jimmy Johnson saw no way out. During a lunchtime jog with his staff, he tossed out an idea.
“We could trade Herschel Walker,” he told his assistants, and Johnson remembered in his book the way they looked at him.
“About the same way I'd taken it,” Johnson wrote, “when Jerry Jones first told me he was interested in buying the Cowboys.”
This is how the change began in 1989. Johnson would put together a confusing and stunning trade package, and his reputation was made because of it.
Jones, not so much.
The Vikings come to North Texas on Sunday looking the way the Cowboys did a quarter of a century ago. Now they are the ones with the super-human runner and seemingly no way out. And when the NFL trade deadline passed last week, and Adrian Peterson's name was thrown around, the memories of 1989 were revisited.
By Walker, too. “I don't think a trade like that will ever happen again,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I think Jerry Jones was very smart in doing that.”
Walker credited Jones when few others do. Johnson's version stands up, and this goes back to his 20-year-old book, “Turning the Thing Around.”
The year before Johnson and Jones arrived in Dallas, Walker was the lone bright spot. He gained over 2,000 yards in rushing and receiving for a team that won only three games.
But he didn't fit as well in the new-era offense. “We had no intention of building our offense around Herschel,” Johnson wrote in his book.
So after the jog, Johnson approached Jones. While Johnson said Jones “trusted me on the technical part of such a trade,” Jones was concerned about the public's reaction.
Jones, wrote Johnson, knew his fan base “liked stars.” Jones has continued to operate based on that belief.
Johnson went ahead, and Jones had a role. He contacted Walker's agent to make sure there would be a smooth separation; he wrote a check to Walker for $1 million to make it smoother.
When the deal was announced, the details were complicated — even to the Vikings' general manager, Mike Lynn. The Cowboys had obtained five players from Minnesota, and they could either keep them or turn them into draft picks if they released them.
Lynn figured talent-poor Dallas would need the players. Instead, said Johnson, they “were essentially straw men, disguising what I really wanted ... I wanted the draft picks.”
Maybe everyone should have seen what was happening. But the draft picks were just numbers then; no one knew Emmitt Smith and Darren Woodson would be among them. And Johnson and Jones, cast as the bumbling heirs to the Tom Landry dynasty, had no credibility.
Given that, the reaction was based on personalities. “I think (Lynn) beat the stuffing out of the Cowboys with the deal,” wrote a Washington Post columnist.
“Love that steal for Minnesota,” a Dallas Morning News columnist wrote. “See you in the end zone, Herschel. See you later, Dallas. Much later.”
The days that followed only heightened criticism. Walker gained 98 yards the first two times he touched the ball for the Vikings, and the Cowboys lost the next weekend on their way to a 1-15 record.
Still, as Johnson wrote, “Jerry Jones and I knew, at the moment we traded Herschel Walker, that the turn was then inevitable, that the beginning was ending. But nobody else knew or believed, because nobody else knew me.”
Nobody else knew “me.” And as Dallas made 51 trades in five years, everybody came to see Johnson as the calculating, fiery reason the Cowboys turned the thing around.
He wouldn't have as much success later with the Dolphins; no one gave him a Herschel-like gift there. But what he did in Dallas lives on, to the Fox studios and beyond, where his Super Bowl legacy is cemented.
Jones has tried to suggest he was in charge all through his ownership. A year ago this month, Johnson swatted that down as “completely a bunch of crock.”
His tone had substantially changed since he wrote his book.
But Jones' stature hasn't. It's as if he's stuck in 1989. No one believed he could get it right then, just as no one does now.
