Jones, Johnson kissing, making up?
Could it be that the NFL’s oddest of odd couples are on the verge of getting back together?
Talk about cats and dogs and end times, it sure sounded as if the icy relationship between Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson was thawing a bit Saturday night as the Dallas Cowboys owner and his former coach retracted their claws a bit.
Jerry used the occasion of his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame to say he might consider ending one of the Cowboys’ great oversights and bringing Johnson into the team’s vaunted Ring of Honor. After all, Jimmy did coach the team to two consecutive Super Bowl victories and played a role — the two men have squabbled over how large it was — in the building of that team.
“You were a great teammate. You were a great partner, to the contrary of popular belief,” Jones said in his speech. “We worked so well together for five years and restored the Cowboys’ credibility with our fans. We were back-to-back. We were driven. We had thick skin. We took all the criticism they could dish out. I thank you.”
Later Saturday night, an expansive Jones elaborated on how the relationship fractured along the lines of personnel decision — and who got the credit or the blame. Johnson quit in 1994.
“After Jimmy screwed up and we parted ways … I come home and, of course, [Jones’ wife] Gene has been watching the news and finds out about it and I lay down,” Jones said, according to the Sporting News. “It’s as silent as anything you can imagine. After I laid there a minute, she just looks over and says, ‘You can’t stand it, can you? You just absolutely, when it gets going, you’ve just got to get in it and mess it up.’ I was asked what I said, and I just shut up and went to sleep.”
Only three years ago, the two were at it. “I couldn’t handle the disloyalty,” Jones said in an ESPN interview. “Whether it was right or not, by every measurement you can go, I had paid so many times a higher price to get to be there than he had paid, it was unbelievable.” To that, Johnson had called his former boss “a rich a-hole.”
You get the picture. With both men now in their 70s, it’s certainly time for the former teammates on the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville’s 1964 national championship team to patch things up and just hug it out already.
“Just so we’re clear, you know me: I want to make anything we do in that Ring of Honor — I want to make it have its own special attention, so I’m not going to get into that right now,” Jones said (via ESPN’s Todd Archer) after his speech . “But I hope it was obvious up there how much I appreciated what Jimmy has contributed to the Cowboys [and] his, frankly, lifelong friendship.
“Our differences, while they were certainly visible and magnitude because of the nature of it, if you really look at our friendship over the years, there’s just not that much to fuss about. And so, it was pretty easy to reflect back on his contribution and what he meant.”
Finally.