The image bowl

Sporting News, The, Nov 4, 1996 by Terry Frei

Barry Switzer doesn't care who knows. Care? He points it out himself, and not self-consciously. As we speak in his office, the Cowboys' assistants are piecing together a game plan in another part of the Valley Ranch team complex in Irving, Texas. Barry? What does Barry need to be there for? Many head coaches are uninvolved in the crucial minutiae but pretend to be, yet Switzer isn't trying to fool me--or anyone else.

So here is Switzer, in the middle of the buildup week before the Cowboys' 29-10 domination of Jimmy Johnson's Dolphins, the game covered as if it were a cross between a Super Bowl and a soap-bubble mini-series. (Which part would Richard Chamberlain play, anyway? Jerry, Jimmy or Barry?) Except for loafers fashionably over sockless feet, Switzer is dressed as if he is about to play 18 holes, and he is talking over times old and present--but mostly old. He brightens, luxuriates in the memories. This is not an audience with Switzer; it is part catharsis, a license to recall.

Like the time, he says, he helped Jimmy get his first full-time college coaching job, at Wichita State. Back then, Johnson was an assistant high school coach in Picayune, Miss. "He was 0 and 11, or 0 and whatever," Switzer says. "I told Jimmy, I said, `Get your ass in that car and get to Wichita and Larry Lacewell will hire you.' So many guys aren't lucky enough to get out of high schol, much less Picayune, Mississippi, and 0 and whatever.

"He walks into Lacewell's office, and Lacewell never had put an eyeball on him, and Jimmy ended up being the best man at Lacewell's wedding later."

Lacewell, Johnson and Switzer all ended up together at Oklahoma. Pals, they were; barbecuing, partying, coaching under Chuck Fairbanks. Switzer and Lacewell had been close for years, and even pals can have trauma, trauma induced by human foibles. But they at least can work in the same organization. The contrast: Years later, when Johnson left the Cowboys and Lacewell stayed as their director of pro and college scouting, Lacewell, in Johnson's mind, was choosing between Jerry and Jimmy.

So as the game against the Cowboys approached, Johnson was saying, sure, he knew Larry Lacewell. But Jimmy, you were best man at his wedding. You just know him? "I was the best man available," he says, triggering laughter among a gathering in the Dolphins' media room.

But we digress. Anyway ...

We picked that one up from Barry. Anyway ...

It is one of Switzer's favorite words, often a recognition that he has strayed off track, figuratively going from a midfield conversation to the upper deck with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other. Which, of course, is the symbolic position he sometimes seems to assume as coach of the Cowboys.

Anyway, we were talking about Barry and Jimmy. How about the time Jimmy and Barry went fishin' in northern British Columbia for 12 days and dammed if Jimmy didn't dress up like a moose and look kinda silly as he came out of the outhouse?

Still have that picture, Switzer says, and it's the funniest damn thing you've ever seen; well, almost as funny as that time he talked about earlier in the week, when he and Jimmy and the rest of the Sooners' assistants dressed in drag and wigs and Jimmy was "really chesty." All because there were trying to lighten the atmosphere during the week of the 1970 Colorado game, because there were "Chuck Chuck" Fairbanks bumper stickers all over the place and if they didn't beat Colorado they coulda been on the verge of getting their asses fired and ...

Oops. Guess it's kinda contagious.

We were visiting Barry because we joined the hordes following the Cowboys and Dolphins during the pregame week. This came from a bemused Emmitt Smith early in the week, as he peered out at the masses: "Y'all got to be some of the stupidest people in the world. We're going down there to play the Dolphins, not Jimmy."

The interest had very little directly to do with what happened on the field Sunday. No, we wanted to see if Jimmy would call Jerry an idiot, or vice versa, and whether there would be a spitting or wrestling match at midfield before, during or after the game. None of that happened: Jerry initiated a for-the-cameras handtouch--"handshake" would make it sound too warm--with Jimmy on the the field an hour before kickoff.

When the game ended, Jimmy ran a Michael Johnson spirit to the middle of the field, brushed Switzer's hand--and ran. "Obviously, they have a very talented team," Johnson said later, "and they were the better team." And Switzer in victory? "The personalities of this game, that's all crap to me," he said. "I don't pay much attention to that."

Hands up from those who believe that.

Thought so.

Johnson spent most of the week dodging memories and also attempting to make it sound as if he inherited a terrible team, rather than one that made the playoffs under Don Shula last season. Jimmy had it set up: If the Cowboys beat the Dolphins, it was like little, ol'bitty Northeast Louisiana playing Oklahoma, and it had nothing to do with a referendum on coaching'cuz everybody knows Barry doesn't much coach the team that Jimmy helped build ...