00:00I was at a conversation with Jimmy Johnson, and he asked me to tell you the story.
00:04He said, how did you get Jimmy to join the NFL on Fox?
00:09Well, my father always said that it's much better to be lucky than smart.
00:15And the situation with Fox 74 Sunday and Jimmy Johnson falls into the pure luck category.
00:23Ed Gorin and I were down in Orlando for the NFL owners meeting when the contretemps happened between the two
00:31legends, Mr. Jones and Mr. Johnson.
00:35And two, three days later, Jimmy was, how to put it nicely, a free agent.
00:45I was in New York. Ed Gorin rang and said, I'm on my way to Dallas.
00:49And I said, good luck.
00:51And the reason for that was that the whole premise of Fox 74 Sunday, it had to have three parts.
00:59It had to have an offense, which was obviously Terry Bradshaw, needed to have a defense.
01:05But the key was to have a coach, to understand strategy, because without that coach's perspective, that you don't really
01:13get the overall view.
01:14And all coaches, especially Jimmy Johnson, are great teachers.
01:19And so I realized that if we were lucky enough to get Jimmy, so Jimmy decided that he would join
01:27Fox 74 Sunday, but not really.
01:29And this is so he wanted to stay down in Amaralda.
01:33And so he started on Fox 74 Sunday.
01:37We had this studio and there's Jimmy in front in front of a tank full of tropical fish.
01:45And then eventually we got him in the studio and then he got antsy, right?
01:52He got antsy sitting there and I could tell he was starting to get antsy.
01:57And he got off of the gig as coach down at the Dolphins, which he took.
02:03And so off he goes to coach at the Dolphins.
02:07We made alternate arrangements.
02:09But Jimmy, as you know, Jimmy is absolutely unique.
02:15He is like I've always said, put Jimmy Johnson in as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and you
02:24would improve its profits by 5%.
02:27He has this incredible mind for getting to what's right and what's wrong.
02:32And then he can look at a picture and say, that's missing and go fix it.
02:37So I was missing him dreadfully because we did not have the sage strategy that Jimmy would bring to every
02:46game.
02:46And so he's coaching.
02:49I don't think he was having that much success with the Dolphins.
02:53So I got Mike Berger, one of our top researchers, to start finding stories about coaches who had died from
03:02heart attacks.
03:03And we found a newspaper in every country around the world.
03:10And I ended up with this thing, story after story after story, of Coach Smith, 47, heart attack.
03:20Coach Brown, 51, out he went, heart attack.
03:25Coach Smith, 41, boom, heart attack.
03:30So I've got this thing and had it special delivered, not to Jimmy, not to Jimmy at all, to Mrs.
03:37Rhonda Johnson.
03:38And I just and said, Rhonda, darling, I've just sent you a little bit of light reading material and love
03:51Jimmy to come back to the show.
03:52Jimmy came back to the show.
03:54What can I say?
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