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boomtown of Port Arthur, where blue-collar whites and blacks attended separate schools, used separate toilets, ate at separate restaurants, yet bonded over similarly arduous existences. As his peers were choosing to stick mostly within their racial boundaries, color rarely seemed to occur to young Jimmy. If you could play ball, you could play ball. “Jimmy never thought there was any difference between him and the blacks,” his father, C. W. Johnson, said. “And he didn’t like it when anybody said anything about it, either.”
    Perhaps that’s because, economically, C. W. and Allene Johnson’s family had more in common with blacks than whites. Jimmy grew up poor, the youngest son of a father who toiled for the Gulf Oil refinery and, later, the Townsend Dairy. While he didn’t earn much, C. W. worked hard and expected the same from his two sons. It was this ethic that helped Jimmy emerge as a big man at Thomas Jefferson High, which he attended with a certain sloppily dressed, music-loving gal named Janis Joplin. (In a typical jock-meets-hippie clash, Johnson mockingly tagged Joplin “Beat Weeds.”) With rare exception, Johnson was respected across social and economic lines as the school’s top athlete (he earned all-statehonors on the offensive and defensive lines) and as an accelerated student who, in the words of Sports Illustrated ’s Ed Hinton, “could solve algebra problems at a glance and write term papers worthy of A’s the night before they were due.” He was nicknamed “Scar Head” by a childhood buddy named Jimmy Maxfield—an ode to both his eternally cut-up noggin (largely the product of wrestling matches between Jimmy and older brother Wayne) and the determination that inspired him to attack all challenges.
    During his senior year at Thomas Jefferson in 1960–61, Johnson was heavily recruited by two dozen major colleges, including Alabama and its tenacious young coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant. Given that his parents were born and raised Arkansans, however, he signed with the Razorbacks. Johnson’s freshman coach, a twenty-four-year-old novice named Barry Switzer, was immediately impressed by the noseguard’s ferocity, and his varsity coach, the esteemed Broyles, looked upon Johnson as a team leader. As a senior against Nebraska in the 1965 Cotton Bowl, Johnson accumulated twelve tackles as the Razorbacks won 10–7 to capture their first national championship. “I got my first taste of the concept of winning it all,” Johnson once wrote. “I thought, ‘Now that’s the way to end a playing career.’”
    With the Razorbacks’ success, collegiate programs from across the country came to Fayetteville to learn the vaunted “Arkansas Monster Slide Defense.” Intelligent and articulate, the soon-to-graduate Johnson was asked to explain the intricacies of Broyles’s system. One of the men to sit in on a Johnson lecture was Louisiana Tech head coach Joe Aillet, who was taken aback by the twenty-one-year-old’s maturity. When Tech’s defensive coordinator suffered a heart attack that would cause him to miss the ’65 campaign, Aillet offered Johnson the job. At the time, Jimmy was spending the summer working as a shipyard welder, desperate to earn some extra money to support his new wife, Linda Kay (whom he had met as an undergrad and married the summer before), and their toddler son, Brent. “They said they’d pay me a thousand dollars a month forthree months,” Johnson wrote. “One thousand dollars a month, in 1965! I said, ‘Hey, I’ll be there.’”
     
    In his three months at Louisiana Tech, Johnson shed his aspiring psychologist skin and transformed into an aspiring football coach. He loved the plotting and the strategy—taking a concept, writing it on a chalkboard, and watching it come to life. That Tech finished a mediocre 4–4 mattered little to Johnson. Through four years of college he was never quite sure where life would lead him. Now, he had an idea.
    Johnson spent the