Woody Johnson Leaps into the Limelight

I found this great article on Jets’ owner Woody Johnson written by Greg Bishop of the NY Times. Enjoy

For years, Woody Johnson was known as the reclusive billionaire owner of the Jets. He ran one of the most secretive organizations in football, the headquarters lined with a barbed-wire fence. So this month, when Johnson verbally slapped the N.F.L. over a clandestine coin flip and invited HBO’s cameras into training camp with full access, his behavior seemed so out of character.

Except that it was not.

Johnson is taking decisive steps to change the Jets’ identity, and that starts with the owner, out front, signaling this new direction.

“We’re coming into our own,” he said during a series of recent interviews. “We’re becoming who we want to be and who we are.”

Finding the right fit, the right business, the right team, took 62 years for Johnson, who most mornings commutes by custom foot scooter to his offices in Rockefeller Center. It makes for an odd image: the billionaire Fred Flintstone, pedaling through Manhattan in designer suits.

Lately, Johnson has been stopped by bus drivers and cabdrivers and police officers, his increasingly public profile part of this design. With flashy free-agent signings, bold trades and a run to the A.F.C. championship game last season, Johnson’s Jets are repositioned, as linebacker Bart Scott said, “to prove we aren’t second-class citizens, to compete with the Giants for the spotlight in New York.”

In August, Johnson will help open a stadium not named for another team. In May, his fellow owners will vote on New York’s joint Super Bowl bid.

In February, inside the nearly completed stadium, Johnson wore a Jets construction hat and considered his own continuing renovation, the way he recently channeled his inner Jerry Jones, leaving himself more open, more visible, more exposed — and not by accident.

“In 1999, this was all a dream,” Johnson said. “I can’t believe it’s really happening.”

On Jan. 4, as his organization, all those moving pieces, coalesced for the playoff run of Johnson’s dreams, he took a phone call that left him devastated. His daughter Casey, a socialite with a history of drug use and personal problems, was found dead in Los Angeles from what the coroner later called diabetes complications. She was 30.

“Worst day of my life,” Johnson said.

At age 8, Casey had a routine check-up and left with the diagnosis of diabetes. The change was immediate and striking. Suddenly, she needed continual care, a special diet, 12 insulin injections every day.

Johnson hated administering the shots, poking his baby girl with needles. He used to practice on apples late at night, and still, at the moment of truth, he often broke into a cold sweat.

The family spent nights at hospitals whenever Casey became dehydrated, lightheaded or sick. She had brittle diabetes, which is characterized by frequent and extreme swings in blood sugar levels.

Father and daughter co-wrote a book about managing diabetes. They raised money for juvenile diabetes research. But over the years, their relationship fractured, they became estranged and, when Casey left for California, Johnson thought that on her own, away from family, she would find herself. The way he did.

“She was trying to find her own identity,” he said. “She was rebellious. She made some judgment errors. Been there, done that. She had to take responsibility. And it couldn’t be me pushing. Or her mother. Or her doctor. She would ultimately have to do it herself.”

The week she died, Johnson went to the Jets’ playoff game in Cincinnati. Inside his private box, he temporarily lost himself in football, but when it became clear the Jets were going to win, friends watched Johnson’s grief resurface. Fans shouted their support. He waved meekly, with puffy eyes.

In the locker room, Johnson cried as Coach Rex Ryan handed over what he described as the most meaningful game ball of his career. The moment meant so much, and yet it changed nothing. Johnson still felt as if he had failed as a parent.

He thought about his father’s work in health care and how he died of cancer, about the diabetes research and Casey’s death. It seemed so unfair. Then he thought about his mother, Betty, and her Midwestern practicality, the way she carried on without complaint after her husband and two sons died.

“I don’t think she’s ever gotten past it,” he said. “With grief, you learn how to live with it. I don’t think you ever get over it.”

Johnson said he did not lean on anyone, including his second wife, Suzanne, and his four other children, while grieving. Asked if that was difficult, he answered quickly, “No, it’s not.” Then he grabbed his cellphone and showed a picture of him, with long hair, holding Casey as an infant. The good memories, he said, were starting to flood back.

He seemed reflective, vulnerable, shaken. Here he had found this new direction, for himself and for his team. Casey barely had that chance.

A Door Is Closed

Johnson’s life, his achievements in football and philanthropy and politics, resulted from three characters, J&J. A framed copy of the Johnson & Johnson credo hangs from his office wall, near a volume of family history that contains a favorite photograph.

The portrait captures four generations of Robert Wood Johnsons: great-grandfather, grandfather and father gathered around Woody as an infant. The three men played significant roles in creating or shaping J&J. The fourth did not.

Fascinated by the family business, Johnson used to linger when his father held evening meetings on the porch. As a teenager, after working one summer at a plant in on Route 1 in New Jersey, he knew he wanted to follow his father and grandfather at J&J.

The plan fell apart, starting in 1965, when Johnson’s father lost his job in a falling-out with Johnson’s grandfather. The two men he most idolized died soon after: his grandfather in 1968 and his father in 1970. Two younger brothers died — one from a drug overdose, another in a motorcycle accident — in 1975.

The decade of loss shaped Johnson’s future. Because in addition to burying four family members, , he lost the entryway to the life he had mapped out.

“That was the beginning of the end of my ability to enter the company,” he said, although he still has ties to J&J and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “That was a big period of transformation. Because I had to find something equal to J&J and the culture I’d been hearing about all those years. I thought it was so attractive. I still do.”

At 28, Johnson had started his search. He had moved to Florida and built condominiums yet found not one ounce of fulfillment. He ventured into cable television in 1977 and made a fortune his way, on his path.

Johnson emulated J&J at each stop, spurred by the company that would not hire him, attempting to reach some sort of parallel success. Still, when pressed for an achievement he regarded on J&J’s level, Johnson said, “I don’t think I’ve reached anything close.”

Sometimes, Johnson thinks about the sports nut in his father, the way he loved listening to baseball on the radio. Sometimes, he says to his mother, “What would Dad think?”

Alpha Males on Harleys

In the early 1990s, Johnson embarked on a cross-country motorcycle trip with a dozen accomplished alpha males. He rode a Harley and wore a black hat with fake hair attached and flowing out the back.

Johnson had sold the cable company and found himself somewhat adrift. He donated to philanthropies and political causes. He managed his money. He raised his family. But he wanted something more.

The trip started at Tavern on the Green in New York and ended at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. They traveled hundreds of miles each day, stopping in small towns, gazing at Mount Rushmore. Johnson even talked his way out of a speeding ticket.

“There was something slightly vulnerable about Woody,” said Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, who befriended Johnson on that trip. “Like he was searching for who he was.”

By then, Johnson had banked billions from business and his inheritance. But among these self-starters, one man who taught in prisons and others who worked on Wall Street, he found a spark.

Johnson struck Wenner as reserved and mild-mannered, but Wenner also sensed ambition, a sincere need to achieve, below the surface. At a gym in Reno, Nev., Wenner said, Johnson “knocked out like 100 chin-ups.” Wenner described that moment as a revelation: mild Woody Johnson was “a real ironman type underneath.”

For Johnson, the trip led to a host of new ventures. Like buying the Jets. Like trying to build a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. Like leading fund-raising for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

With each step, Johnson inched further into public view. Asked if he agreed with stories that painted him as the reclusive billionaire, he said, “I don’t see myself that way.”

He paused, then added: “At this point.”

Johnson arrived 10 minutes before the funeral for Leon Hess, an oil tycoon who had owned the Jets since 1963, and gained entry only by following a United States senator inside. Soon after, the Hess estate announced that the franchise was for sale. About seven months later, in January 2000, Johnson paid $635 million for the Jets.

“What do I know now that I didn’t know then?” Johnson said. “That I didn’t know that much.”

He held little N.F.L. experience, save a “Monday Night Football” guide titled “Touchdown” that he co-published after college and a flirtation with the Tampa Bay franchise in the early 1980s. Friends shared Wenner’s thinking, Woody might be too nice for this.

Rebuilding the Jets

The Jets played home games at Giants Stadium in New Jersey and practiced in an aging, substandard complex at Hofstra University on Long Island. The first time Johnson drove to Hofstra, the Jets’ sign hung slightly crooked.

Before Johnson’s first season, Bill Belichick left for New England, scribbling on scrap paper that he was resigning as “HC of the NYJ,” shortly after the Jets hired him. After the 2000 season, Bill Parcells departed as the general manager. Johnson was off to a rough start: two Hall of Fame coaches, vanished.

In Johnson’s first 10 seasons, the Jets made five playoff appearances under four coaches but struggled to erase two notions that give rise to Johnson’s voice.

On the Jets’ supposed inferiority complex about the Giants: “People who say that must have a complex. They must be complex people.”

On the phrase Same Old Jets: “It’s derisive. It’s not good whether it applies to football, or business, the Same Old Johnsons, whatever. It’s just disrespectful.”

To signal this transformation in culture, Johnson charged into the forefront. He opened an organization — “my directive,” he said — that the former coach Eric Mangini had cloaked in secrecy. He walked the parking lot, greeting fans. He stood outside the locker room, shaking hands. If that sold a personal seat license or 2,000, all the better.

The more visible Johnson became, the more comfortable he felt. The more comfortable he felt, the more he revealed about himself. Soon, a nuanced picture of the reclusive billionaire emerged. He collects American history books and first editions of famous texts, knows that Manhattan is home to 16 birds of prey, goes heliskiing all over the world.

Rex Ryan provided an unexpected influence. On the surface, they make an odd couple: the bald, bookish owner and his heavyset, brash coach. But in Ryan’s bold pronouncements, unwavering confidence and authenticity, Johnson saw some of himself and the owner he wanted to become.

Johnson refused to criticize Mangini, but in praising Ryan, he highlighted the difference between them, at least in the organization’s eyes.

“How you manage players, make them a team, is so important,” Johnson said. “That was the missing ingredient. That’s not the missing ingredient anymore.”

Reminded that Ryan had described the Jets as New York’s team, Johnson said: “I normally don’t disagree with Rex, and people do at their own peril. Because Rex is usually right. I’ll say it.”

The new motto, In Rex, He Trusts. Ryan said he wondered if he would feel uncomfortable around a man of Johnson’s stature. Instead, he found an owner whose family ate pregame meals with the players, who spent wildly acquiring free agents, who had J&J research the weight-loss procedure Ryan underwent this month.

“That’s why I wanted the Jets’ job so bad,” Ryan said. “It was more Woody than anything else.”

The two met recently at the Jets’ gleaming three-year-old headquarters in suburban New Jersey.

Johnson pointed at Ryan’s Super Bowl ring from Baltimore and said: “That’s what it’s about, Rex. We’re going to win this thing. And when we do, I’m going wear it every day.”

Ryan said, “What’s it going to look like?”

Johnson answered with three words: big and bold. With that, the reclusive billionaire took another step into the spotlight.

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