Up in the darkened owner’s suite, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is dancing with Kate Bosworth, a 31-year-old blond actress and model. Their hands clasped, they shuffle their feet along the suite’s top step, giggling when they momentarily go cheek-to-cheek. What Jones may lack in rhythm, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm. Clad in a black cocktail dress, Bosworth sashays with her back to the action. With a lopsided grin, Jones, in a black suit and salmon-colored shirt, peeks over her right shoulder at the oval stage. Standing a few feet away are Tony Romo and Jason Witten, Cowboys veterans who steal sideways glances at this unlikely duo’s jagged two-step. As Strait sings the final stanza, Jones guides Bosworth through a mini-twirl that careens into a hit-and-run half-hug. It all looks innocent—or as innocent as 71-year-old Jones looks doing anything.
“Soooooooo awesome—thank you, Mr. Jones,” Bosworth says before scampering down the suite’s steps to rejoin her husband. Winking, Jones retrieves a tall plastic cup—emblazoned with the Cowboys’ iconic star, filled with his usual drink this summer, Johnnie Walker Blue Label (always on ice)—and savors a swig of the smoky-smooth whiskey.
Jones’s last dance is the perfect capstone to a glittery, boozy celebration of the $1.25 billion pleasure palace that he built for his mediocre football team. Inside the owner’s spacious suite, Jones’s star-studded concert party offers all the trappings of a corporate retreat—calligraphy name cards, a barbecue buffet, and an open bar—but it soon degenerates into something resembling a barnyard square dance.
“We knocked down a fifth in about 30 minutes already,” Jones tells onetime billionaire Tom Hicks. “So we are ready to dance tonight.”
“Good,” says Hicks, the former owner of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars. “I’ve never seen this many people spendin’ so much money.”
Jones winks. “This broke the Super Bowl record for money spent . . . this concert—biggest gate in the history of this stadium,” he says.
It’s June 7, the final concert of George Strait’s last tour, dubbed “The Cowboy Rides Away.” Always keeping score, Jones confides the concert’s highlights to a few select guests: Didja know 77,000 tickets sold in just 15 minutes? . . . These tickets got up to where they were sellin’ for $10,000—the parking close to the stadium was $1,000 a space . . . This gate is $13 million—after I get mine, I’m laughin’ . . .
Standing 6 feet, ½-inch tall, Jones is, like his stadium, modernized by creative vision and formidable resources—his face lifted, his scalp fortified, and his teeth capped to gleam. His blue eyes are still icicle-clear, full of mirth and the hint of trouble. It’s been nearly a half-century since he played college football, but he still moves with an athlete’s gait, as effortlessly as a man 20 years younger. Stepping forward heels-first, he appears to glide, even lope, despite a slouch that’s most perceptible when he’s immobile and feeling agitated, which happens most often when his team is playing.
Exactly three months from now, the Cowboys will open the regular season here against the San Francisco 49ers, the start, most likely, of another season stuck in that rut. But for the Cowboys’ owner, president, and general manager, tonight is a guaranteed winner.
“This is fun, isn’t it?” Jones asks Romo, the Cowboys’ hard-luck starting quarterback. “They will not kick a last-second field goal and kick our asses tonight. Everybody goes home happy.”
On the living room wall of his estimated $20 million mansion in Dallas’s posh Highland Park suburb is an original Norman Rockwell painting, Coin Toss. With a football cradled in his left arm, his right thumb raised, and his eyes aimed heavenward, Rockwell’s pear-shaped referee, flanked by skinny football players, flips a coin that hangs in midair. The image was the cover of the Saturday Evening Post dated October 21, 1950.
“I bought this painting in 1989 right after buying the Cowboys,” Jones says, admiring it late one night in June. “I had no money left—I mean, nothing . . . But Ross Perot collects Rockwells—he told me this one was too good to pass up . . . so I somehow scraped together $1.1 million.” Recently, Jones says, auction house Christie’s appraised Coin Toss at $18.5 million.
“Nothing I’ve ever owned has appreciated that much,” Jones says.
On February 25, 1989, Jones, then a little-known oil and gas wildcatter from Little Rock, Arkansas, bought the Cowboys for $151 million, the highest price paid at the time for an American sports franchise. Still the NFL’s most valuable franchise with annual revenues of $615 million, the Cowboys are now valued by Forbes at $3.2 billion. Jones is estimated to be worth at least that much, although likely much more. When told that the Cowboys’ value has appreciated at a faster clip than his beloved Rockwell, Jones mulls the idea for a moment, then beams: “You know, that’s probably true—I hadn’t thought of that.”
No team owner in American sports is more famous and infamous, more revered and reviled, than Jones. After the 2010 death of New York Yankees boss George Steinbrenner, Jones assumed the mantle of America’s mercurial team owner, hell-bent on doing it his way and constrained only by a salary cap.
Although Jones has made nearly all the right moves as the Cowboys’ owner, he has made just as many wrong moves as its general manager, the job he gave himself when he bought the team. Since the start of the 1997 season, the Cowboys have established themselves as the NFL’s masters of mediocrity, with a record of 136-136 and only one playoff victory. Each of the past three seasons, Dallas has finished 8-8, missing the playoffs by losing its final game ignominiously to a different division rival. Each subpar season further separates Jones’s first flush of glory—three Super Bowl titles in just four years, the last Lombardi Trophy raised in January 1996—from front-office dysfunction and fans’ impatience stretching nearly two decades now: the litany of blown draft picks and trades, hapless head coaches, overpaid and underachieving free agents, and squandered on-the-field chances.
It’s become a preseason rite that this question is posed in Dallas: why hasn’t owner Jerry Jones fired general manager Jerry Jones? Every summer, Jones gamely parries the question, always acknowledging the team’s past futility but never leaving any doubt that nothing will change.
“We would have thought that, with Romo as our quarterback, with a coach, a young coach, like Jason Garrett, that we should have been in better shape to compete,” Jones says at Valley Ranch. “So I’d be highly critical.
“On the other hand, I would have to look at what the GM has been—what he’s been in the past and, I would like to think, capable of what he can do in the future.”
When speaking of his role as GM, Jones often refers to himself in the third person, as if doing so might keep his shoddy performance at a safe distance.
Asked to grade his performance as GM, he says, “I’d give a C. If we had won a half a game more a year, we would be in the top five winningest teams in the NFL . . . We’ve been in a rut. Now, that stops with me. But the best person to get us out of the rut is me.”
“More than anything,” columnist Randy Galloway wrote in the Dallas Morning News a generation ago, Jones “wants to be known as a ‘football guy.’” Of all the barbs Jones has endured, this one still cuts the deepest: His millions purchased a seat at the football guys’ table, an accusation akin to saying a country bumpkin used new money to buy his way into the country club on a hill.
“He’s the luckiest guy I’ve ever seen—in business and in life,” says Larry Lacewell, one of Jones’s closest friends and the Cowboys’ head of scouting from 1992 until 2004. “His football team has been the unluckiest thing I’ve ever seen. How can you be that unlucky that long?”
Says Jason Witten, the Cowboys’ All-Pro tight end drafted by Jones in the third round in 2003: “People can misunderstand the passion for something else—an ego—and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I believe when he wakes up every morning, the first thing that comes into his mind is, ‘I’m gonna make this football team better.’”
Year after year, however, Jones hasn’t.
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sp; “Jerry Jones has become one of the biggest jokes in north Texas,” says Dale Hansen, a venomous, 34-year veteran sportscaster on WFAA in Dallas and the critic Jones most despises. “He has one of the most important jobs in all of American sports, maybe in the world: he is the general manager of the Dallas Cowboys. And based on his record, there is not a single team in the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, or the NHL that would hire him to be their general manager. Hell, he couldn’t get a job in Major League Soccer as the general manager . . . It’s almost tragic that he has allowed it to happen—not only to the Dallas Cowboys but to himself.”
Beyond the team, Jones is one of the NFL’s all-time leading visionaries, always devising ways for the league and his fellow owners to “grow the pie.” Commissioner Roger Goodell and many owners often call Jones, on his AT&T flip phone, seeking his counsel. Like Goodell, Jones wants an 18-game regular season, noting it would add $1 billion to the NFL’s annual revenues. Like his protégé Dan Snyder, the Washington owner, Jones believes that the Redskins name should not change, calling it “a term of respect.” Jones says the owners will stand behind Snyder.
Back in 1961, riding a team bus as a player on the University of Arkansas football team, Jones was thumbing through Life magazine when he stumbled on a profile of Art Modell, the new, fresh-faced Cleveland Browns owner. “I looked at it,” Jones says, “and I said, ‘Ya know . . . this is kind of what I’d like to think about doin’.’ And what a great way to spend your days, spend your life.” He wanted not only to own a team but also to call the football shots, do everything but the X’s and O’s.
But that wouldn’t be enough. After a quarter-century as Cowboys owner, general manager, and the architect of the stadium that has become a spit-shined monument to every Texas-sized aspiration, something big is still missing for Jones, as elusive now as it was then: to be widely regarded as a smart football man. Winning a Super Bowl trophy now, on his terms and without the help of Jimmy Johnson, his college teammate, the first man he hired to coach the Cowboys and his longtime nemesis, is all that’s left. To show them: this was—and still is—a smart football man.
“I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want to win the next Super Bowl,” Jones says, smiling. “You wouldn’t want to see the size of the check that I would write if it would for sure get the Dallas Cowboys a Super Bowl.”
The one thing he wants most is the only thing he can’t buy.
Happy hour, the bar inside Atlanta’s Ritz-Carlton, on a Tuesday afternoon in late May: Jones sits hunched at a table just outside the men’s room. Sporting a sky-blue sport jacket, a Cowboys star pinned to his lapel, and a loosened, midnight-blue tie, he’s nursing a tumbler of whiskey, which on closer inspection looks like a bowl of whiskey.
I came to this hotel for the NFL spring league meeting to try to meet Jones and persuade him to cooperate with a man-in-full profile for this magazine. For several weeks, Rich Dalrymple, the Cowboys’ longtime PR man, had not returned my calls to gauge Jones’s interest. When Dalrymple finally called back, he sighed heavily at my request and promised nothing. “Believe it or not,” he told me, “Jerry doesn’t really like doing these things.”
So I crash the owners’ meetings with the hope of cutting out the middleman and pop my invitation directly. Throughout the afternoon, I hang around the hotel but catch only glimpses of Arthur Blank, John Mara, and Zygi Wilf in the lobby and Roger Goodell slipping into the men’s room. After the meeting ends, I watch Jones’s older son, Stephen, and his daughter, Charlotte—both senior Cowboys executives—march to their airport-bound Town Car. Still no Jerry Jones. Before leaving, I duck into the brightly lit bar. Imagine my surprise and relief when I see Jerry Jones sitting at a square table for four. Sipping his whiskey. Alone.
After I introduce myself, he smiles and launches into a rollicking soliloquy about the NFL’s long-ago first TV contract negotiations with ESPN. Then he asks whether I’d like to join him for a drink. Are you kidding? And for the next three and a half hours (he repeatedly postpones a dinner engagement), he’s charming, self-deprecating, hilarious, and curious, every drawled word slow-roasted in that Arkansas molasses. This is Maximum Jerry.
Instantly, I’m reminded of another unstoppable life force, Bill Clinton. Jerry and Bill: two Arkansas good ol’ boys who’ve made good and know just how to work ya.
Not only did he agree to cooperate with this profile—“This is gonna be some fun,” he tells me—he goes all-in. I spend much of the summer with Jones, from hitching a ride on his Gulfstream V jet from Dallas to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to watching a team practice from his tower above the Cowboys’ training camp fields in Oxnard, California. The Jones treatment isn’t just excessive fun, it is exhausting: nearly every question I posed, he answers—a gusher of words and no filter—with only one main exception. He declines to discuss the cell-phone photos of him with two young women taken in a Dallas restaurant bathroom in 2009 that were published on several blogs in early August before they made national news. In Oxnard, he tells me he had been advised not to talk about the photos or the alleged extortion plot linked to them. Then the very next day, he tells reporters the photos “misrepresented” what had happened but declined to say more. A week later, at Dallas’s first preseason home game, he again refuses to discuss the matter with me.
His no-comment is noteworthy because the photos reminded the public that Jones has long had a reputation for womanizing. Jones was dubbed “Honky Tonk Man” in a chapter title in Jim Dent’s 1995 biography about this aspect of Jones’s life. “It’ll take an act of God to stop it,” Lacewell told me. “. . . Jerry loves to party and dance. He has been known to pick up the tab for the whole bar. Needless to say, good women won’t leave him alone.”
Another reason Jones’s no-comment is noteworthy is that more than any other owner in the NFL or any other sport, Jones loves being quoted and adores the spotlight. A brilliant entrepreneur, genius brand builder, marketing wizard, and Tasmanian devil of a pitchman who has sold shoes, insurance policies, and oil and gas, Jones is a master promoter of his team, his stadium, the league, and himself. The cost of the attention—not to mention all the high-profile entertaining he hosts on not one but two Cowboys party buses—is that Jones catches more arrows than any other executive in sports except perhaps Goodell.
A hard-charging, egomaniacal, but larger-than-life owner named Norman Oglesby, obviously based on Jerry Jones, is a character in the celebrated 2012 novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. “A king of self-esteem,” Oglesby is called, and Jones is certainly that. Oglesby oozes likability; so, too, does Jones. Both men share a sunny optimism in the face of subpar seasons. Oglesby’s winning personality is betrayed by “a faint arthritic creak in every smile and gesture,” while Jones punctuates every off-color quip and daggered remark with a just-kidding grin chased by a maybe-not wink.
By hour three of our Ritz-Carlton introduction—deep into my second round and his third—it is obvious that Jones is more irresistible than his fictionalized self. A waitress delivers a cocktail napkin from a female admirer with a scribbled message: J—I’m over at the bar. Hurry your ass! X C. Jones reads it with a smirk, folds the napkin, and leaves it on the table next to his glass of whiskey. The note has no impact—he keeps rolling.
“I am still so damn mad,” he snaps. “I get madder, every day, about missin’ him.”
Him is Johnny Football.
At the 2014 NFL draft two weeks earlier, Johnny Manziel, the freshman Heisman Trophy winner and Instagram antihero, had fallen to the first round’s 16th slot owned by the Cowboys. Twitter nearly imploded: anything bigger than Johnny Football, the Texas A&M Aggie, becoming the future quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys?
Among the organization’s football minds, only Jerry Jones wanted Manziel. Jones’s son Stephen, the Cowboys’ executive vice president in charge of player personnel, had lobbied hard against choosing Manziel—“I’m still so damn mad at Stephen,” Jerry tells me—but Jones’s younger son, Jerr
y Jr., told me, “I’m the head of sales and marketing—where do you think I came down?”
Everyone else had strongly advised against picking Manziel: Coach Jason Garrett, his staff, and the team’s scouts. After all, Romo is entering the second year of a seven-year, $119.5 million contract with $55 million guaranteed. But Romo is also 34 years old and coming off his second back surgery in less than a year. The inevitable quarterback controversy—not to mention the three-ring circus of Romo, Manziel, and Jones in Big D—would have distracted everyone and could have provided enough TNT—and TMZ—to blow up the team.
On draft night, fans and haters watched, enthralled, when Manziel had fallen in Jones’s lap, their partnership looking preordained. On the clock in the Cowboys’ draft room, Jones appeared anguished as he ground No. 2 pencils in his right fist. But Jerry Jones always gets what he wants, right?
No. Heeding everyone’s advice, Jones selected offensive tackle Zack Martin of Notre Dame, picking a player to protect Romo over a player who would have made Romo hear footsteps. “I can’t believe that Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus didn’t buy the biggest elephant of all time,” Lacewell says later.
In his suite during the George Strait concert, Jones introduces me to Romo, who asks the subject of this story. Jones answers for me: “Passin’ on Manziel for Romo.” The surprise decision reveals something not widely understood about his boss, Romo says: he selected a sound fundamentals player needed to improve the offense, not the high-risk matinee idol of the draft. “More than anything,” Romo explains, “it just shows a lot of people that we’re here to win—not just be a flashy program.”
The Best American Sports Writing 2015 Page 19