Despondent, Jones visited his mother and father in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in early 1994 to seek their counsel. Johnson was threatening to bolt for the new franchise in Jacksonville, and most Dallas columnists were in the coach’s corner. “It’s eatin’ on me, it’s botherin’ me, it’s changin’ me,” Jones told his folks. Pat Jones just said, “Come on, Jerry—be a man, live with it.” His mother echoed that advice. And a longtime business partner, Mike McCoy, told Jones, “Are you getting what you want from Jimmy?” The answer, on the field, was yes. “Then live with it,” Jones says McCoy told him. “Forget it. Use him.”
But Jones couldn’t do it. In a matter of weeks, Johnson was gone, sent home with a $2 million check. In the end, Jones said, he felt like a phony, and his father would eventually agree he needed to “clear up” the angst he was feeling. “When I would be with him and we’d be charming and all that stuff, I just—I just couldn’t stand it,” Jones now says. “And I was just thinking—it’s false.”
Gene Jones told me, “What makes it fun to own a team if you have that?”
This summer, as he rehashed those days of sudden triumph and lasting hurt, Jones teetered between rage and sorrow, sometimes blaming himself for their falling-out. “I should have exercised tolerance and patience,” he told me at the Ritz-Carlton. “I did not.”
Other times, Jones blamed Johnson’s covert acts of disloyalty, skullduggery, and pettiness for their breakup. “There was just an undermining that went on,” Jones says. “It’s subtle. It’s smart . . . I lost my tolerance of having an associate, a friend, not be loyal. I’ve been told, ‘That’s trite. You should be bigger than that.’ I mean, really—am I so dumb that I don’t know you don’t fire a coach after y’all just won two straight Super Bowls?”
“When I went to the Cowboys, Jerry told me he’d handle the marketing and money and I’d handle the football and we’d make history,” Johnson said in an email after declining to speak or meet with me. “That changed after the first Super Bowl. I appreciate the opportunity he gave me and I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish.”
Johnson’s statement irritated Jones, who on Tuesday said: “Jimmy came from college and dealt in scholarships. This is pro football. You don’t separate the money from pro football when you are physically and mentally there and up to your ears in it every day. That’s a difference of opinion I have with him. Since I have owned the team—from day one Jimmy was here—I made or approved of every football decision that required a dollar.”
Johnson is not in the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor, among the 20 team legends such as Landry, Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin, each name emblazoned in big, capital letters inside AT&T Stadium.
At the Ritz-Carlton, I first asked Jones why he had not honored Johnson; after all, he had coached the Cowboys to two Super Bowl titles in five years, while it took Landry 29 years to win the same number. Jones responded with a convoluted explanation about Johnson failing to meet the standards favoring players established long ago by Tex Schramm, whom Jones himself had put in the Ring of Honor in 2003. (Jones had honored Landry in 1993.) Weeks later, Jones struggled to answer the same question during our on-camera interview at Valley Ranch, insisting that his decision is not personal.
But it is.
Onboard his plane, with Gene sitting in a leather chair across from us, Jones spits out the reason Johnson isn’t in the Ring of Honor: “Disloyalty . . . I couldn’t handle the disloyalty. Whether it was right or not, by every measurement you can go, I had paid so many times a higher price to get to be there than he had paid, it was unbelievable . . . By any way you wanna measure it, wear and tear, pain, worry, butt kickin’, the criticism—everything in the book!”
Jones wants to win another Super Bowl for many reasons. But one of the biggest is it would prove to the world he can do it without Johnson.
“It certainly has been more of a negative for me than it was for him,” Jones says of Johnson’s firing, his voice rising. Gene’s eyes narrow—she knows where this is headed—and she shakes her head to warn him. Too late. Johnson’s firing “caused him to never have won but two Super Bowls!” Jones says, practically shouting. “I don’t give a s—t what it is, but it caused one thing for him: he’ll never win but two! I’ve won three—and I may get to win five more!”
It’s hard to miss that the Cowboys’ era of mediocrity coincided with Jones’s decision to build a new stadium. A decade ago, Jones decided he’d replace antiquated Texas Stadium. A new stadium’s projected price tag was $650 million, but as Jones shopped for its home—and kept adding to its design’s bells and whistles—the price tag ballooned, eventually nearly doubling but also looking like a billionaire owner’s overcompensation for continuing on-the-field disappointments. After the city of Dallas didn’t offer enough tax incentives (as a consolation prize, Jones says then-Dallas mayor Laura Miller offered to name a bridge after him), Jones decided to build his stadium in Arlington in a neighborhood of pawn shops, chicken joints, auto repair garages, and the Texas Rangers’ ballpark. He needed—and eventually won—approval from taxpayers to kick in $325 million. At the same time, Jones hired Bill Parcells, a Hall of Fame coach who won two Super Bowls coaching the Giants. The timing of Parcells’s arrival was hardly coincidental, critics say: Jones needed Parcells to regain credibility with fans to help win approval of Arlington’s stadium tax referendum.
Jones had promised Parcells nearly complete control. They began with mutual trust. At Parcells’s first training camp in 2003, he called the shots—or so it looked to the beat reporters surprised that Jones had, finally, ceded control to his coach. Parcells established a defense employing big, physical players. And by getting his way most of the time in the draft room, Parcells quickly began rebuilding the Cowboys.
But Parcells and Jones would soon clash. Jones moved the training camp from Oxnard, California, where it’s cool in summer, to San Antonio, where it feels like a blast furnace. Parcells was furious; Jones explained that Ford, the team’s top training camp sponsor, was far bigger in Texas than California and that another sponsor, Dr Pepper, was more popular with San Antonio’s Hispanic community. “Let me get this straight,” Parcells told Jones. “We got a multibillion-dollar corporation, and we’re worried about selling f—ing soda?”
Far more harmful to their relationship was Jones’s decision to sign free-agent wide receiver Terrell Owens. After the 2006 season—and the disastrous Romo bobble of a snap on a 19-yard field goal try that would all but clinch a victory over the Seahawks in a wild-card playoff game—Parcells quit. With a Cowboys coaching record of 34-32, he left Dallas (and soon ended up in Miami) with a nice payday and, apparently, no bad blood between him and Jones.
“I found Jerry to be a very, very straight-talking, forthright person, whose word was good,” Parcells says. “We got along very well.”
Parcells’s successor, Wade Phillips, coached teams built primarily by Parcells and won 33 games in three seasons. After going 13-3 in 2007, the Cowboys lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion New York Giants in a divisional playoff game. Jones’s best shot to erase the Johnson stigma was lost. Friends of Phillips told me he felt undermined and second-guessed, repeatedly, by Jones, who denies this. When I reached Phillips by phone, he agreed to meet with me in Dallas, but a few hours later, he called back to cancel, saying he didn’t want to say anything bad about Jones. “He’s been good to me,” Phillips says. (Jones had lent his private jet to Phillips’s wife to attend her father’s funeral.) He’s been good to me: I heard this refrain from other former players and dismissed coaches who declined to discuss Jones on the record.
Jones’s Cowboys and stadium businesses are truly family-run: Stephen, 50, is Jones’s right-hand man on player-personnel matters (and sits to the right of his father during games); Charlotte Jones Anderson, 48, the executive vice president and chief brand officer, leads the Cowboys’ charity efforts; Jerry Jr., 44, is in charge of sales and marketing and is executive vice president
. Jerry brags that Gene has attended every home and away Cowboys game since he bought the team, including preseason. “A 100 percent attendance record,” he says. They are a close-knit family and fiercely protective of one another. Even so, while Jerry Sr. consults with his children on a moment’s notice, I didn’t see them palling around much in Jones’s suite, at Valley Ranch or at training camp. All business. Jones is in good health; he beat back skin cancer and was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat at the age of 46, shortly after buying the Cowboys. “A good-time heart,” Jones calls it.
Fans can recite Jones’s personnel misses and flops: passing on Randy Moss in the 1998 draft (Jones apologized for this a dozen years later); trading four draft picks for 28-year-old wide receiver Joey Galloway, who never caught a pass from Aikman, in 2000; drafting QB Quincy Carter in the second round despite coaches’ and scouts’ warnings about his problems; choosing RB Felix Jones over Chiefs star Jamaal Charles and Coach Phillips’s choice, Titans star Chris Johnson. When I ask Jones for a decision he wants back as GM, he doesn’t hesitate. “I think when we traded two number ones for Roy Williams,” he says of the 2008 trade for the Lions receiver who was released in 2011.
Except, well, Jones gets it wrong. The Cowboys didn’t actually trade two first-round picks for Roy Williams. They gave up a first-, third-, and sixth-round pick in 2009 and got a seventh-rounder in 2010. It seems a bit unfair to correct Jones like this—the man has been GM for 25 years and shouldn’t be expected to know the particulars of every transaction carried out under his name. Or perhaps the three picks the Cowboys gave up just felt like two first-rounders. But at the same time, this is his biggest regret as GM—and he can’t get the details right.
The rut Jones is in is littered with bad choices and busted gambles, and he knows it. He also knows there are fewer chances to reverse that view.
In early June, Jones flew on his G-V to Paradise Valley Country Club, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to salute Frank Broyles, his college coach, and donate $100,000 to a foundation created by Broyles’s daughters devoted to educating caregivers of those who have Alzheimer’s.
Standing next to Broyles in the jammed clubhouse on a muggy afternoon, Jones talked about his old coach’s life lessons. A half-century ago, Broyles always raised four fingers on the football field, a reminder for his players to try to preserve their energy for the game’s most critical time—the fourth quarter.
Jones said, “I never dreamed that when he was talkin’ the fourth quarter to us the night before a ballgame in Eureka Springs . . . we’d be standin’ here right now, 2014, and him coachin’ us in how to be in life in the fourth quarter, how to handle the stuff that comes to us in life in the fourth quarter. And boy, have you coached us up, Coach.”
“Thank you,” Broyles said.
“You showed us how to do it,” Jones told him, his eyes moist. “You showed us what stickin’ and stayin’ and lovin’s all about—keeping that enthusiasm and that stature and pushin’ right through. Now that’s the fourth quarter. Yep.”
Back in Dallas, it’s time for supper: Jones’s personal security chief, Roosevelt Riley, is behind the wheel of Jones’s black Lexus LS 460 and pulls up to my Dallas hotel. The boss is riding shotgun. I slide into the backseat and we head to Al Biernat’s, one of the city’s favorite steakhouses. When Jones and I walk into the bar, every head turns our way and you can feel the electrons in the room become supercharged, in that way they do anytime a famous person enters a public space. We settle into a low-slung booth for four, opposite the bar and adjacent to a hallway leading to the bathrooms.
Jones orders Johnnie Walker Blue for both of us. Years ago, Jones gave up alcohol for about a year to lose weight, but he became so ornery that his mother told Lacewell to persuade her son to start drinking again. “He’s no fun,” Jones’s mother said. More than once, Jones asked me, “You still working?” as a way to invite me to join him for a Blue. (Dale Hansen, the WFAA sportscaster, recalls a famous story: He and Jones were drinking heavily in Austin one night and stumbled into a dance club at 2:30 a.m. when the bartender told them that last call had long passed. “Either you start servin’ drinks,” Jones said, “or I buy the bar and you’re the first son of a bitch I get rid of.” Ten minutes later, Jones tells Hansen, “Go to the bathroom.” Inside, Hansen discovered a bartender sitting behind a hastily assembled but fully stocked bar; Jones, Hansen, and another 10 pals enjoyed mixed drinks until 5:00 a.m. Hansen was shipwrecked with a hangover until late the following afternoon. “Jones was on Good Morning America at 7:00 a.m.,” Hansen says in awe.)
We discuss his family’s commitment to turning AT&T Stadium into a mecca for sports and entertainment, a venue for everything from this past April’s Final Four and the January 2015 College Football Playoff championship game to dirt-bike races and high school proms. The stadium gave Jones another way to apply his sixth sense of monetizing every imaginable aspect of something he owns. He has forged 200 corporate sponsorships and alliances for the Cowboys and AT&T Stadium; nearly every one of AT&T Stadium’s 347 luxury suites is locked into a lucrative, 20-year lease, and the seat licenses are worth $1 billion. There’s practically no debt. The place has become a humming cash factory.
When I ask Jones how he settled on AT&T for the stadium naming rights, he says he fell in love with the name: “It just sounds like America—and the future.” He then confides he considered investing $300 million in Chanel or Cartier, becoming partners with one of the companies and slapping its name on his stadium. Jones loved the idea that his team might have been married to one of those luxury brands. “Can you imagine—the Chanel Cowboys?” he asks. “Or the Cartier Cowboys? Now that has a nice ring, a lovely ring. Pure class.”
This idea never went very far, and besides, the AT&T deal was sealed in July 2013 by the telecommunications giant’s mind-boggling offer, an estimated $500 million over 25 years. “I was a whore!” Jones growls, with that just-kidding smile chased by that maybe-not wink.
His real estate company, Blue Star Land, owns vast property holdings totaling more than 2,000 acres worth more than $2 billion, with much of it located north of Dallas. In Frisco, Texas, the Cowboys will move to a new, modernized training facility in 2016. In the early ’90s, Jones began buying the parcels, anticipating the growth that has marched north of Dallas–Fort Worth.
Two hours into our dinner, our menus remain untouched. When we talk about the Cowboys’ chances this fall, Jones expresses guarded optimism—he has bought into Romo’s enthusiasm for the offense, aided by a revamped, though young, offensive line. But he acknowledges that the defense, the third-worst in NFL history last year based on total yards allowed, must radically improve for the Cowboys to have any hope of making a playoff run. Of this prospect, he sounds less certain. Coach Garrett is in the final year of his contract, and Jones says Garrett’s future likely will depend on what happens on the field this season. Of course Jones’s future, as GM, never depends on what happens on the field in any season. After all, what person, in any profession, could manage to keep a job if he hadn’t succeeded in nearly 20 years?
“Trying to do too much,” Lacewell told me. “It’s his biggest fault, I’d say.” So I raise this prickly issue again, asking Jones whether his attempts to rebuild the Cowboys were hampered by his business obligations and corporate commitments, particularly the decade-long campaign to get the stadium designed, approved, financed, built, and, now, earning.
Jones acknowledges the difficulty of trying to juggle so many responsibilities, confessing, “It’s my devil.” However, he estimates he spends 80 percent of his time working as a GM and the rest managing the team’s business affairs and his personal investments.
Win or lose, America’s Team is still, to use Jones’s word, relevant. And likely always will be. Jones takes great satisfaction in the Cowboys’ entrenched popularity beyond the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, extending to places such as Mexico and Europe. The Cowboys are the only NFL team to market and distribute its own me
rchandise. The blue-starred jerseys, hats, and caps (and a wide selection of women’s attire) bring in $250 million annually. After each season, Jones brags that the highest Nielsen-rated games featured the Cowboys, who will play at least five games in prime time this fall. For Jones, the sales and ratings appear to help mitigate the on-the-field mediocrity.
“And if we’re not the most popular team,” he says, “we’re always the most hated team.” Is being the most hated team the second-best thing to being the most popular team? “I think I’d trade second-most popular for . . . the most hated.”
Three hours after sitting down, we finally order salads and T-bone steaks, although not the hubcap-sized $65 Cowboy cuts. As we tuck into our meals, a stunningly beautiful woman in her 40s stops by our table. “You don’t remember me,” she tells Jones, mentioning a decade-ago meeting, but this doesn’t jog Jones’s memory. A few more hints, still nothing. She stomps off. Jones shrugs and smiles. Then winks at me.
After dinner, Jones invites me to join him for a nightcap at his house, a buttery-lit 14,044-square-foot “villa.” Inside the vast foyer, Jones asks a home security guard to bring us two glasses of Blue on ice. On the gleaming marble floor of his living room are covered works of art, new purchases waiting to be unwrapped. Jones explains that he and Gene have become avid collectors of Rockwell and other artists. AT&T Stadium’s dazzling collection of modern art has been showered with critical praise; Gene selected most of the pieces.
Jones and I carry our drinks into his two-story library. Here on the walls is a stunning mix of six woods including cherry, walnut, and Macassar ebony and shelves lined with candy-colored antique books and framed photographs of Jerry and Gene cavorting with their children, grandchildren, politicians, and celebrities. Above us, the black ceiling glitters with the constellations of Jerry’s and Gene’s zodiac signs, hand-painted in gold leaf. Jones marvels over a 40-pound Tiffany crystal commemorating the Switzer-led Super Bowl win. On an antique end table is a silver-framed photo of a beaming Jones and a grinning Bill Clinton at the White House. On the wall is a small dinner guest list, inked in cramped script by Thomas Jefferson. One of the invited guests is Betsy Ross.
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