Throughout his gas and oil career, the failed Chargers purchase haunted Jones. Sure, digging through Arkansas and Oklahoma for black liquid gold was lucrative, but the work lacked purpose. Jones wanted to mold something, wanted more than a big bank account and a luxurious Little Rock, Arkansas, home for his wife, Gene, and their three children. Hence, in 1988 Jones managed to spend four hours tagging along with coach Bill Walsh and general manager John McVay of the San Francisco 49ers—neither of whom had ever heard of this strange man with the Arkansas drawl. Jones certainly had the means, but he needed a crash course in NFL-ese. “I knew I wanted to own a franchise one day,” Jones says. “And if you’re gonna meet with someone, it might as well be the best.”
So there he was, months later, floating on a bay in Mexico while reading in the Wall Street Journal of the sale of the Dallas Cowboys. With Arkansas lacking its own professional football entity, the state’s 2.3 million residents either rooted for the (relatively) nearby Cowboys or ignored the professional ranks altogether. Jones was hardly the type of guy who studied every NFL roster, but he knew enough about America’s Team to believe there’d be no better opportunity. He called Salomon Brothers, who patched him through to Bright. The introduction was simple and, in hindsight, historic: “Mr. Bright, my name is Jerry Jones. I’d like to buy your football team.”
The forty-six-year-old immediately topped Bright’s wish list. Armed with a thick wallet and a love of football, Jones’s greatest attribute was that his stewardship would guarantee the demise of Tom Landry. Such was confirmed during one of the initial conversations between the two multimillionaires, when Jones volunteered his plan to hire Jimmy Johnson, his former Arkansas teammate and the current head coach at the University of Miami.
In his seven years as a writer with the Dallas Morning News, Ivan Maisel could count on one hand the number of articles he had written about the Cowboys. Maisel’s beat was college football, after all, and there was little need for his contributions to the coverage of the professional game.
On the night of February 24, 1989, however, Dave Smith, the Morning News executive sports editor, presented members of his staff with a code-red order: Find Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson. According to mounting rumor, the incoming owner and would-be future coach were in town and preparing officially to take control of the Cowboys. There were reported spottings here and there, and Smith desperately wanted to beat the rival Dallas Times Herald to the story.
Throughout the afternoon Maisel had tried at all costs to avoid Smith’s glare, hiding in his tiny corner office with the door shut. It didn’t work. “Ivan!” shouted Smith. “Jones and Johnson might be staying at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Go sit in the lobby and wait ’em out!”
Maisel knew damn well there was no way two men trying to lay low would take residence at a famed five-star hotel (they were actually staying at an Embassy Suites), but orders were orders. “So I got there at four-thirty, trying to do my best to not get my ass thrown out,” Maisel says. “I’m sitting in a chair, looking like I’m waiting for Elvis to walk through the lobby.”
At 7:15 P.M. Maisel called Chris Worthington, the Morning News’s sports editor, to ask if he could leave. “Yeah,” he told Maisel. “Go on home.” Maisel immediately contacted his girlfriend, Meg, who was back in town after a lengthy business trip and had been craving Tex-Mex. “Let’s go to Mia’s,” Maisel suggested. Located on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas’s Uptown area, Mia’s was the Tex-Mex restaurant for many of the city’s biggest names in politics, sports, and entertainment (including a certain taco-loving coach named Landry). People literally drove across the state to indulge in Butch and Ana Enriquez’s brisket tacos, which were stuffed with tender brisket, sautéed onions, and tangy poblano-chili strips.
At approximately 7:45 P.M., Ivan and Meg strolled into Mia’s, placed their names on the waiting list, and patiently stood against a wall located to the left of the restaurant’s main entranceway. Surrounded by an ocean of people, Ivan and Meg leaned in toward one another, speaking quietly and minding their own business. Then, without warning, the door opened. In walked Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson, accompanied by their wives.
“Ivan,” said Meg, “you just turned white.”
“Oh, shit,” Maisel said, his mouth agape. Then, he turned back toward Meg. “I’ve gotta go do this,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Maisel weaved his way through the restaurant, sliding along the L-shaped bar toward a space directly behind Johnson. Having covered the collegiate game for one of the nation’s elite sports sections, Maisel knew Johnson well. He tapped him on the shoulder and watched as Johnson’s jaw dropped. “Ivan,” said Johnson, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“I live two blocks away,” said Maisel. “What are you doing here?”
Johnson introduced Maisel to Jones and Jones’s wife, Gene, and chatted for a couple of minutes. Maisel returned to Meg and waited for Johnson and Jones to be seated. As soon as they were placed at a table, Maisel snuck through the kitchen, out the back door, and straight to a phone to call Worthington. They had to get a shot of this.
Unfortunately for the Morning News, there were no available photographers. Well, there was one, but referring to Mark Kegans as a “photographer” was quite a stretch. A twenty-four-year-old intern from little-known Hardin-Simmons University, Kegans spent the majority of his time at the Morning News locked in a photo lab as a technician. He knew how to work a camera, but so, for that matter, do most six-year-olds.
Robert Hart, one of the paper’s photo editors, scribbled “MIA’S; 4322 LEMMON AVE” on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to Kegans. “If you don’t get anything,” he told the intern, “don’t come back.”
Kegans sped to Mia’s, parked his red Datsun 240SX, and dashed through the front doorway. He nervously approached Jones and Johnson’s table. “Guys, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m with the Dallas Morning News and I have to take your picture.”
“Okay,” said Jones. “Just make it quick.”
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“That’s good,” said Johnson. “It’s enough.”
With that, Kegans returned to the Morning News office, loaded his roll into the film processor, and prayed. In the twenty-five minutes it took for the six photographs to develop, Hart laid on the pressure. “There better be something here,” he said, “This is your life as a photographer on the line.”
The pictures emerged from the machine. They were non-artistic, non-dazzling, non-eye-catching—and absolutely, positively perfect. There, sitting across from one another and engaged in conversation, were Jones and Johnson. It was as good as official: The Cowboys were under new management.
On the morning of February 25, 1989, readers of the Dallas Morning News woke up to find one of the most breathtaking sports-related front pages in the city’s 143-year history. Beneath the headline COWBOYS SALE NEAR; LANDRY LIKELY OUT and alongside one of Kegans’s photographs ran a piece from staff writer Bernie Miklasz, who cobbled together a story utilizing Maisel’s encounter along with various other sources. It began:
Arkansas millionaire Jerry Jones and Cowboys owner H. R. “Bum” Bright were locked in negotiations all day Friday, attempting to make final a purchase that would give Jones control of the Cowboys and Texas Stadium Corp. A source with knowledge of the negotiations said that Jones has offered Bright $130 million for the team and stadium leases.
By all indications the purchase, which could become official Saturday, would abruptly terminate the 29-year regime of Tom Landry, the only head coach in the Cowboys’ history. Jones, according to several sources close to him, plans to replace Landry with University of Miami coach Jimmy Johnson.
The article was jarring, the picture even more so. How could Jones and Johnson come to Dallas and strip Tom Landry of his job and then his dignity by celebrating at the legendary coach’s favorite restaurant? Throughout t
he city the news was blasphemous. The local talk radio stations were bombarded with venomous calls—Who was this Jones guy? How could he dump Coach Landry like that? The Cowboys were an institution, not merely another team. This was evil; nightmarish; pathetic; wrongheaded. A handful of solitary voices begged the city for patience. The request was roundly ignored. Patience? To hell with patience. “My first impression was that this Jones guy had a chance to make it,” says Norm Hitzges, the longtime Dallas radio personality. “Or that he had a chance of becoming the NFL’s version of the Hindenburg.”
When Jones initially learned of the franchise’s availability, he told himself he would fork over whatever it took. After all, a dream was a dream. Yet the eventual deal was, in hindsight, a steal. Though Bright had wanted $180 million, he wound up settling for significantly less: $90 million for the team, $50 million for the stadium, and $10 million to assume the mortgage on the team’s headquarters. After four days of negotiating, Bright and Jones had one of their final battles on the morning of February 25 at the Bright Banc on Stemmons Freeway, when they disagreed over $300,000 in closing fees. Bright pulled a quarter from his pocket. “Let’s flip for it,” he said.
Jones called tails. The coin landed heads up.
“Oh well,” said Jones with a chuckle. “You just made three hundred thousand dollars.” (Bright later presented Jones with a quarter glued to a block, along with a note reading, “You’ll never know if it was a two-headed coin.”)
Midway through the meeting Tex Schramm arrived, looked at Johnson (who had attended at Jones’s insistence), and roared, “You need to get your ass out of town! Your people have embarrassed Tom Landry enough already.” Though Schramm himself had been trying to deftly, sensitively nudge Landry aside for the past few years, there were proper ways to go about it. Dinner at Mia’s was not one of them.
Johnson heeded the advice and caught the next flight to Miami. Jones and Schramm, meanwhile, had their own flying to do. Bright assured Jones that he would have no problem firing Landry as his final act of ownership, but Jones refused. He believed that, as the new boss, it was his duty to confront Landry face-to-face. Bright wasn’t one to argue the point—as long as Landry was a goner, he was content. “Bum Bright owed it to Tom to pick up the phone and give him a heads-up that the sale was going through,” says Bob Ackles, the team’s director of player personnel. “But Bum didn’t like Landry and felt he owed him nothing.”
With his time dwindling, Landry followed the course of action of many imperiled men before him…and fled. Schramm had asked the coach to remain in Dallas so that Jones might speak with him, but Landry had little interest in making his ousting an easy process. As most Dallas residents were learning of his imminent demise from the Morning News, Landry was piloting his Cessna 210 to Lakeway, Texas, where his family owned a weekend getaway house. As if the big news of the day were a 4-H bake sale (and not his dismissal), Landry headed out to the Hidden Hills golf course, where he played eighteen holes with his son, Tom Landry, Jr.
By the time Jones and Schramm reached Hidden Hills on the evening of February 25, the sky was darkening. Only two golfers—Landry and his son—remained at the facility; they were practicing their putting. With Schramm at his side, Jones approached the men and introduced himself. The four retreated to a sales office, where Jones and Landry sat face-to-face. “This is with absolutely no disrespect to you,” Jones said. “But I’m here and so is Jimmy.”
Having seen Landry on TV, oh, ten thousand times, Jones expected his reaction to be subdued and polite. “I’ll always regret going there,” says Jones. “I misread the situation. I wanted to do the right thing and tell him in person. I thought it would be honorable. But it didn’t come off that way. I’ll always be haunted by that.”
“You could have saved your plane trip down here,” Landry snapped. “As a matter of fact, you could have handled this whole thing a lot better. This whole thing is just a bunch of grandstand tactics. You had no obligation to do this. You could have saved your gas.”
With that, the third-winningest coach in NFL history began to cry.
Later that evening, Jones and Schramm returned to Valley Ranch to announce the takeover of America’s Team. With approximately twenty-five reporters waiting in an auditorium, Jones stepped into Schramm’s private bathroom and shaved. Normally cool under pressure, Jones found himself sweating profusely.
Upon leaving the bathroom, Jones was approached by Doug Todd, the team’s veteran media relations director. Todd had handled Super Bowls and drug scandals, surprising trades and shocking deaths. “You’ll enter the room and there will be a dais on the right,” Todd told Jones as he tightened the knot atop his tie. “And over here will be a row of chairs—”
“Hold on,” snapped the new owner. “I can handle it. I can handle it.”
But he couldn’t. Jones was not merely an outsider purchasing a football team—he was an outsider purchasing the soul of Dallas in the midst of a citywide slump. The same financial crisis that had done in Bright was impacting hundreds of thousands of denizens. Within the past seven years not a single new business had relocated to downtown Dallas. The murder, rape, and aggravated assault rates were the highest in the city’s history, and the public schools were being compared with those in Detroit and Houston. “Dallas was suffering from a self-confidence crisis,” says Steve Bartlett, who served as mayor from 1991 to 1995. “If the sports team did well the people would start feeling better about themselves too. But at the time the Cowboys were terrible and people were angry. That’s what Jerry was walking into.”
The press conference was a disaster. In what would come to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Jones took the podium (Johnson remained in Miami) and presented himself as a backwoods Arkansan bumpkin powered by a heart of coal. With dozens of team employees apprehensively looking on, Jones kicked things off by exclaiming, “This is like Christmas for me!” and followed with a meandering seven-minute, twenty-four-second monologue that detailed his euphoria and excitement.
“I had a little media experience when I played at Arkansas,” says Jones. “But I had no idea what I was doing. Admittedly, it was terrible.”
When he finally got around to the beloved Landry, Jones’s words lacked depth and empathy. “This man is like Bear Bryant to me, like Vince Lombardi to me,” he said, suppressing a giddy smirk. “If you love competitors, Tom Landry’s an angel.” Collectively, the assembled media groaned. Landry may well have deserved to be fired—but by this yokel? Jones would promptly be nicknamed “Jethro” after the doltish Jethro Bodine character from TV’s The Beverly Hillbillies.
“Jerry was so obviously in over his head,” says Jim Dent, the veteran Dallas writer. “In the media, we felt stabbed in the heart by the way he fired Landry. Jerry just dropped out of nowhere, and the opinion was, What the hell does this guy know? That press conference cemented the belief.”
At his best, Jones came off as dumb. He called Johnson “the best coach in America” and said that, as the new owner, he would be involved with everything from “jocks to socks.”
Standing beside his new boss, Schramm shrunk by the second. Though his relationship with Landry ran hot and cold, there was always respect. At one point a reporter asked of Schramm’s status. “He’s standing right next to me, isn’t he?” Jones said. Told that Schramm was actually standing behind him, Jones said, “He’s a little behind tonight. We’ve got an evolving thing. Tex and I just initially talked this morning at nine o’clock. We’ve got a lot of settling to do.”
Like Landry, Schramm was a goner. The man who had constructed the Cowboys would soon take a job as president of the new World League of American Football. Gil Brandt, the personnel wizard, was eventually jettisoned too.
With a tilted grin, Jones assured the masses that he “needed” the holdover employees to show him the way. Then he went on a firing spree, unloading dozens upon dozens of longtime Cowboy workers. “On his first full day he had a bunch of us come into his office,�
�� says Carlton Stowers, the outgoing editor of Cowboy Weekly, the team’s self-published tabloid. “He gave us the ol’ I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing speech. The next day the ticket manager got a note saying she had to be out of the building by five o’clock. She’d been with the team for twenty years.”
On Monday, February 27, Tom Landry—his boxes packed, his office empty—addressed his players one final time. The former head coach entered a room at Valley Ranch and, as always, removed his hat. Following a lengthy pause, he began to speak softly. “This will be our last…meeting together,” he said, taking deep breaths. “We will…all go on. You’ll…all find that in…adverse situations, strength…comes through. I believe that…through all of this…that we’ll all learn. But what…makes me sad is…that I…had a lot…of plans for…next season, and my…dreams have…been dashed. I love…you all, and…”
Landry paused. He dabbed his moist eyes with a sleeve, took a deep breath, wiped away more tears. The assembled Cowboys were shocked. “He kept trying to talk, basically about handing the command over to Jimmy, and he tried to talk a little more, and he cracked a little more,” says Garry Cobb, the linebacker. “Then he just started crying. And crying. He never finished the speech. He collapsed on the floor and the other coaches came and tried to console him. And he was done. Everyone filed out.”
For some players, Landry’s departure was a gleeful case of what-goes-around-comes-around. A handful of Cowboys even celebrated with drinks at a nearby pub. How many athletes had Landry cut during his years leading the Cowboys? Now he was getting his. “Tom probably fired ten thousand football players without ceremony,” says Crawford Ker, the longtime Cowboys offensive lineman. “Every dog has his day.”
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