NEED TO KNOW
- Jerry Jones claimed that he received multiple death threats shortly after he bought the Dallas Cowboys in 1989
- In the new Netflix docuseries America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, the owner looks back on what happened after he fired legendary coach Tom Landry
- Jones hired his longtime friend and former teammate Jimmy Johnson as Landry’s successor
When Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys in February 1989 and then fired legendary head coach Tom Landry, virtually no one in the franchise’s fandom was happy with the Arkansas oil man.
Then, he installed himself as president and general manager — an unheard of move in the NFL — riling even more of the team’s supporters.
But none of his decisions in the early days of owning America’s Team had prepared him for the extreme criticism from Cowboys Nation.
“I was Darth Vader,” Jones, 82, recalls in the new Netflix docuseries America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys.
Jones told Arkansas state lawmakers at the time that he had received multiple death threats.
“They’re serious about their football in the state of Texas, almost as much as we are in Arkansas,” he says in the doc.
After Landry’s firing, more than 100,000 people turned out for a parade through the streets of downtown Dallas to honor the Cowboys coach of 29 years.
“Jerry and the Jones family had broken into the museum and taken our most valuable possession,” former ABC affiliate WFAA-TV sportscaster Dale Hansen says in the doc, describing the affection fans had for the former coach.
Looking back, even Jones confesses it may have been a rash decision to fire Landry — whose team notched a 3-13 record during his final season in 1988.
“The firing of Coach Landry was certainly one of the great PR missteps, maybe of all time,” Jones says. “Because I still wear that.”
At a press conference later termed the Saturday Night Massacre — a reference to the Watergate scandal — Jones announced his intentions with the team.
One day later, he fired Landry and named longtime friend and fellow University of Arkansas teammate Jimmy Johnson as the new coach of the Cowboys.
Charlotte Jones Anderson, Jones’ daughter and the team’s executive vice president and chief brand officer, recalls thinking after the press conference, “What do we do?”
Jones says he had no choice but to forge ahead.
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His team in Dallas — nicknamed the City of Hate due to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination — was coming together, and that’s when Jones truly laid it all on the line, he says.
“With all that hate, I could stop and cry or I could just keep going,” Jones says. “But I’m not gonna take my marbles and go home. I can’t, I burned all my ships when I landed.”
