Jerral Wayne Jones snr was deep-sea fishing around the Baja Peninsula in 1988 when he read a newspaper article reporting that Harvey ‘Bum’ Bright, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, had tasked Salomon Brothers with finding a suitable buyer for his club.
From the reception desk of a Mexican hotel, the one-time co-captain of the University of Arkansas football team phoned the Wall Street investment bank and announced his interest. With his fortune gleaned from oil wildcatting, insurance and real estate, he eventually paid $140 million for a franchise that was haemorrhaging $1 million a month in a league struggling to sell out games.
“I intend to have an understanding of jocks and socks, with players, with television, with day-to-day operations,” said Jerry Jones, as America soon came to know him. He added that because of the price he paid, he had to be close to the operations.
He was as good as his word, appointing himself general manager and firing Tom Landry, the legendary and only coach the Cowboys had known up to that point in their 29-year history. It was an audacious move that was hugely unpopular with the fanbase. Then he hired Jimmy Johnson, a former college teammate who had been successful helming the University of Miami. The pair won a Super Bowl together in 1993, then another the following year before inevitably falling out.
Jones wanted somebody more malleable and when the team garnered yet another title in 1996 under Barry Switzer, the false impression grew that the owner somehow mattered more than anybody else in these triumphs.
Between then and now, there have been three fallow decades. The Cowboys have never been back to the Super Bowl, even as the value of the club mushroomed to just north of $13 billion and Jones became known as the most meddlesome owner in sport.
On his watch, they have come into NFL seasons in good shape and bad without ever threatening to win the whole thing again. Excellent coaches have come and gone. Many of them have struggled with the over-involved machinations of the outsized character in the owner’s box who believes he always knows best. It has been obvious for some time that he doesn’t always know best.
Witness Jones trading Micah Parsons, the team’s best defensive player, to the Green Bay Packers last week. A seismic decision that ensures when the Cowboys meet the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL curtain-raiser on Friday night, they kick off what many now feel will be another futile campaign.
Losing the best edge rusher in the sport was entirely the fault of the owner trying to play hardball in negotiations, seeking to cut a clandestine deal without the player’s agent involved and consistently refusing to pay what the market says a linebacker of his calibre is worth. It was the type of dramatic brinksmanship that has always been Jones’ hallmark. Hence the recent Netflix documentary titled, America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys.
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“I know he loved Micah Parsons,” said Michael Irvin, Cowboy wide receiving icon-turned-commentator and usually staunch defender of his former boss. Irvin described it as a “crazy, dumb move”, adding:“This is a gamble The Gambler should not have taken.”
Every serious pundit echoed that sentiment as the Cowboys waved goodbye to a generational talent who, aged 26, is entering his prime years. That the Packers gave Parsons a four-year contract worth $188 million – the largest deal ever signed by somebody who doesn’t play quarterback – sums up how he is rated around the league. At any stage in the previous 18 months, Parsons would have gladly stayed with the Cowboys for less money. But getting a deal done after his first three stellar seasons with the star on his helmet would have prevented the egomaniacal Jones from hogging the limelight during the headline-generating soap operatic wrangling. At 82, media attention remains his oxygen and his weakness.
Back in his first year owning the Cowboys, Jones shocked the NFL by trading Herschel Walker, his star running back, to the Minnesota Vikings in return for a raft of first- and second-round draft picks. Lambasted at the time for moving on the team’s most potent weapon, he and Johnson used those subsequent selections to build the dynasty that dominated the 1990s. The problem is he’s been desperately trying to replicate that rare alchemy ever since.
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During a press conference where he tried to spin losing Parsons as a strategic long-term move, he embarrassed himself even further by repeatedly calling the player Michael rather than Micah. Whether it was an innocent mix-up of names or a deliberate insult, neither is a good look.
“We’re the sixth-winningest team in the last 20 years,” said Jones, in a bizarre and pathetic comment recently, “not counting Super Bowls in the NFL.”
During initial negotiations to buy the club, there was an impasse about who should pay $300,000 in closing costs for the transaction. To settle the matter, Bright whipped out a quarter and said, “Let’s flip for it!” Always fancying a game of chance, Jones called tails. It went heads and so he wrote another cheque. Much later, the previous owner gifted his successor that same 25 cents piece glued to a block with a note reading, “You’ll never know if it was a two-headed coin.”
All these decades later, he still doesn’t know what end is up.
