Boys Will Be Boys (3 page)

Among those vying to take over America’s Team were a band of Japanese businessman (the archconservative Bright would have sooner eaten his spleen than sell America’s Team to a nationality of people he still detested over Pearl Harbor); a posse led by former Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach and Denver billionaire Marvin Davis; Don Carter, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks; Jerry Buss, owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers; and hotelier Robert Tisch. “Bum would like to see the Cowboys carry on the tradition that has been built over three decades,” John J. Veatch, Jr., the managing director of Salomon Brothers’ Dallas office, told the
Wall Street Journal
—and it was pure garbage. What Bright wanted was someone to fork over $180 million for the team, the stadium, the new Valley Ranch headquarters, and the $34 million debt.

What he wanted was Jerral Wayne Jones.

An obscure Arkansas oil driller with a cache of loose women and loose business dealings, Jones was fishing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on September 8 when he opened to page 10 of that day’s
Wall Street
Journal.
A headline caught his eye: LIKE MANY OTHER TEXAS INSTITUTIONS, THE COWBOYS HAVEN’T FOUND A BUYER.

The Cowboys? The
Dallas
Cowboys?

Jones was euphoric. Ever since his boyhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, Jones had always possessed an indefatigable desire for big. He wanted big things. Huge things. He could talk any girl into a dance, any store owner into handing over a free gumball or two. In his first year at North Little Rock High School, Jones willed himself to become the freshman team’s starting quarterback, even though he weighed a mere 120 pounds and played with a hairline fracture in his upper right arm. The beatings from opposing defenses were brutal—but Jones loved the glory and spotlight of the position. The quarterback did things; went places.

While his father, Pat, who first supported his family by selling chickens, rabbits, and eggs from the back of a truck, was building the thriving Modern Security Life Insurance Company from hard work and elbow grease, young Jerry was paying close attention. “I learned early on,” says Jones, “that if you bust your ass and go after exactly what you want, you’ll get it.”

By the time he enrolled at the University of Arkansas in 1959, Jones was a junior executive in the family insurance business, earning $1,000 per month. At the same time he attended classes and played fullback for the Razorbacks, Jones was a full-fledged entrepreneur. He sold shoes from the trunk of his car, purchased the rights to a pizza parlor, and operated a taxi service that shuttled Razorback fans from the airport to the football stadium.

As teammates were solely focused on the next week’s contest versus Tennessee, young Jerry was focused on the next decade’s potential for economic expansion. His short-term postcollegiate goal: Make boatloads of money. His long-term goal: Own a football team.

The sport was in his blood, an ingrained love that germinated in his five years at Arkansas. When coach Frank Broyles recruited players, he assumed 80 percent would fail to survive his taskmaster ways.
Indeed, of the sixty freshman players who began with Jones, a mere eleven lasted. Limited as a fullback, Jones was gradually transitioned to offensive guard, and excelled. The scrappy 6-foot 200-pounder not only started for the 1964 national championship team, but earned an undergraduate degree in finance and a master’s degree in speech and communication. “Jonesie had this unique way of verbalizing in very few sentences his very innermost feelings and convictions,” said Jim Lindsey, a wingback with the Razorbacks. “I played four years of college football and seven more in the pros. But I was never around a more inspirational leader.”

With no shot at a professional football career, Jones followed an unconventional path. Less than two years after leaving school to work for his father in life insurance, Jones attempted to purchase Barron Hilton’s 80 percent share of the San Diego Chargers of the American Football League. “I was very excited,” says Jones. “To be so young and have the chance to own a professional team—it was a dream.” When Hilton offered a 120-day, $50,000 option on his $5.8 million stake in the Chargers, Jones turned to his father, who advised the twenty-four-year-old to walk away. The Chargers were later sold to a group headed by Eugene Klein and Sam Schulman for $10 million. Jones was disappointed, but he believed the opportunity would arise again.

With his football dreams on hold, Jones used much of the $500,000 he garnered from the 1970 sale of Modern Security Life to enter the mysterious world of oil and gas exploration (aka “wildcatting”). For Jones, a swashbuckling risk-taker with an unparalleled desire to strike it rich, the career choice was a natural. “Nobody,”
Sports Illustrated
’s Ed Hinton once wrote, “plays hunches harder than a wildcatter looking for a lock, a hole card, a secret advantage in searching out oil deposits,” and it was true. Adhering to the unorthodox practice of drilling for “close-in” reserves between the dry holes of previously abandoned leases, Jones hit it big. The first thirteen wells he sunk in 1971 and ’72 struck oil. By 1981 Jones had made $10 million.

Over the ensuing decade, Jones and partner Mike McCoy (who would later become the Cowboys’ vice president) formed the Arkoma Production Company to man the fertile, gas-rich Arkoma Basin in northwestern Alaska, then earned nearly $174.8 million from a corporate buyout in 1986. The obscure, up-from-the-sticks Jones was now one of America’s wealthiest men.

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:

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 the 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.”