Vain Glory
It’s his team and he can do what he wants. And what Jerry Jones wants to do most is prove he can win without Jimmy Johnson.
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The Dallas media, and the fans who live by the wisdom of that media, have subjected Jerry Jones to a curious double standard. Jimmy Johnson’s monstrous ego was greatly admired by the media and credited as the secret of his success, but the same trait in Jerry was ridiculed and regarded as detrimental to the team. This is partly Jones’s fault, but it can also be attributed to Jimmy’s skill in choreographing his own image—usually at Jerry’s expense. Jimmy always left the impression that Jerry was just along to carry the money. Unaccustomed to being in the spotlight, Jones came across in the beginning as clumsy and bungling. The media pictured him as an Arkansas hillbilly who probably peed off the front porch and ate goober peas with a knife. Or, alternatively, as a womanizer and cretin who used his fortune to buy acceptance. Jerry’s reputation as a nocturnal carouser with a taste for strong drink and an eye for pretty women was not altogether undeserved, but the rumors that circulated in 1989 that his marriage was on the rocks were just that—rumors. Jerry has been married to his wife, Gene, a former Miss Arkansas, since 1963, when they were students at the University of Arkansas, and he is devoted to his three children, two of whom work for the Cowboys. Once the Cowboys started winning, Jerry’s hillbilly studmuffin image vanished, but it reappeared as though by magic the week that Jimmy Johnson was dismissed. “It’s no coincidence that all those rumors of family problems popped up again when the thing with Jimmy happened,” Jerry said, his voice more ironic than bitter. Jerry-bashing was back in style, at least for the moment.
Jimmy had always promoted his own image as a larger-than-life anti-hero, a maverick to be feared and respected, a gambler who would risk it all on one turn of pitch and toss. The media gobbled it up. Jimmy took all the credit for the landmark Herschel Walker trade, but what really sealed that deal was Jerry’s willingness to pay Walker $1 million to leave Dallas. Jerry ponied up another million to get Charles Haley and yet another million for Bernie Kosar, two reasons why Jimmy was able to win a first and then a second Super Bowl. Jimmy was up-front about his flaws and vices: He had no friends, except a small clique of trusted assistant coaches, nor did he need any; he had no interests outside of football; and though he had a wife while playing and coaching college football—because that was the convenient and socially acceptable thing to do—he divorced her when he reached the pros. Why couldn’t Jerry be more like Jimmy?
Almost from the beginning of the Jaybirds’ tenure in Dallas, Jimmy dropped hints that his boss was a lightweight, a whiner, and a pest. Jimmy let it be known to a Dallas Morning News sportswriter that Jones had come to him after the 1990 season and told him, “I want it to be Jerry and Jimmy . . . not just Jimmy.” In private and public conversations, Jimmy claimed that he—not Jerry—made all the football decisions. Jerry made the same claim about himself, though less adroitly. Jimmy and Jerry both courted the media shamelessly, but with different degrees of success. A perfect example of the double standard was a remark Jones made before the playoff game against Detroit in 1991. As an injured Aikman fretted that he was being shoved aside by fill-in Steve Beuerlein, Jones took it upon himself to tell Fort Worth Star-Telegram beat writer Mike Fisher what Johnson should have already make clear—that Aikman’s career in Dallas was safe and secure. When Johnson read Jones’s remark in the Star-Telegram, he was outraged. “Who is running the football team?” he roared. “Is Jerry the coach or am I the coach? To hell with it! If I’m not running things, maybe I should take my whole staff and we’ll move to Tampa Bay!”
More enthusiastic than articulate—especially when he has consumed a few beverages—Jerry isn’t always able to get his message across. In interviews, Jerry has led people to believe that he seriously thinks that he could coach the Cowboys. That’s not what he means—not exactly. He keeps trying to tell people that the opportunity to coach has passed him by, that “when they put me in my grave, my coaching record will be zero-zero.” But as he starts and stops and changes directions in mid-sentence—droning on about his motivation and his famous people skills—what one remembers is Jerry’s celebrated pronouncement in Vanity Fair: “I could coach the shit out of this team!” His meaning is fairly simple: Had he decided back in the sixties to be a football coach instead of a multimillionaire, he would have been a damn good one, just as he has been damn good at everything he has ever tried.
Jones did not misspeak, however, the night of that famous barroom incident following the NFL owners meeting in Orlando, Florida, when he told a group of sportswriters that he intended to fire Johnson and hire Switzer. It wasn’t the whiskey talking in Orlando: Jerry knew exactly what he was saying, though on sober reflection he probably would have picked a better time to say it. But Jerry had been thinking about firing Jimmy for at least two months, since Johnson had remarked to the media—on the eve of the NFC title game with the New York Giants, no less—that, yeah, sure, he would be interested in a job with the new expansion franchise in Jacksonville, Florida. Jimmy was contractually committed to the Cowboys through the 1998 season, so it was obvious to everyone in football that he was just jerking Jerry’s chain again. Jerry had done some needling himself, but this was different. “What Jimmy said about being interested in another job, that was part of it,” Jerry told me. “But the other part, and this took me a little by surprise, was that I realized that it didn’t bother me. I could see by then that the Jimmy-Jerry issue wasn’t going to go away. The careless way we were handling our relationship, the way we were using the media to jab at each other, was taking its toll.”
What the writers in Orlando didn’t realize until later was that Jones had endured what would be his final insult from Johnson earlier that same evening. At a party for NFL executives, Jerry had approached a table where Jimmy and some of his former coaches and staff were having a private conversation. Jerry should have known better than to butt in: He had fired two of the people at the table. “As luck would have it, we were telling Jerry Jones stories when he walked up,” recalled Bob Ackles, who was the player-personnel director for the Cowboys before Jones canned him and is now the assistant general manager of the Arizona Cardinals. “We had just gotten to the one about the ESPN cameras on draft day of ‘92.” According to Jimmy, when the cameras turned in their direction, he had orders to pretend to be consulting with Jerry on which player to select. Jones probably didn’t hear them tell the story, but the cool reception that he received—particularly from Jimmy—set off the events that followed. Within a week Jimmy was history.
The one dig that Jerry Jones cannot tolerate is the insinuation that he used his fortune to buy his way into an exclusive club to which he had no place and no right. Randy Galloway in particular loves to push that button, as does fellow Dallas Morning News sports columnist Frank Luksa, both of whom have covered the Cowboys since the early sixties (and are old friends of mine). Over the years they have portrayed Jones as a buffoon, a hypocrite, a liar, and worst of all, a football wannabee. “More than anything,” Galloway has written, Jerry “wants to be known as a ‘football guy.’” This is the unkindest cut of all, like saying that while money can buy property, it can’t buy class. One cannot help but hear the echo of Jimmy Johnson in these sentiments.
The criticism is unfair but not altogether untrue. Jerry Jones does want to be a football guy. “I bought the Cowboys not for financial gain but basically because I’m a frustrated coach,” Jones told me. In his most formative years, between the ages of 10 and 22, the two most important things in Jerry Jones’s life were football and the family business. Jerry was a plugger-style fullback in high school—”that tough-assed Jones kid,” a coach on an all-star team called him—and later a guard and co-captain (and teammate of Jimmy Johnson’s) on the University of Arkansas’ national championship team in 1964.
Jerry grew up in an apartment over the family grocery store in the rough-and-tumble Rose City (a.k.a. Dogtown) section of North Little Rock. The store was the center of family life. “When Jerry was just a little boy,” his mother, Arminta Jones, told me, “we dressed him in a black suit and bow tie, and he stood by the front door, saying, ‘Can I help you find something, ma’am?’” Pat Jones remembered that his son worked and played football with equal ferocity. “I always told him there was nothing he couldn’t do if he wanted to do it,” he said. The store was open every night until midnight, and as a teenager, Jerry sometimes stayed up all night helping restock the shelves. “We’re not much for sleeping,” Pat Jones added.
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