The Dallas Cowboys Used to Sell NFL Dynasties. Now They Sell Drama.
It’s been almost thirty years since America’s Team last played in the Super Bowl, yet fans remain hooked on Jerry Jones’s soap opera.
Former senior editor Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Texas and Texans for five decades. He is the author and coauthor of biographies of Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Selena, and the Dallas Cowboys, and he wrote the texts for various coffee-table books on the Texas mountains, the Texas coast, and Big Bend National Park.
One of his more recent titles is Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers, and Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas, published in 2019. His 2020 book, The Ballad of Robert Ealey and His Five Careless Lovers, is an oral history of the seminal blues band Patoski grew up with in Fort Worth in the early 1970s. He has also written Generations on the Land, published by Texas A&M University Press, and Texas High School Football: More Than the Game, a catalog of an exhibit he curated for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in 2011, and has contributed essays to the books Homegrown, Conjunto, and My Soul Looks Back in Wonder.
A staff writer for Texas Monthly for eighteen years and a onetime reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Patoski currently serves as a writer-at-large for Texas Highways and hosts The Texas Music Hour of Power on Marfa Public Radio and Wimberley Valley Radio.
He directed the documentary film Sir Doug and the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove about the musician Doug Sahm in 2015.
He lives in the Texas Hill Country near Wimberley.
It’s been almost thirty years since America’s Team last played in the Super Bowl, yet fans remain hooked on Jerry Jones’s soap opera.
I’ve spent the past half century immersing myself in Texas’s clear, cool waters. But if development and drought have their way, I may be the last of my kind.
The recording career of country music’s greatest artist, surveyed, sized up, and sorted on the occasion of his 87th birthday.
David Courtney, a.k.a. the Texanist, is a staff writer.
Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue.
John Spong writes primarily about popular culture.
Christian Wallace writes about West Texas, oil and gas, music, cowboys, history, and history-making Texans.
The Fort Davis historian and raconteur knew and loved Texas and its people like no one else.
All Hallows Eve, which descends from the grand Celtic festival of the dead, was stirring up a cauldron of supernatural activity long before kids started donning costumes to harvest candy from the neighbors. But, alas, for some time, Halloween and the belief in spirits of the departed have
Former Dallas Cowboys equipment manager Jack Eskridge, who died earlier this month at 89, didn't just create a logo. He defined the city and the sport.
Hey Jerry, want to win another Super Bowl? Sell the team to its own fans a la Green Bay Packers, says Dallas Cowboys author Joe Nick Patoski.
So what if they’re not cranking out hits and selling out concerts the way they used to? After nearly three decades, no one makes better blues rock than ZZ Top.
ROUTE: West of Ozona to Sanderson DISTANCE: 85 miles NUMBER OF COUNTIES: 3 WHAT TO READ: James H. Evans’s Crazy From the HeatA drive whose sole purpose is to experience the simple pleasure of being behind the wheel has a few requirements. The route must lead west, because that’s the
ROUTE: Turkey to Lubbock (the long way) DISTANCE: 366 miles NUMBER OF COUNTIES: 13 WHAT TO LISTEN TO: Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be the Day and Waylon Jennings’s Ol’ WaylonWest Texas is the Texas of wide-open spaces, but it is also the Texas of music giants, starting in the Rolling Plains
After more than two decades in the movie business—including star turns in Apollo 13, Twister, and now his own Traveller—Fort Worth’s Bill Paxton is finally getting what’s coming to him.
Houston’s new movers and shakers don’t hang with the Wyatts or Sakowitzes. They’re Eightball, Scarface, Lil’ Keke, and the other power players of the city’s rap music scene.
Food fight: The most ridiculous, overblown squabble this side of the legislature.
An animated personality.
Why reporters who cover the border are finding themselves more and more under the gun.
And you’re going to need it, eventually, since Texas’ most precious natural resource is being depleted at an alarming rate. His plan is to pump vast amounts from his land in the Panhandle and pipe it to parched cities like El Paso and San Antonio—for a hefty price, of course.
When Selena Quintanilla Perez was killed on March 31, Texas mourned—and around the world, the veneration began.
He’s a little bit country, rock and roll, and everything in between. That’s why Doug Sahm is still going strong.
A match made in heaven and blessed by Hollywood.
A Texas football magazine that scores.
On the first Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in August for the past 61 years, thousands have converged on a park on the outskirts of Dalhart for the XIT Rodeo and Reunion, celebrating the history of the XIT Ranch, once the biggest ranch in Texas. (This year’s dates: August 7—9.) In
Breathtaking scenery, tons of runs, and pillowy, powdery white stuff: If you need a lift this winter, New Mexico skiing won’t leave you cold.
The rap on Corpus Christi is that there’s no there there—but a case can be made that it’s a great weekend destination.
More of the best bootmakers in the state.
Nothing advertises your Texas bona fides more these days than a pair of handmade cowboy boots. Here's everything you need to know about them - how to tell a vamp from a pull, which toe style is right with a suit - and where to buy the best.
TopThe top, also known as the shaft, is the artist’s canvas: Here is where the most detail work is done (although, ironically, if you’re a man, the top stays hidden under your pants legs unless you’re riding or at a cowboy ball). Standard tops are twelve inches high, though custom
ABILENEJames Leddy Boots 1602 N. Treadaway Boulevard 915-677-7811The nephew of boot king M. L. Leddy is now royalty himself, and he runs a real family business: He does the cutting, his wife and daughter do the stitching, his son-in-law does bottoms, and his former daughter-in-law creates the prettiest inlays anywhere.
A drive that’s unforgettable to the end.
This month, more than 150,000 fans will pack an enormous new venue near Fort Worth to watch the state’s first major stock car race. Clearly, NASCAR is on the right track in Texas.
Where are the best places to eat barbecue in Texas? Six years ago we published a highly subjective—and hotly debated— list of our fifty favorite joints, and now we’ve gone back for seconds. Ten intrepid souls drove more than 21,000 miles in search of 2003’s worthiest ‘cue. Here’s what they
Patricia Sharpe writes a regular restaurant column, Pat’s Pick, for Texas Monthly.
Katy Vine has been a staff writer since 2002.
John Spong writes primarily about popular culture.
Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue.
Comfort, style, and identity are a few of the reasons why Texans will be forever in blue jeans.
In Lubbock they call her the "Spanish Yoko Ono," and María Elena Holly, Buddy Holly’s widow, has always had a troubled relationship with his conservative hometown. Some folks rave on that it’s her greed that has killed the city’s Buddy Holly Music Festival. But it’s more complicated than that.
Play-by-play coverage of high school baseball in Alpine, polka and Pan-American music in El Campo: More than a dozen reasons not to touch that dial.
It’s music to your ears.
Two decades ago, a barbarian from Arkansas named Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys and rebooted the franchise from the ground up. Inside the wild first days of the most hostile takeover the NFL has ever known.
Two and a half years ago, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum asked me to organize an exhibit about high school football. Did I mention I'm not a curator?
Unless otherwise noted, all places take credit cards.ABILENE: Harold’s Pit Bar-B-Q We didn’t catch pitmaster Harold Christian singing gospel songs to his customers, but we’re told that isn’t an unusual occurrence. This cozy little room, packed with nine picnic tables, seven booths, and a congregation of athletic trophies, is where
Patricia Sharpe writes a regular restaurant column, Pat’s Pick, for Texas Monthly.
Katy Vine has been a staff writer since 2002.
John Spong writes primarily about popular culture.
Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue.
Cooper’s Pit Bar-B-Q MasonThe name “Cooper’s” has long been synonymous with Llano, but now the Mason operation of the same name has overtaken its distant cousin. Cooper’s Pit Bar-B-Q was opened in Mason in 1953 by the late George Cooper, whose son Tommy (also deceased) cloned it a decade later
Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue.
How Lubbock--epicenter of the prairie dog universe--learned to stop worrying and love the little beasts.
The Austin American-Statesman versus Barton Springs.
Drilling for answers on Padre Island.
Why you can't spell "cheerleader" without "leader."
The mayor of San Antonio says a 2,600-acre golf resort on top of the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone won't ruin the city's sole source of drinking water. Who wants to tee off on that one?
When the City of Marshall wanted to pump millions of gallons of water out of Caddo Lake and sell them to the highest bidder, the state said, "Sure." Residents of Karnack, Uncertain, and other tiny northeast Texas towns said, "Hell, no." Guess who prevailed (for now)?
Beach palapas, blue water, angelfish, Gauguin sunsets, mahimahi al mojo de ajoand a frog in the shower.
Birders and their allies want to preserve the vanishing grassland of the farm and ranch country west of Houston, but time is running out.
Tackling the ins and outs of Reliant Stadium.
A new book on dance halls explains why Texans are itching to go boot-scootin'.
Why Grand Prarie's Bobby Patterson of KKDA-AM is my favorite deejay in Texas.
These drives are sure to get your attention.