Tight end Billy Joe DuPree, unlike many athlete-entrepreneurs, doesn't fall back on team connections. Instead, he projects the same total dependability and fierce discipline that have made the Dallas Cowboys famous.
Ninety miles from Longview we got to talking about hands-on management, but the focus was all on his hands. Billy Joe DuPree, 10 years into his All-Pro football career as a tight end with the Dallas Cowboys and 5 years at the helm of CWC Construction Inc., a rising star in Dallas's business marketplace, gripped the wheel of his Jeep Laredo and nudged the speedometer up toward 85. Scrub oak flew by us like startled quail. Seldom had east Texas looked so small.
"I take one vacation a year away from work," DuPree was explaining, his enormous fingers spread like tentacles across the brim of his baseball cap, "and that's the month I spend in California at Cowboys training camp. Otherwise, I like to be in the office every day."
He flexed his hand and made a fist. Little crescent-shaped pieces of scar tissue -- one, it seemed, for each of his 40 career touchdown catches, the enduring legacies of the cleats of a lot of beaten cornerbacks -- winked in the sunlight like cheap costume jewelry. Surprisingly, not even the winners' ring from Super Bowl XII was there to offset them; only by his healed wounds did one of pro football's premier performers advertise his craft. And that, he added, was just how he liked things.
"I never thought much about playing in the NFL," he continued in his soft Louisiana drawl. "Even now, after 10 seasons, I think of myself more as an athlete-entrepreneur than a player. Not many people around Dallas even know I'm in the construction business, which is fine by me. My company can't service the average fan who comes to see me play, anyway." He drummed on the dashboard. "There was a time when I could be standing in a crowd of a hundred people and only three would say, 'Hey, there goes Billy Joe DuPree!' That let me get a whole lot of business done before the talk ever swung around to football."
There was also a time when his construction company could operate comfortably out of the hip pocket of DuPree's oversize pants; but those days, like the miles between Dallas and Longview when the accelerator is pressed flat to the floor, are long gone. In the last three years, CWC has gone from pouring sidewalks and patios to putting up 18-story commercial buildings, and its annual gross has grown from $200,000 to well over $5 million, with an average contract tag of $600,000. Instead of DuPree's kitchen table, the company now works out of 1,600 square feet of office space at its north Dallas headquarters and another 20,000 square feet -- most of it enclosed storage -- at its nearby Garland warehouse.
During this same spurt, CWC has added a full-time administrative staff of 12, plus 100 to 150 regular hourly wage-earners and has expanded its services to include not only concrete-pouring, but also crane installation, rebar installation for steel reinforced concrete, post-tension cable system design and installation, and general contracting. In a tight economy, a growth curve like this would test the mettle of any ambitious young chief executive officer, not to mention one who, from mid-July through December, regularly leaves his desk to get knocked six ways from Sunday by the Jack Lamberts of the modern world.
Billy Joe DuPree, however, is anything but average -- even by National Football League standards. A survey of all 28 NFL football clubs produced only a handful of players who are also active business managers, and most of them were running businesses that are either sports-related (such as racquetball clubs and sporting-goods stores) or trade heavily on name identification (for example, Ron Jaworski Sports Enterprises, which runs a speakers' bureau and summer camps). A Claudie Minor (Denver Broncos), who owns a drilling-fluid company and is branching out into real estate and cable TV, or a Mike Pruitt (Cleveland Browns), who helps run a construction rehab company, are the exceptions to the rule. Like DuPree, they work as hard reading spreadsheets as they do reading playbooks. Not many athlete-entrepreneurs are in their league.
"The main thing about Billy Joe is he's always under control," marvels teammate Drew Pearson, a training camp roommate along with Harvey Martin and Benny Barnes. "He's so in control, in fact, that sometimes I think it makes the front office nervous, because he's not as dependent on them as they'd like him to be. But in our room anyway, the talk is always more business than football. And all the guys, especially the younger players, seek Billy Joe out. He's so stable. No matter what's going down during the football season, B. J.'s got his business stuff well in hand."
"The most remarkable thing about him is he never saw football as his way to get rich," adds Dale Dodson, chairman of Dalcor Financial Inc., a venture capital and real estate investment group, and DuPree's longtime financial adviser. "For him, playing pro ball was only the means to get himself into the free enterprise system so he could show what he could do. And B. J.'s unbelievably dedicated. I've seen him go to the office at 7, be out at the practice field by 8:45, take his lunch break back at work, go back to practice in the afternoon, and then stop by the office for an hour or two on the way home. He set goals for his business early on, hired the top people in town to help implement them, listens to their advice, and only tackles what he thinks he can do well. Forget other athletes; that's highly unusual for any executive in Billy Joe's position.
Perhaps even more than the bruising tight end, the executive in Billy Joe DuPree has its roots in northeast Louisiana, where he grew up before becoming a star athlete at Michigan State University. DuPree's father drove a truck for a construction company, and B. J. liked to hang around work sites. He appreciated the engineering skills it took to throw a bridge over a bayou without the whole thing sinking into the swamp. He first wanted to become a civil engineer, but Michigan State had other ideas. Not atypically for a Big Ten school, it made full use of DuPree's talents on the gridiron and basketball court while giving him precious little constructive advice on how to get what he wanted out of the academic curriculum. He stumbled on the department of building construction and took as many courses as he could there. But when his college playing days ended DuPree was still several credits short of a degree (a situation he plans to rectify soon) and worried about how he would support his wife, Marsha, and their infant son. By making Dupree their first pick in the 1973 draft, the Cowboys eliminated his immediate problems, but he was still wary.
"I signed for a lot less than I could have because I hate hassling over contracts," he admits. "Once I signed, though, I felt like I'd made a commitment to the team and the city. I knew I wanted to play there a long time and make it my home."
Throughout the sporting world, the Dallas Cowboys are known for making their primary commitment the famous Cowboy System, a highly structured approach to playing and management that includes drafting the best available athletes regardless of position, breaking them into playing roles slowly, keeping rookies subservient to veterans, keeping everyone subservient to Coach Tom Landry, and wrapping the whole package in blue, silver, and stars and selling it to Texas -- and the world -- as high-tech athletic entertainment. They call the Cowboys "America's Team," but it is really more like a Japanese techno-giant, investing heavily in research and development (scouting), emphasizing long-term goals over short-term profits, and stressing continuity at the top, where head coach, general manager, and team owner have all ruled since the club's inception in 1960, a modern sports-world miracle. DuPree came into this system as so many others have, learning to accept whatever role was given to him and to prove to his coaches that he could be counted on to play -- and play hard -- week in and week out, no matter what.
