America's Owner

Over a two-decade entrepreneurial career ranging from chicken farming to oil drilling, Jerry Jones made himself and many other people rich -- only to gamble everything, in 1989, on the financially crumbling Dallas Cowboys

Master Entrepreneur:
Jerry Jones, Dallas Cowboys

Buying the Dallas Cowboys was never just another deal for Jerry Jones; he's willing to admit that. He told himself at the start that all he wanted was H.R. "Bum" Bright's controlling interest in the fiscally troubled team and no more, though financing even that would be a stretch. But he let himself get drawn in. The deal kept expanding. By the time he passed papers, on April 29, 1989, he wasn't buying out just Bright but all of Bright's partners and Texas Stadium, too. The final price came to $140 million -- $65 million for the team, $75 million for the stadium. Jones put up $90 million -- all the cash he had -- and borrowed the rest against personal assets. For Jones, who thought in terms of the interest he was paying and the interest he would no longer earn, that came to $40,000 a day. All for a franchise that in the previous year had lost almost $10 million on only $41 million in sales. "I really risked more than I should have," he says now.

The purchase complete, Jones and his accountant worked hard to clean things up. The National Football League makes available to each of its member franchises a $30-million line of credit on favorable terms, and Jones drew on that. He sought nonrecourse bank loans. And he quietly worked out an exit strategy, on the theory that we all make mistakes but that part of what makes some people rich enough to buy a football team in the first place is the good sense to nip those mistakes in the bud. In other words, as Jones cast it in his own mind, "there had to be a way to say, 'Whoops! This isn't working.' And shut it down."

Then again, a professional football team -- much less the Dallas Cowboys -- is not like a pizza parlor or a chicken farm or a gas well or any other business Jones had operated up to that point. You don't simply shut down the sport's most glamorous franchise, no matter how much money it eats. In retrospect, that seems obvious. But before he fully understood, Jones needed some words from his father, Pat, who telephoned one afternoon about a month after the deal had closed.

"He called me up and said, 'Son, you're a relatively young man. [Jones was 46.] I don't know if you ever want to do anything else with your life. You may not. But if you do, you'll never get the opportunity if you don't make the Cowboys work. This thing is too visible. You have to make it work or you're going to be recognized as a failure."

Assuming Pat Jones was right about the visibility bit, this hardly bears repeating, but yes, Jerry did make it work -- as he has made those other enterprises work on the way toward recognition as this year's Master Entrepreneur of the Year. His Cowboys -- a 1-and-15 flop just four years ago -- won the 1993 Super Bowl with the youngest roster in the NFL and a player payroll ranked 24th out of 28 teams, and in so doing helped put $21 million back in Jones's pocket.

Which is why Jones can smile now, telling his story. His eyes are silvery blue; his complexion is leathery; his thick nose is a little bit bent. (Football did it -- Jones, a former offensive lineman, was cocaptain of the University of Arkansas's team in 1964, the year it won the national championship.) His office at Cowboys Center -- a $20-million glass-and-sandstone monument built (by the previous owners) on 30 acres of landscaped prairie northwest of Dallas -- is large: longer than a first down, wider than running back Emmitt Smith's average yards per carry. The windows are floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Outside are a trellised patio, pleasantly shaded; a wide green lawn ringed with oaks; a creek winding through the trees; and tennis courts. Inside are reminders of the Cowboys' success: a trio of tricornered Super Bowl trophies ("That front one is the one we won; the other two are VI and XII"); a Waterford crystal football, somehow Super Bowl related ("That thing weighs about 40 pounds"); and over there on the end table next to the couch, in a black-felt display box, a silver- and-platinum Dallas Cowboys football helmet. "To my friend Jerry Jones," the inscription reads. "You said you would do it, and you did it. Bandar." Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, is a big fan of America's Team.

"It may be an exaggeration, but I don't think so," says Jones, getting back to the story about his father's ominous warning. "For the rest of my life, whenever I would walk into a room and say, 'My name is Jerry Jones,' bells would go off, and people would say, 'That's the guy who fumbled the ball on the Dallas Cowboys."

Attempting the Cowboys turnaround was risky, but Jones has always been a willing risk taker. Perhaps too willing, he says. "At times I've felt like hiding assets from myself because I didn't want to be tempted and risk them." He likes to tell people he has "a high tolerance for ambiguity," a characterization he supports with descriptions of the oil and gas business, where he made his fortune: the high failure rates, the long wait for an uncertain reward, the role played by luck.

"Some people have to have everything all tied up or they can't function," says Jones, thinking perhaps of his stiff-haired head coach (and former Arkansas teammate) Jimmy Johnson. Others, like Jones, are always juggling. He was raised in North Little Rock ("Dog Town" to those who lived on the better side of the Arkansas River), worked all through college, played football, and earned two degrees. Fresh out of school, he made a vague bid for the San Diego Chargers, then part of the old American Football League. Owner Barron Hilton wanted $5.8 million for his 80% stake, and at one point offered Jones a $50,000 option good for 120 days. At the time, Jones had no real money of his own. He was working for his dad at Modern Security Life, in Springfield, Mo., drawing a $1,000 monthly advance against sales commissions and, in his spare time, rounding up backers for his more ambitious ventures. It was his dad who finally persuaded him that to take on so much debt so early in life was perilous, that worrying about it would only sap his energy and stifle his natural salesmanship. So Jones passed on the deal, which was too bad. For within the option period the AFL merged with the NFL, and the Chargers changed hands for $11 million.