KING COWBOY

Sport

The Dallas Cowboys are the reigning champs of the N.F.L., and the man at the reins of the Cowboys is wildcat oil millionaire Jerry Jones—but has his high-risk negotiating jeopardized the team's dynastic dream?

FRANK DEFORD

The football sound is original in nature. It's somewhere between a slap and a thwack, and then there is usually an oomph-CRUNCH too. The main problem is, the pads don't pad. Instead, they build the players up into stylized cartoon heroes, imbuing them with reckless powers that they employ indiscriminately against one another. But you can't really tell what football is unless you can hear it, down close. Seeing is deceiving. The shrill screaming from the cheerleaders and the throaty roars of the crowd muffle the people-hitting noise. Nowadays, in fact, way up in the best seats, in the enclosed private suites, you might not hear anything at all except for more ice cubes dropping into another Bloody Mary. So usually, late in the game, Jerry Jones will sneak away from the swells in his skyboxes, go down to his field, and stand just behind his players, to enjoy the secret sound.

Of course, the suites are part of natural evolution. Football has always been the most social game. While baseball is a pastime, intellectual and family, football is an event, emotional and sexy— football is a whole damn weekend. Football is corsages. Some sage old soldier long ago observed that we fight wars for the women watching, and so too with football, our party to violence. The panoply and the pom-poms, the martial music, organized cheers, organized mayhem, those huge, helmeted V-shaped men crushing each other, donating their knees to a grateful nation.

No one ever caught all this better than America's Team. Tits and action, glitz and ass, snappy souvenirs, a bornagain coach bossing secularly outrageous athletes called Hollywood, Dandy Don, and Too Tall—praise the Lord and pass the ammunition—and the gee-whiz most technologically advanced front office in sport. Something for every taste.

Of course, it was Texas too. Why, almost from the time football spread out from the sissified Northeast, Texas has fancied itself football's true home field. And possibly this time the bluster is legitimate. Certainly, football fits in Texas. The culture and the posture—all that tedious we're-the-biggest crap. Even the contour and the climate. "If I owned hell and Texas," General Sheridan once opined, "I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." In the brutal griddle of Texas summer, the first harbinger of more pleasant times ahead is the schoolboys starting their steamy two-a-days. After that, in most Lone Star settlements, high-school football games are the stickum that fuses the whole community. Maybe that's the key, that, all the other stuff aside, the Cowboys are only a larger version of the Texas high-school-football experience—well, except that the cheerleaders have midriffs bare and pants hot. "Tell me," a visiting Russian coach once inquired. "Tell me. These women. Are they wayward?"

Ironically, Jones, the owner of the cheerleaders and the Cowboys, of this whole grand star-spangled Texas shebang, is in fact an oilman from Arkansas. Oil and Arkansas? In Texas that sounds like perfume and Belgium. And when he stands by his team, some of the local cognoscenti still mumble, "What's Jones doing down there with the players?" This September, when the defending champions got off to a stumbling start, the critics were even more disapproving. Everybody was sure that it wasn't the team's fault, that it wasn't the usual jitters of trying to defend a title. No. It was all because Jones, the owner, wouldn't give Emmitt Smith, the star, the money he wanted. And so, once again, there Jones was at the center of things, more visible, more involved, more at risk than any owner in any sport.

He needs to go down to the field. He needs to be close to his game, to stand there, strangling his program in his hands, looking up to the crown of the field where the action is on, hearing the secret autumn sound, awful but dearly beloved.

The only two previous owners of America's Team had, decorously, barely been visible. But once Jerry Jones decided, late in 1988, that he was going to buy the Cowboys, he was determined to run the sonuvabitch himself, all day, up front. That's the way he'd always operated; that's the way he had accumulated, as he characterizes it, "serious money." He had made that fortune as an Independent. In the past, an Independent was known as a wildcatter. Independent doesn't sound quite as racy, but, in this day and age of entitlements, it still has a ring to it, doesn't it? Jerry Jones is an Independent. "I believe," Jones says, "that if you work hard you should be able to take it all."

And, sure enough, on February 25, 1989, he had America's Team all to himself, installing his old college football teammate Jimmy Johnson as the coach, pledging his attention to everything down to "the jocks and socks." In sports history, no individual had ever put up so much for one franchise—about $140 million for the team and Texas Stadium. So, naturally, Jones expected to be hailed by Dallas as a savior. After all, he was promising to revive a team— America's or otherwise—that under the dispirited leadership of the aging coach, Tom Landry, hadn't won a playoff game in six seasons. Gimme a J! Gimme an E! Gimme an R! Gimme another—

No. It was exactly the opposite. Lone Star sophisticates vilified Jones as an invader, deriding him as an Ozark rube— Jethro, the Jaybird, the Crock from Little Rock. Jones's good friend Hugh Pollard, a Little Rock marketing consultant, cracks, "Texans especially pass us off as some sort of Third World country. When an Arkansan bought the Cowboys—why, that was worse over there than the Japanese buying Rockefeller Center."

Loyal Texans actually launched several serious investigations into Jones's life, business and private alike. "All they found," he says triumphantly, "was that I love beautiful women, and I love to honky-tonk, but I don't pair up." But then it got worse. He was subjected to death threats. For buying a football team. Eventually, under the stress, he succumbed to arrhythmia, irregular heartbeat.

Wherever he goes, he is recognized, most of the beholden Cowboy fans calling out his name. "There's Girrajoan! It's Girrajoan hisself!"

Meanwhile, in counterpoint, old Coach Landry, who had been widely discredited as a has-been right up to the day Jones gave him $1 million and wished him well in retirement, was suddenly reborn to glory, given a grand Mac Arthurian parade that closed down Dallas. Even billboards were erected, castigating the interloper. On radio talk shows Jones was, alternately, the fool and the Devil.

Worse, in the first season of the Jones regime, the Cowboys only won a single game. America's Team, which in its heyday had accounted for 26 percent of all N.F.L. product sales, slid down with the likes of Indianapolis and Tampa.

Do you know how bad it was?

It was so bad that the number of Texas beauties trying out to be Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders dropped 75 percent.

That's how bad it was.

Unlike a lot of struggling American families who see a way up for their athletic children through sport, the modest North Little Rock household of Pat and Arminta Jones did not particularly stress football when young Jerral Wayne was growing up, the only son and heir. Jerry came from farming stock, but Pat Jones had met Arminta (who is called Butch) when they were both scraping to go to night business school during the Depression. The business of the Joneses would be business.

Butch recalls, "Jerry heard nothing but business talk breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He understood what we wanted was to make money and get ahead." Pat Jones started in what family members invariably identify as "the fruit-stand business." He moved up to own grocery stores, and then switched to insurance, where he was an instant success. "Wrote $40 million the first year, made $81,924.21," he reports, rattling off, to the penny, figures from more than a quarter-century ago.

North Little Rock was the other side of the tracks—or the river, in this case. It was such a backwater, so near and yet so far from the state capital, that in Jerry's ninth-grade year, when the whole damn world was glaring at the attempted integration of Central High, in Little Rock proper, nobody gave a hoot that North Little Rock High went on, blithely, segregated. This helped Jones become a high-school star and earn a football scholarship to the university, as a member of that last lucky generation of slow white boys who didn't have to compete with black athletes.

As a senior at Arkansas, on the team that won the Cotton Bowl, Jones played offensive guard. Unexamined, this doesn't make any sense at all. Offensive linemen are the mules of the sport, dutifully doing their job, "protecting" the quarterback, never expecting or gaining any credit. Sure as hell, no offensive lineman could possibly grow up to be an Independent.

Defensive linemen are different. They're balls-out and cagey. Jimmy Johnson, for example, was a defensive lineman, and from the moment Jones began dreaming about trying to buy America's Team someday, he planned to hire his old teammate as his coach—and never mind the clash of wills. That isn't at all like an offensive lineman, either.

"Hell," says Jones, setting the record straight, "I was only an offensive lineman that one year." Before, he had always been a running back, carrying the ball. Prior to his senior season, however, head coach Frank Broyles decided to switch Jones to the line. Jones refused; he would fight to keep a job in the backfield. But then an assistant coach came to him and made it plain: Make the sacrifice, son, or Coach Broyles will bury your ass. So he agreed to play guard, and Arkansas went undefeated.

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"I still have a recurring dream, though," Jones says. "Same one, every time. I'm on the Razorback team, and I either miss the bus to the game or I'm in the locker room and I can't get my stuff on. " His eyes dart around just thinking about it. "And the game's started, and I can't get out there, and I know I'm going to be demoted five teams. I dream that all the time."

Of course, by now Jones understands that the dream is about his life, and not just about football. Yet, even after redemption, even after January 31, 1993, he dreams it still.

That Sunday evening was one of those nights people moved to Los Angeles for, before so many people moved to Los Angeles that there were hardly any nights like this left—the clear sky stretching from the mountains, down over the valley, and on over the sea beyond. From the moonlight, the helicopter sparkled like one of the stars above it as it zipped west from Pasadena on this night of nights, when the Cowboys had destroyed the Buffalo Bills, winning the Super Bowl, 52-17. America's Team was reincarnated, and Jerry Jones was lionized by fawning, elbow-nudging hindsighters hooting that they sure did put the wrong Arkansan in the White House last week. Heh-heh.

In the chartered helicopter, he was so excited, so gleeful, that he couldn't contain himself. Jones is a man of pleasant aspect—something of a Tommy Lee Jones without the angled edges—but when he gets himself going his eyes seem to take over his whole head. He was so beside himself with joy that he couldn't talk lucidly; he would start a sentence, then stop and zoom off with exhilaration in another direction. His wife, Gene, and the three others on board finally just gave up trying to communicate with him and only, happily, watched his eyes.

As with his team, the man himself had been publicly transformed. The bumbling clodhopper whom microphones had followed around, sure in the faith that he would say something foolish, seldom to be disappointed—the cheerleaders, Jones had boasted on national TV, were "the pick of the litter"—was now self-assured, the sage country cousin, Dr. Sound Bite. He was not only the savior of Big D but a class-A celebrity, more famous than most of his players. Why, he even has his own newspaper column and TV show— an owner, with a TV show! an owner!— and wherever he goes, he is recognized, most of the beholden Cowboy fans calling out his whole name, an amalgamation that sounds, in southwestern dialect, like Girrajoan. "There's Girrajoan!" the cry goes up. "It's Girrajoan hisself!"

From a distance, the admirers shout, ' 'Jerry! Jerry! Show us your ring! " and he happily obliges, thrusting high his hand, displaying the humongous, bejeweled diadem of the finger that appears to be nothing less than a high-school ring on steroids. The faithful press him for autographs. "Jerry! Jerry! Sign this, please!" Programs, tickets, legal currency, hats, sneakers, even ... at two o'clock in the morning at a country-western joint, Jones politely indulges an off-duty topless dancer, signing his name along the slim halter that holds up her bountiful left breast.

At two o'clock in the morning, Jones politely induces an off-duty topless dancer, signing his name along the slim halter that holds up her bountiful left breast

"You been out beveraging with Jerry?" a young Cowboy employee inquires. "Beveraging with Jerry is harder than working for him."

More important than this revisionist popularity is the bald fact that Jones is becoming a certified power within the N.F.L.—and the model of an owner that others are studying throughout professional sport. Leigh Steinberg, the most important agent in football, representing 25 quarterbacks, including Troy Aikman, the Dallas marquee hero, says bluntly, "Jerry has an absolutely brilliant mind, an integrated worldview, with a level of sophistication you rarely see with sports people. He's not only the master showman in sports today, but he has already transcended the way sports business is done. ' '

As impressive as Jones's team winning the Super Bowl only three years after a 1 -and-15 season is the fact that he has paid off all debt on both the Cowboys and the stadium—which he estimates was costing him $45,000 a day when he took over. Even more incredible, the Cowboys became champions with the 26th-lowest payroll in a 28-team league. Jones negotiates closefisted, unafraid to shuck off higher-paid veterans for cheaper young aspirants. It helps that he has dug a lot of wells in his life; he remains a romantic who isn't a sentimentalist.

"You're in the oil business, you learn to expect bad news," Jones says. "And that helps me here, because there's a lot of bad news in football too. You gotta expect injuries. Remember, it's unnatural playing football. God tells you to run away from the 275-pounder—not run into him. So they're heroes, players are, sure, but in the end they're also just" — he shrugs—"gladiators."

Jones has some advantage in that he played big-time football himself, so he understands the bittersweet allure of the gridiron, the glamour-coated brutality. He has heard the secret sound. His attitude rings as starkly, if not so rhythmically, as the grim last lines from James Wright's ode to football, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio":

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October

And gallop terribly against each other's

bodies.

Indeed, of all the initial misconceptions about Jones, the greatest, perhaps, was that he was some old gaga college jock, giddily buying his way back into the locker room. "Sure, I have great respect for players because I was one of them," he says. But then, distant, in a throwaway tone: "But most of 'em, in any sport, once you get past the Michael Jordan types, you know what? You could shake 'em all up in a sack, and I'd hand you half without looking, and I'd take the rest, and we'd be equal."

This dispassionate—some might say cold-blooded—attitude was put to the test this summer when Emmitt Smith, the Cowboys' running machine, held out for a substantial raise. Now, unlike quarterbacks, running backs have the career span of second lieutenants in the Ardennes, so Smith understood he must get all he could up front. Jones, though, was determined to practice some economy with Smith— especially since a new N.F.L. policy begins next season, putting a ceiling on the total amount an owner can pay his roster. Jones's long-term planning had to further take into consideration that Aikman's contract would be up after the '94 season; Jones feared that if he paid two backfield superstars top dollar there wouldn't be enough to go around for the worker bees,

Jones knew what he was risking by negotiating tough with Smith, and all summer he agonized, worrying about it so much that sometimes he would bring the subject up out of the blue, without any introduction. "Suppose" is how he began once.

Suppose? Suppose what?

"Just suppose I'm never this close to winning the Super Bowl again, and I pass on Emmitt this time, and we don't win this year ..." His voice trailed off.

With some luck, Jones might have forced the player to fold 'em. At first, for example, fans thought the offer of $11 million just to lug a pigskin for four years for America's Team was plenty generous, and public opinion sided with old Girrajoan. But the Cowboys who did return to play quickly evidenced the kind of nextyear smugness that infects so many modem champions. Then, when a frustrated Coach Johnson tried to stir up the 'Boys, it was easy for them to blame their malaise on Owner Jones for not paying their teammate what they thought he deserved.

On offense, without Smith, the fragile equilibrium of running and passing broke down. Dallas had hardly finished fumbling the opener to the Washington Redskins when the fans, who operate pretty much on the assumption that all modem players are greedy, overpaid bastards (except the ones on my team), swung to support Smith. In the Cowboys' second game, the home opener, against their erstwhile Super Bowl lunchmeat, Buffalo, the Bills took the lead, and the chants soon rang out, "We want Emmitt!" A banner unfurled: SIGN EMMITT AND TRADE YOUR EGO.

When the Cowboys lost to the Bills in the last seconds of the game, Jones was stripped. If he yet refused to sign Smith, the young team would unravel altogether; sign him and Jones would be abandoning his long-term plan for maneuvering under the new salary cap. But at 0and-2 the here and now prevailed over the future and Jones anted up $13.6 million to Smith for four years.

Of course, seduced as they are by the sweat and the glamour, frightened by the bad publicity, men who buy sports franchises tend to end up paying the jocks' price. Not so long ago, in fact, when a fellow could buy a franchise for a mere handful of millions, team owners were like the last gentlemen farmers. Today, though, when it is estimated that the cheapest buy in sports would be the Winnipeg Jets at $35 million, owners are often leveraged, and probably a little angry that they overpaid for the cheap thrill of getting into a game. Quickly, the worst of them come off like that little horse's-ass tycoon on the Monopoly Community Chest cards. Boone Pickens, a friend of Jones's, himself an old Independent who got rich and famous, knows the type well. He leans back in his Dallas office and tells this story:

'They're heroes, players are, sure, but in the end they're also just"— Jones shrugs— "gladiators."

"Guy goes into a bar with a dog and says, 'Hey, gimme a beer and my dog a martini,' " Pickens begins. "You heard this? No? O.K. The bartender says, 'Sorry, we don't serve dogs here.' Guy says, 'But this is a special dog. He doesn't just drink martinis. He talks.' And, sure enough, the dog talks, so the bartender gives him a martini, and they all chat awhile, till the guy goes to the men's room. Sure you haven't heard this? O.K.

Then the bartender says, 'Hey, dog, do me a favor.' 'Sure,' says the dog, 'if you'll gimme another martini.' 'On the house,' says the bartender, 'if you'll just go down the street and buy me a newspaper. ' So he gives the dog a dollar bill, and the dog goes off. Then the guy comes back from the men's room. But after a while, when the dog doesn't come back, he goes outside. There, down the block, is a huge crowd. The guy hurries down, and there's the dog, in the middle of the crowd, mounted on the prettiest poodle you ever saw, going at it. So the guy hustles in, grabs the dog, and screams at him, 'Hey, you've never been this kinda dog.' The dog still ^ has the dollar bill in his mouth. He finally lets go of it, and only then he says, 'Yeah, but I never had money before, either.' "

Pickens pauses and grins. "Well, you see, Jerry's done very well the first time he was big rich, but you never know about a lot of people."

Certainly it is true that many new owners, most prominently George Steinbrenner of the Yankees, jumped the poodle first chance, eventually damaging their franchise, even smudging the whole sport. On the other hand, though, owners are damned if they do, and damned otherwise. These men, who were, ipso facto, smart enough to have made a fortune at something, are presumed to be witless when they tackle any sports matter, and fans and the media are ever vigilant to catch the owner "meddling" (the operative word) in field affairs.

Jones was suspected of preternatural meddling because he handpicked Johnson, his old Razorback teammate, to coach the team. Actually, the truth is that the two old teammates never did have much in common save football. Johnson does occasionally get put out at Jones's ego, but he also takes a perverse delight in it because the owner's manic penchant for attention spares Johnson from having to suffer as many fools as most coaches must. "You know," Johnson chortles, "thanks to Jerry, I haven't had to speak to a civic club since I got to Dallas."

Anyway, the controversy about Jones's being too intrusive has certainly failed to limit his horizon. One night, he suddenly spoke these words, flat out: "In my mind, I am the Dallas Cowboys."

That's saying a mouthful, Jerry.

"Hey, in my mind. And there's nothing wrong with that, because other people can have other thoughts about the Cowboys in their minds. But understand, you cannot truly own the Cowboys. Nobody can. They are priceless. So, in that sense, I don't own them at all. It's just my turn to be steward of the Dallas Cowboys."

It still rankles him that anybody could ever have thought that he bought America's Team for ulterior motives. He just adores the Cowboys, and he's devoted to football. That's it. All the years he was an Independent, he would leave a business meeting in, say, Oklahoma City, cut it off just like that, rush to the airpark, and have his pilots fly him back to Little Rock. That's because it was football season, and he was a Little League coach. His older son, Stephen, would already be in his pads, waiting, fretting at home, but Gene would tell him, "Now, Stephen, don't worry. Daddy will be here to take you to practice, because he never misses."

And Daddy would swoop through the front door, taking off his dress shirt and tie as he ran, pecking Gene as he rushed by. Most of the kids' teams Jones coached were winners, too.

Now, at a fancy Mexican restaurant, Jones takes a swallow of Miller Lite. "I'll tell you what," he says, eyes blazing. "I could coach this team."

The Cowboys?

"Hey, I could coach the shit out of this team. But don't worry. I'm not prepared to put in the dedication to coaching Jimmy does, and, anyway, even if I wanted to, even if I became an offensive-line coach, I wouldn't. Because they'd say, What does he know? They'd say I was meddling, I was making a mockery out of the Cowboys. And I will do nothing to diminish the Cowboys or the game of football."

The irony was that Jones didn't have to do what Coach Broyles ordered him to do that senior year. He didn't have to play offensive line. He didn't have to play football at all. It was only for the love and for the challenge of the game. Already he had money burning a hole in his pocket. He was selling shoes out of a catalogue and scalping football tickets on campus, and, at large, he was serving as executive vice president of his father's company, Modem Security Life. That wasn't just a title, either. Not only was young Jones a star salesman, but he also delivered motivational speeches to the other 2,000 agents, all of whom were his senior.

"111 tell you what," Jones says, eyes blazing. "I could coach this team.... Hey; I could coach the shit out of this team."

He resided in the best apartment house in Fayetteville and tooled around in a Cadillac Eldorado. One Saturday, after a game at Texas A&M, the Aggie manager came mnning out to Broyles with a diamond pinkie ring that had been left behind in the locker room. "You left this, Coach." "Not me," replied Broyles. "I can't afford that. Ask Jerry Jones." And yes, it was his.

He was already married, too, with a baby. He had met Eugenia Chambers on literally his first day of college. She was as pretty as could be, Miss Arkansas and the state Poultry Princess, a real catch. But, to the despair of her banker father, John Ed Chambers, Gene would never see anyone but the Jones boy of the fruit-stand family. In many ways, the wooing of Gene and the winning of her family would foreshadow buying the Cowboys and conquering a dubious Dallas 30 years later. John Ed gave in, and Jerry and Gene were married when he was only 20. "It wasn't a shotgun, but the closest thing to it," Jerry explains, grinning, as Gene grits her teeth ever so delicately, beauty-pageant smile pasted on, her eyes pleading, Oh, Jerry, please don't say that again.

But then, tonight is a happy occasion, the family and close friends all assembled to surprise that oldest child, Stephen, on his 29th birthday. What goodlooking people they all are, how friendly; what achievers, unashamed. The family is so tight that not only would Jerry fly home to watch Stephen practice when he played for the Razorbacks, but when their daughter, Charlotte, went to Stanford, Gene virtually moved to Palo Alto, to regularly attend classes with her.

Gene always had to be the silent stalwart at home as her husband jetted to the oil fields. "I was always just goin' and blowin'," he says. "Rollin' it and movin' it." For a long time, wealthy as he had become, he wouldn't even hold back enough cash from investing to finish furnishing the family residence. He was a multimillionaire who had a credit card cut in half at an airport auto-rental counter. Although Stephen grew up in great comfort, he remembers his father as "constantly at risk," his mother simply as "a saint."

But, you see, Jerry Jones could naturally get at money, the same way God gave other folks the ability to hold a high note, say, or to paint a landscape. "I always expected it to work," he says matter-of-factly—meaning getting rich. "If it hadn't worked, well, you know, it wouldn't have been a disappointment. It would have been a surprise. That's all." His banker father-in-law came to appreciate what a tiger his daughter had found. "Keep Gene off the big notes" was his only advice, and then he cosigned a $50,000 loan for Jerry when the bank's limit was $15,000. His first year out of college, Jones was paying interest of $120,000 on loans—mostly unsecured—when he was drawing down less than one-tenth of that in the insurance business. He had also been awarded the franchises for Shakey's Pizza in the state of Missouri, and it was the men he sold the parlors to who agreed to back the 23year-old kid in his $5.8 million offer to buy the San Diego Chargers.

Borrowing, of course, is just another form of selling—selling yourself to the bank. "Jerry could talk fluently at nine months old," his mother says. "I know you think I'm fibbing, but that's so. And he hasn't stopped talking since." And so in Dallas he started sweet-talking the very people who despised him, selling them a package: himself and their team. That first year, when the team went 1-and-15, he sold sizzle, he sold the future. But that came easy. After all, life insurance is betting on the come. So is a lot of oil and gas.

When Jones took over the team, 5 of the stadium's 118 luxury suites were leased. Today, all are taken—filled till the year 2008 at prices of up to $2 million. Imagine spending two million on football tickets. But then, having a luxury suite at a sporting palace like Texas Stadium is the most conspicuous way to show off wealth these days. It's sort of what it was like having a yacht or a mistress in gilded ages past. Sixty-eight more Cowboy suites are being constructed. Also, just as important in the scheme of things, Jones browbeat the state legislature into allowing him to purvey beer, the mother's milk of sport, in Texas Stadium.

Then, when the team started winning, he sold the moment. Attendance is up 28 percent—not a seat has gone begging since 1990. In the U.S. Olympic tradition, a few class products compete to be the official this or the official that of America's Team. The first day back in the office after that giddy helicopter ride, Jones was on the phones, capitalizing. It was the best day to sell.

Still, probably the worst football decision he made—at least until he tangled with Emmitt Smith—was his first, when he passed on the purchase of the Chargers. Before he let the option lapse, he went to see Lamar Hunt, the quintessential gentleman owner of the Kansas City Chiefs— a man from Dallas, son of an Independent. "My, you're a young man to be so successful," Hunt said. And Jones beamed. Twenty-three and he could own a major-league team. Reluctantly, he gave up the idea under family pressure. The Chargers promptly sold at almost twice the price Jones had them locked in for.

Then again, it was also a blessing. Four years later, in 1970, when everybody else was bailing out of oil, Jones decided to go in . . . just in time to cash in on the Arab oil embargo. So today he has oil and gas and America's Team—plus banks and real estate and poultry-processing interests and other bric-a-brac reaching into the hundreds of millions.

Is it all a game, Jerry? Making money—is it just a game?

He kicks back on the couch in his office, right by the three Super Bowl trophies the Cowboys have won playing real games. "I've thought about that a lot, of course," he replies, "and I'd have to say, no, that's not quite the word. Game. It's more like this. It's like some people say making love is fun. And, hell, it is fun"—a slight smile of reverie; he's thinking hard now, trying to be helpful—"but that's not quite the word for that, is it? So, no, for me making money's not a game. Not quite.

"Now, you want to know what it is, though? What making money is? It's like trying to quench a thirst. That's what."

And are you still thirsty?

"Well, I must say, I've never gone to sleep a night yet without wanting something more to drink."

Although Jones has been in Dallas going on five years, only recently, only after the Super Bowl, did Gene begin overseeing the renovation of a grand house in a fancy section of Dallas called Turtle Creek, one that befits the owner of America's Team. Girrajoan belongs to Big D now.

The team Jones paid $60 million for is now worth at least three times as much— estimated to be the most valuable sports property in the world.

How not? After all, surely the Cowboys are more closely tied to the psyche of their hometown than is any other sports franchise in the United States. Bizarre as it may sound, it is rather accepted now that the face of Dallas, the persona of this glimmering metropolis that rises out of the interstated plains, rests upon a stool held up by these three mythic legs: November 22, 1963; J.R. and his motley family; and the 'Boys. Do not snicker. That old antic image of Texas—represented by the loudmouth in a 10-gallon hat roaring how bi-i-i-g-g-g everything is down here—has been subsumed by the dazzling Dallas.

Besides, everybody has a soft spot for that all-American icon, the ride-'em cowboy—and never mind that there never were many Dallas cowboys. Dallas was a depot; Fort Worth, down the road a piece, was the gen-u-wine cow town. But, so what? "Nobody seems to hate the Cowboys," marvels Roxy Roxborough, the man who sets the betting line in Vegas. As a consequence, if Roxy's figures tab the 'Boys, say, a three-point favorite, he'll list Dallas only at two or two and a half because so much sentimental amateur money will come in on America's Team.

Any Cowboy game automatically gets higher TV ratings. The team's radio network is back up to 151 stations, from Delaware to Hawaii, including 30 Spanish-speaking ones, on either side of the Rio Grande. And the purchase of Cowboy gimcracks accounts for almost a third of the $2.5 billion laid out for N.F.L. merchandise annually. Not only that but, most important, the number of cheerleader candidates is up threefold.

Good heavens! Just imagine for a moment owning America's Team. What else that is so preciously American could a man buy? For all the money in the world, you could not purchase the Statue of Liberty or Hollywood or the Lincoln Memorial or the Metropolitan Museum or Arkansas.

Not only does Jerry Jones own America's Team, he doesn't "owe a penny anymore." The Super Bowl was hardly a vanity victory; the team he had paid $60 million for is now worth at least three times as much—estimated to be the most valuable sports property in the world.

But: name a price. He'll never sell. Jimmy Johnson says he plans to be lolling on a beach somewhere soon enough, but Jerry Jones and his family will own the Cowboys in perpetuity. He doesn't have to scuffle anymore, no more rollin' and blowin'. He's not only champion but, even better, he's in the right crowd, one of those old gentleman-farmer owners who know how to enjoy a franchise.

"This team is a piece of the country," Jones crows, "and I don't ever want the Cowboys to be something I have to make money on. I need $20 million, well, I can take my plane to Midland." That's where he flew this afternoon. That's where the oil is. Merely going from the fruit-stand business to owning America's Team in a generation isn't everything. Going from Independent to independence is traveling just as far. "You know where I am now?" he asks, beaming to beat the band. "Now I'm in Lamar Hunt City. That's where I am."

He hoists his glass of Miller Lite, the Official Beer of the World Champion Dallas Cowboys, and the myriad diamond chips on the steroid ring that read JONES down one side and OWNER down the other, reflected by the amber liquid. "You see," he explains, "if I hadn't been greedy, I'd have just stayed in football all my life. Now I don't have to be greedy anymore." And he takes another big swallow, because, at least for the moment, he feels satisfied, and is only thirsty for beer.