When I initially began my career as a beat writer covering the Dallas Cowboys one my first projects was a day in the life of owner Jerry Jones.
I sat in his office and chronicled his daily routine of meetings with players, agents and outside endeavors. So when I took the job with DLLS, I went to Jones’ office again.
I’ve certainly changed in 27 years and so has Jones.
Grayer and thinner up top and wider around the midsection, the both of us.
Jones is as healthy as he’s been in years.
“There was a time when I was wondering what it was going to be like for [my] future,” Jones said. “Generally, I’m in pretty good health for my age.”
And while he is not necessarily socks to jocks as he was when he bought the Cowboys in 1989, because he has so much help from his family and the company is so much larger, he made it clear that the fire, passion and defiance remains in him at the age of 81.
And no one in the NFL can do does a better job at running a football team than the 2017 inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Yes, Jones is extremely frustrated that the Cowboys have not been to the NFC title game since the last of their three Super Bowl titles in the 1990s was consummated in January of 1996.
That the Cowboys have just five playoff wins in the last 28 years is a particularly sore subject.
But don’t dare suggest changing how the Cowboys run things with him as owner and general manager as a possible solution.
He said he is the only answer in explicit and profane fashion.
“I’ve done it all. So I have an ordinate amount of confidence that fuck, if anybody can figure out how to get this shit done, I can figure out how to get it done,” Jones said. “I’ve been there every which way from Sunday, and have I busted my ass a bunch, a bunch. And there’s nobody living that’s out cutting and shooting that can’t give you a bunch of times they busted their ass. So hell no, there’s nobody that could fucking come in here and do all the contracts … and be a GM any better than I can.
“Plus, I’m where the buck stops. When it fucks up, I got to cover it. And so there you can’t give anybody enough. Can’t give. There’s nobody can do it.”
Of course, Jones was just getting wound up. He said he is the one for the job because of what he has been through in life, the hard times of waking up not knowing if he could pay a bill and that includes his wife Gene Jones having her credit cards cut up.
“I fucking have had hundreds of [bad days],” Jones said. “I’m emotional about it sometimes. Well, running this thing, that’s who I want to make the last call. Now, when I can’t fucking think, when I’m old and I can’t even do it… but I’m a long way from not being able to do it too.
“The reason I don’t let somebody else be the GM is because I don’t have anybody that I will let do it to actually do it right. And they’re gonna have to come to me and because I know where it is that you’re going to pay for it.”
Jones said he takes the same tone at league meetings with his fellow NFL owners. He reminds them often of how broke the league was when he bought the Cowboys in 1989.
“I say, ‘Guys, y’all never seen a meeting when they had no money, right?’,” Jones recalled. “I said, ‘They’re no fun now. We sit in here and talk about all this stuff.’ But I said, ‘We could have a meeting when there wasn’t any money.’ And I said, ‘Can any of you imagine not enough money coming through the doors to pay the overhead?’ I said, ‘When I walked in this nobody had enough money coming in. You all had to go get it from someplace else to feed the kitty. The Cowboys? You had to go get a million a month. Go get it each month from the Coca Cola business or a car business. It fucking sure wasn’t coming from the Cowboys.’
“So my point about all of this is there’s a lot here that I think we benefit from when we’re sitting there looking these different issues over.”
Jones said he has great confidence in his children, Charlotte Jones, Stephen Jones and Jerry Jones Jr. to get the job done, “If I get hit by a car out here tonight.”
They have been there with him from through most of his tenure with the Cowboys and have heard the, “Shit you’ve been listening to.”
But that time is not here and it’s not now.
So… “While we got [his expertise and experience], we might as well use it,” Jones said.
More importantly, there is nothing else he would rather be doing and cares more about.
“If I didn’t give a shit, if this wasn’t fun for me to do, or interesting for me to do, whatever you want to call,…the facts are, I really would rather be fucking around like this,” Jones said. “The point is I love this. And you know I do.”
I also know he’s not going anywhere.
