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| photography by Tadd Myers |
Arkansas-reared Jerral Wayne “Jerry€VbCrLf Jones, 65, has been among professional sports’ most accomplished and controversial owners since buying the Dallas Cowboys and the use of Texas Stadium for $140 million in 1989. One of four current NFL team owners to have won at least three Super Bowl titles (in 1992, ’93, and ’95), Jones has also been a revenue-generating innovator in the league in areas such as marketing, corporate sponsorships, and television rights. With the Cowboys’ season set to start Sept. 7 with an away game against the Cleveland Browns, we recently sat down with Jones, the team’s president and general manager, at the Cowboys’ Valley Ranch headquarters to discuss the franchise and his hard-driving approach to business.
D CEO: The Cowboys under Coach Wade Phillips look promising this year. How do you think they’re going to do?
Jerry Jones: A lot of my expectations and optimism for this season have to do with how we played last year. We not only were able to have an outstanding regular-season record, but that was the best team I’ve ever been involved with that didn’t win the national championship.
We’re going to be better this season, and one of the big reasons is because our first- and second-year players from last year now have another year [under their belts]. The players that get a lot of the attention are your draft picks, because they’re new and exciting; then maybe your free agents that come through. But, what excites me most about this team is the returning young players. I think they’re really going to give us a lot of additional talent and energy.
Can we talk for a moment about how you arrived at this point? You came to Dallas in the late 1980s, having already been very successful in the oil and gas business. I’ve read that you learned a lot about the business world from your father, Pat, who differed from you in one respect, in that he wasn’t quite the risk taker that you are. Is that pretty much right?
I think I have a higher tolerance for ambiguity than my dad did. He was not a multi-tasker at all. He had an excellent ability to focus in on a project and a challenge, and that served him well and was a big measure of his success. And I frustrated him by the fact that I would have four and five balls in the air at the same time. I could not handle those four or five balls as well as he could do his one-no doubt about that.
And frankly, he had a bigger front door and a smaller back door than I do. That’s a philosophy of mine: big front door, small back door. Take a lot in financially; don’t let a lot out, keep it. He was also very creative, and he had a flair for promotion. He was in four or five different businesses over the course of his career and successful in all of them, with good business fundamentals relative to expenses.
He was probably the biggest influence on me, as far as my style. He basically pushed the envelope, and he wasn’t afraid to try different things. So he was an innovator, but not quite the risk-taker I am. He did his experimentation with sweat, as opposed to some of the financial risks that I’m willing to take.
Where did your yen for risk-taking come from?
I just think how to get from A to B. I had a lot of ambition as a young person, and I give both my father and my mother a lot of credit for that. I couldn’t get where I wanted to go-from A to C, from C to F-in the time frame I had without taking some risks. So it was more of a necessity to take risks because of a kind of inner urgency to do it now. When I was a younger person, I really did things that somebody 20 years my senior would have been doing. While I was in school, at 17, 18, I was selling life insurance, for example. My point is, I was trying to get there quicker and faster.
You really turned around the Cowboys franchise in the early 1990s, and to do it you had to shake up the status quo, including firing the longtime coach, Tom Landry. To this day we hear complaints from longtime Dallasites about that. If you could do things over, would you have handled that differently?
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| Jerry Jones and Tom Landry photography courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys |
Yes. I understand the criticism; I actually understood it then. I didn’t have a sense of how significant the emotional attachment was to Coach Landry, and to some degree [Cowboys President and General Manager]Tex Schramm, but especially to Landry and the franchise. He had actually transcended the franchise. I actually had very prominent consulting people-not one but two firms, Hill & Knowlton, out of Washington D.C., and one firm from Dallas-that were advising me all during this time. And they advised me in many ways to do it the way I did it. Bum Bright-the individual I bought the team from-offered, to his credit, to make all these changes and to sell the Cowboys to me with no one here, a clean slate. But I was advised, and I concurred with it, that everybody knew the reason the changes were coming was because of me, so I should be a man and directly do it myself, as far as Coach Landry’s and Tex Schramm’s situations-in other words, do it face to face.
Having said that, it’s not something I would do that way again. I would have been more sensitive. I don’t know if I would have gone so far as having Coach Landry coach one more year, then having a transition period of a year. Or work longer with Tex; come in and let them kind of mentor you, show you the ropes, talk about their fundamental vision for the Cowboys. In hindsight, that’s what people say I should have done. But again, unfortunately, I’ve always tried to get there quicker and consequently, as I said earlier, taken more risk by getting on with things.
You’ve been called the NFL’s savviest owner, and really sort of revolutionized the league in terms of aggressive marketing and merchandising and so on. That’s also led to criticism by other NFL owners, who’ve attacked you as money-hungry; one even compared you to a heroin addict, with your heroin being money. Do you consider those critics to have just been “unenlightened€VbCrLf in the ways of business and the marketplace?
I knew at the time that they didn’t know me. I also know that change is hard to accept, and the agents of change-the people that do it-are usually very criticized. They’re thought to be not aligned with what’s in the best interests of the organization, the company, the country. They’re certainly not thought to be “team players.€VbCrLf Now, with all that in mind, it was very apparent to me that there needed to be change, not only with the Cowboys, but that there could be change for the better in the National Football League. The Cowboys afforded that opportunity. We were then, and are now, one of the premier franchises. We’re the most visible franchise. Tex Schramm did a great job of creating that visibility. And then, in the early heyday of television, those Cowboys teams really became America’s Team. So it was and is a franchise and a team that could lead by example.
We, and I, had things that needed to be changed and accomplished. So it was actually easier to make changes in my first 36, 48, 60 months in the NFL than it is today, because I was introducing things that they’d never had meetings on, things they had never addressed, things that nobody had attempted to do. I’m talking about such things as having a debate over whether the club should [own] this, or should it be the league; sideline visibility, in the case of some marketing issues; some of the very territorial issues that we have in the NFL. The Cowboys, uniquely, have a serious interest in coverage in areas that far exceed your normal definition of territory. We are in almost every city in this country. We’re the second most popular team in every NFL city in this country. You have your home team [and then us]; and, almost always, we are the most hated team as well.
Popular in terms of selling merchandise, you mean?
In terms of just an overall barometer of interest. You’ve got a team that’s interesting-it’s what’s called “The Cowboy Factor€VbCrLf-to a lot of this country. We’re the No. 1 team in television in the NFL. When we play games, we’re the No. 1 program not just in sports but in all of television. Our ratings and the number of people that watch us play are No. 1. So that creates a lot of opportunity and the kinds of things that I try to take advantage of.
What is your business philosophy when it comes to success and making money? Do you always need to be making more money to improve the product?
Before the Cowboys, I had some very good things happen to me in the oil and gas business. I worked hard; I had a lot of bait in the water, and I had hoped to catch some fish. But I paid a high price for it. Most of the oil and gas industry was brought to its knees in the late ’70s and early ’80s. So, when I did have some success, I knew how fortunate I was to have had it, and I was never going to risk it again. Never. I didn’t care how good the opportunity was, or what the potential of the situation was.
And then along came my devil: the Dallas Cowboys. And I found myself taking the biggest risk I had ever taken in my life: taking assets that I had felt very fortunate to have accumulated, to buy the Dallas Cowboys. I don’t think that my wife and family would ever have had to mop floors, but I do know that there was a big risk involved there.
Consequently, when I’m aggressive-or resourceful or imaginative, or whatever-to make more money, I quickly say, “It’s because of the game.€VbCrLf The proof of the pudding was that I took money, and I exchanged it for the Cowboys. So, if money had been what I was interested in, I would have kept my money. But instead I wanted the Cowboys, which had a national appeal and represented a potential opportunity to grow, even though I didn’t know yet what those opportunities were. I just wanted to be part of the future of the Dallas Cowboys and was infatuated, intoxicated with being involved in their future.
My children often say to me: “We believe that you would rather work and spend all your energy and take a risk to make a penny for the Cowboys than you would to make a dollar anyplace else.€VbCrLf And they’re right, because it is a challenge to make the Cowboys viable. It’s one thing to catch a 10-pound bass; it’s another thing to land one on a one-pound test line-now, that takes some skill. The challenge of operating in a league like the NFL, all the competitive physical challenges like injuries, all the financial things you have to consider, all of that is quite the challenge in bringing home my Super Bowl trophy.
As your children said, you have a number of other business opportunities to make money besides the football team. What are some of them?
My principal business, apart from the Cowboys, is still the oil and gas business. I’m very active in it, and have been for years. Not necessarily always successful all the time, but still very active. In other words, I drill a lot of oil and gas wells, principally in Texas, but also in Canada and California, as well as in Oklahoma and Arkansas. For the most part, I’ll drill any place in the country. I’m also very involved in the real estate business. I have property in our immediate area, but I have a real emphasis on projects that my family and I have up in the Prosper and Frisco area.
I’ve read you have a couple of thousand wells?
I’ve sold production over the years, but there are also wells that I drilled back in the 1970s and ’80s that I still have. And so, over time, that has accumulated and aggregated to approximately a couple of thousand, yes.
Now must be a great time to be in the energy business.
Yeah. I never would have dreamed that we would be dealing with these kinds of prices. Most of the time that I’ve owned the Cowboys, oil was at $20 a barrel, or below. So I do understand the oil and gas business and am aggressive in it as far as finding new production.
Are there any promising new “plays€VbCrLf you’re looking at?
I’m involved in three different plays, including some natural-gas-type shale plays here in Texas. I also have large leaseholds in Maverick County, Texas, and in East Texas, mainly gas plays.
With the Cowboys, you’re said to lead the league in corporate sponsorships. Can you give me an idea how much those relationships are worth each year?
We’ve got significant, long-term rela-tionships with Dr Pepper, Miller Lite, Pepsi, Bank of America. If you would aggregate those key, basic long-term sponsorships, that would exceed $50 million annually. We have smaller relationships through our broadcasting, radio and television.
And for merchandising, would $50 million be a good number?
The wholesale-merchandising area is a very, very proprietary number that has a lot involved with it. Let’s see, how to say this? Our wholesaling and retailing combined, as far as financial viability is concerned, is on par with what we do with sponsorships. They are equal in their contribution to the Cowboys.
For the team as a whole, what are you looking at for revenue this year? A few years ago, the figure was north of $200 million; are you going up every year?
Yes, we are. I think it’s fair to say that we will be north of $300 million.
The whole franchise has been said to be worth $1.5 billion, the most valuable sports franchise in the world. Is that still a pretty good figure?
The thing about an evaluation is, it’s totally dictated by the market. So at best, it would be relative to other teams. When I see numbers attached to the Dallas Cowboys, the only real thing I would say is, look at where we’re ranked relative to other teams and sports, more than the numbers themselves, because the numbers are a product of the marketplace, and no one really knows for sure. And, I don’t intend to sell the Cowboys. We are No. 1; I would agree with that, based upon my knowledge of what we are and looking at other franchises.
The new Cowboys stadium in Arlington is under construction, and will be the NFL’s biggest when it opens next year. But I’ve got to ask you, because we still hear this all the time: Did Laura Miller lose the Cowboys for Dallas?
I think I was not the right messenger. It looked too self-serving. And you can say, “Well, it should look self-serving, because you were going to benefit.€VbCrLf But [my involvement] probably distorted the overall merits of the entire project. And it certainly distorted things when the critics said, “Well, we’re subsidizing somebody who doesn’t need subsidizing.€VbCrLf That obviously distorted it, when it turns out that I’m going to spend over $1.1 billion on a project that started out asking for $300 million or so.
I had always been quite a voice saying that public dollars did nothing but “prime the pump€VbCrLf for an ultimately much bigger investment by the principles involved in the team. That message did not come across. I think that’s the biggest issue. It didn’t get over-not just to Laura Miller, but it didn’t get over to some of the other constituencies there in Dallas that could and do benefit from a project like this.
But, I cannot understate how important and aggressive Arlington and Mayor Bob Cluck and that City Council were in the decision. They really do have to get credit for not only seeing the leverage and the value to the citizens of Arlington, but basically seeing that this thing is going to have such visibility nationally and worldwide, that there was a huge value in that alone, much less the economic benefit. They saw it clearer and better and, not only did they see it, they acted upon it. And it was a brave thing for them to do.
They certainly had an advantage in seeing how the [Texas Rangers] baseball park had worked out for them, which I think helped. But, Bob Cluck had called me years earlier-years earlier, before he became mayor-and asked, “Was there any chance the stadium could ever come to Arlington?€VbCrLf And I said, “There is always a chance.€VbCrLf And he said, “Well, if there is even a remote chance, that would encourage me to go ahead and run for higher office, mayor, just so that I could be a good proponent and possibly make something happen here.€VbCrLf And that was it. That just shows you the vision that he had as an individual.
You’re said to be shopping now to sell naming rights to the stadium for the first time. Why are you going for naming rights now?
I think we have to. The naming rights should be and can be and will be very significant. But it is something that we’ve never done. It’s the closest thing to “naming€VbCrLf the Cowboys you’ll ever come to. Because this stadium is going to be so visible, and so inextricably associated with the Cowboys, that when the [naming] company or service becomes a part of that stadium, it’s going to be associated with the Dallas Cowboys. So, they’re going to be associated with the most prominent, most recognized sports venue-not just venue, but sports entity-in the United States.
Written reports have you talking to AT&T about the naming rights. Who else are you talking to?
No decisions have been made at all. But fundamentally, we look to companies that have a synergy with America’s Team. There are some companies where that just wouldn’t work with the Dallas Cowboys. When I think of a company, I think of great tradition, of a company that has broad visibility, of a company where you feel like you’re talking about maybe some of the corporate or business past of America. And so it’s not just about dollars; since it’s going to be a part of almost the verbiage or the articulation of the Cowboys, it’s got to have that kind of mentality about it when it’s said. We want it to be a company that has really preferably great tradition in this country.
I’ve heard the naming rights could go for $1 billion over time. Is that accurate?
Well, I don’t want to go into numbers, because we haven’t done this yet. But certainly, when you look at the kind of visibility we’re talking about, and you look at what we have done with our other corporate relationships, then I think you get some idea of the range of dollars we’re talking about.
Do you have a target date for announcing the naming rights?
Before the stadium opens.
How are seat and suite sales at the new stadium going?
First of all, they certainly exceeded my expectations. We basically began the real effort on seat sales last Thanksgiving. We have been particularly sensitive to our existing fans, the ones that are sitting in the seats [at Texas Stadium]. We are adding to our numbers of suites, because we have exceeded where we thought we would be with our suites right now. I’m deliberately not going into exact numbers or percentages here, because I don’t want to start the process of giving a weekly sales report to our public. But it’s well known that we were initially building 200 of them, and it is well known now that we have stepped that up to 300 suites.
For our seat licenses, and also our club seats, we went through a pretty deliberate process, taking our fans that were in those seats and giving them every opportunity to locate, albeit in a different product, in a club seat-different than just a regular seat or seat license. There are people that sat in those seats whose grandfathers, or people before them or somebody else, paid the seat license. They were sitting in seats that have a value that exceeded what they might have been paying. We needed to work through that.
For instance, a lot of seats were owned by brokers, and those brokers were selling them at so much a ball game-at prices that were way beyond our price on the seat. We needed to work through all that, and basically have a reconciliation of sorts with our season ticketholders-an acknowledgement of our appreciation of them and the past, but with the idea that we’re going to be in a new pricing structure and a new time. When we priced those [new] seats, we looked back at how things were when I bought the team in 1989. We sold a lot of those seats-without any club amenities or anything like that-in the $15,000 range back in 1989, and that was in a stadium that cost $35 million to build.
This new stadium is costing $1.1 billion to build, and things are a lot different then they were back in 1989.
Even so, some fans are still saying, “It’s too expensive; the average Joe is not going to be able to afford it.€VbCrLf How do you answer that?
I’m very sensitive about that. We basically have designed our stadium so that we could be inclusive of most people’s pocketbooks. I do recognize that we have some limited, very premium areas where the seats are the equivalent of what the seats are in the suites, but only a small number-only 1,200 out of 100,000. Those seats are of the same quality as those in the best suites. And remember, the stadium is air-conditioned completely, so that we took all that into consideration. It took over $1 billion to make those limited seats available. In other words, they’ve got the best of all of those seats, and they own them for the duration of the stadium. So they can basically sell those, if they decide later they want to sell them.
Have escalating construction costs hurt you at the new stadium?
The very fact that we’re spending $1.1 billion, as opposed to what this stadium would have cost 10 years ago, says that you’re paying more. And that is escalating. But knowing that we had this project coming, we did some hedging very early on with steel and concrete. We also locked in a lot of the subcontractors early on. Where I thought we might be hung out was on the finish-outs, because we’ve got 225,000 to 250,000 square feet of finished-out club areas, plus the finish-out on your normal concourses-millions of dollars’ worth. Those were hard for us to get a fix on with the subcontractors. I just felt that by the time we got to this point, that those costs-the combination of the labor and materials-might have gotten out from under us. But what has actually happened, because we’re in kind of a lull-a pushback, a pullback, in the building industry-is that those costs have not escalated. And so that labor and those finish-out costs are going to be done reasonably.
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| 14 degrees: The angle at which the stadium’s 86-foot high canted glass exterior wall slants, creating a luminescent glow day or night. 6.5 million pounds: The weight of each truss, the equivalent of 20 Boeing 777s. Each arch is more than twice the length of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. 18 minutes: The time it takes to open or close the clear glass retractable end zone doors, the largest in the world at 120 feet high by 180 feet wide. photography courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys |
The 2011 Super Bowl will be played at the Arlington stadium. What will that mean for North Texas, particularly for the business community here?
Well, it’s going to have a huge economic impact directly on this area, because far more people than will be at the game will spend money here. That’s obvious. A lot of money also will be spent staging the Super Bowl. Then we’ll have the ability to sell to the country and internationally what a great place we have in North Texas. We have the best economy right now, and that’s always going to say something. If we get through this economic cycle and continue to have one of the top economies in the country, that is something people need to recognize-the benefits of the nation’s fourth-largest market. We will be able to tell those stories through the Super Bowl, and so our constituency-all the cities and chambers and tourist organizations that make up North Texas-can really benefit from this if they will contribute with their effort and activities. To me it is the classic event that will basically let everybody recognize the power of our region.
Are you going to shoot to bring the Super Bowl here every five to six years?
Yes. One of the things that’s foremost in my mind is that I expect us to sell as many as 125,000 tickets to the Super Bowl. So this venue has the ability to be the largest-attended Super Bowl that we do in the NFL. That is meaningful when people look at where to have the Super Bowl.
On a more personal topic, your relationships with your coaches have drawn critical scrutiny over the years. Did your experience with Bill Parcells, to take one recent example, teach you anything that might be valuable going forward?
First of all, it was really rewarding to work with him. We didn’t accomplish on the field what we should have accomplished, in my mind; and I accept full responsibility for that, but we just didn’t win. When I hired him, he told me, “You know, we’ve got to win-and win big.€VbCrLf And I said, “Well, that’s why we’re doing it.€VbCrLf And he said, “No, my stuff wears thin and people rebel on me when we’re not winning. They can’t take my style of coaching and my personality.€VbCrLf So he’s pretty candid. He’s also got a great sense of humor. And he’s certainly someone that has spent his life in football and in the NFL.
There was a lot to gain from spending four years with him. We had a lot of give and take. He worked very hard to make it work for us here. That inspired me to work just as hard to make it work, to function and work together. So that never left us. And, when we got in sensitive areas, we had Stephen, my son, and others who would step in and help us out. I’m really proud on a personal level to have had the relationship, and the Cowboys have benefited and will continue to benefit from it over the years.
And, it should be an aggregation, an accumulation thing over the years. I’ve been doing this almost 20 years. I spend a lot of time on league matters; I spend a lot of time with other coaches in this league. I saw a new ESPN deal the other day, where I was one of two owners the coaches named as people they’d like to work for, which was quite a little plus. But the bottom line is: Yes, I have a lot of respect for coaching, contrary to what a lot of critics might say. I think it can be a difference-maker, and I have always been very open-minded to input from coaches. Where I think I get criticism is, if there are any ties [in decision-making] involved, serious ties, then I break all those ties. If I weren’t sitting out here every day, 40 feet away, I would not operate that way. I’m not trying to be defensive about that, but I think it’s a great way to work, because it does facilitate decision-making-it makes it more timely, it makes it speedier, and I think you can make better decisions. We need to win more football games around here, but other than that I like the way we’re structured.
How important is winning the Super Bowl this season to you and to the Cowboys?
A Super Bowl can lift a team that has never won one, or a team that is trying to establish an identity, in a very measurable way. But when a team like the Cowboys, that has a legacy of Super Bowls-five, no team has ever won more or played in more-when that team wins one, it takes it to the stars, it just has a bigger effect. It basically reinforces all the past tradition and interest in the team, and solidifies the fans and creates new interest there.
Today, of course, content is king in any type of media, especially with television and satellite and cable. So there’s just a lot more to talk about when a team like the Cowboys wins a Super Bowl than you have with the “normal€VbCrLf team. In terms of its value to America’s Team, as the foremost franchise in the country, you do need to win a Super Bowl or Super Bowls-and I’m not going to use the word occasionally, but you do need to win them.
So that’s what you’re aiming for every year?
I think you’ve got to pick your spots. I think it goes without saying that you need to be accomplished at quarterback to have a chance, to really feel like you may have a strategy to get to the Super Bowl. There have been teams that didn’t have an accomplished quarterback that did win one, but to really lock in on it, you need to have an accomplished quarterback. Consequently, we have one, and I want to protect him.
That’s the reason for the investment in the offensive line that I’ve made over the last two or three years with the Leonard Davises of the world, the Flozell Adamses-to give good protection, to give the quarterback time to make the plays.
It’s also why we emphasized offense in the draft. With the makeup of our defensive unit, with the No. 1’s that we have on that defensive unit spread throughout the team-not only from the secondary, but with our front-then it’s obvious I’m firing at it. This is our time. This is when we should be going for it. This is one of the times when I should be very aggressive in trying to get all the pieces together, because we have the fundamental talent to compete for the Super Bowl. For whatever reason, certain decisions-like extending a Terrell [Owens], extending a veteran player, looking at it on a 24- and 36-month basis-sometimes are not quite as compelling unless you have a few of those fundamental things in place. We’ve got them in place.
Speaking of the quarterback position, does Tony Romo’s high-profile relationship with the entertainer Jessica Simpson bother you, like it does some Cowboys fans?
Tony’s relationship with Jessica Simpson doesn’t bother me at all. It’s good for the franchise-adding sizzle and show business and interest-and it doesn’t affect Tony’s performance in any way.
Finally, how long do you see yourself owning the Cowboys? And what will happen to the franchise once you’re ready to call it quits?
I think I’ll always own the Cowboys. I have a succession plan in place that calls for my family-my children-to own the team [eventually]. From a management standpoint, I’m more enthused and driven today than I’ve ever been. I don’t see that ending anytime soon.
