THE DEVIL & MR JONES

ONE OF THE TRENDIEST TAVERNS IN

Manhattan these days is called Live Bait. Bass and catfish are mounted on the walls, Rolling Rock beer is iced down in garbage cans, and every thirty-year-old Wall Street hotshot worth the price of his suspenders is in there at five o’clock.

The place is an Arkansas bar. Arkansas chic is in. Arkansas, the cultural conduit that links Mississippi with the Choctaw reservations of Western Oklahoma. Arkansas, where there is a doctorate program at Fayetteville to train future carnival personnel.

Previously, the impoverished aristocracy here in Dallas could ponder the phenomenon with an attitude of unthreatened amusement. But that was before the now-infamous Saturday night massacre, when Boss Hawg bought the Cowboys from Bum Bright for an alleged $140 million and thrust Tom Landry into the ranks of the unemployed.

That’s when Dallas stopped laughing at Arkansas chic.

Who is this Jerry Jones with his diabolic eyes and thin, cruel lips-and just who in the hell does he think he is? A lot of people around town believe they have a pretty good idea. Good news, folks. The new owner of America’s Team was created by Al Capp.

And anyone so optimistic as to presume that the Jones administration at Valium Ranch might eventually recede into, as they say in Beijing, a “time of benign stabilization,” can forget that fantasy.

The cheerleader squawk that escalated into the scandal that we shall call Jigglegate was just one more proof that controversies will become an unchanging feature of the reign of the third owner the Dallas Cowboys have ever had. The man manhandles each and every one of these touchy situations in his inimitable clumsy fashion. He is the loose cannon. The runaway train. The mega-gaffe is destined to become the man’s signature. It is obvious that a Beverly Hillbilly is stationed at the Cowboy helm. The question is, which one? Jethro or Jed?

Now, in fairness, Jigglegate was not entirely the product of what some people believe is Jerry Jones’s breast obsession. Jones had merely suggested to Debbie Bond, cheerleader director at the time, the possibility of changing two ancient cheerleader rules; why, he wondered, should cheerleaders be given the “death penalty,” instant banishment from the squad, if they went out with a player? Jones felt that each incident should be reviewed. And why, in 1989, was it ver-boten for America’s Girls to appear at functions where alcohol was served? Bond, who took over the cheerleaders’ head job after Suzanne Mitchell left to join Tex Schramm’s Worldwide American Football League, then complained to Cowboys public relations director Greg Aiello that Jones seemed eager to compromise the group’s time-honored morality code.

It was during this intense discussion that Aiello, not Jones, endorsed the sacrilegious concept of outfitting Tex Schramm’s Chastity Corps in biking shorts and halter tops. Good God. Can you imagine the cheerleaders entertaining our fighting men overseas in any costumes other than their cute little communion suits?

Of course, it was not Greg Aiello who encouraged Jones to refer to the girls as “the pick of the litter.” Jones, at least, should know what he’s talking about in this regard, having, he recently confessed to me, devoted many happy hours to watching the girls practice and audition through the two-way mirror that Tex had installed at the cheerleader headquarters at Valley Ranch. Really. Even though most of the cheerleaders who walked out eventually returned, confident that they could now rely on the new owner as a partner in virtue, Jones did not come away from that skirmish unscathed.

It’s just a matter of time, probably very little time, until Jones materializes in the eye of another tempest. It may involve a little subplot developing back in Arkansas over a rather sweet deal Jones’s drilling outfit cut with the utility company that supplies gas to the entire state-a deal that was helpful to Jones as he amassed the fortune that eventually enabled him to turn America’s Team into Arkansas’ Team.

Or perhaps it will be over some impending struggle with the city fathers of Irving, home of Texas Stadium. It is Jones’s intention that beer shall be sold at Texas Stadium.

Imagine the potential for acrimonious interface in this confrontation. Jones, now emerging as the advocate of the fan, will insist that one can’t fully appreciate the assets of the pick of the litter unless one has a good buzz on.



MORE THAN SIX MONTHS have passed since that amazing February press conference where Jones formally introduced himself and his Al Haig “I’m In Charge Here” personality. Haig, at least, had been tactful enough not to mention anything about socks and jocks.

Jones, ever the drum major thriving in the spotlight, is escorting fifteen Amoco-Dome executives from Calgary through the football facility at Valley Ranch that is designed in the grandest traditions of corporate excess.

He leads the group through a vacant office. “This used to be Gil Brandt’s,” Jones says. Two walls are covered with name tags of every player in the National Football League, color-coded as to their talents. From there, Jones directs the group into the players’ elaborate dressing facility. It is spacious and immaculate. The only thing that reminds visitors that this is a football locker room is a notice on the wall from the NFL Commissioner’s Office reminding the players that it would be unwholesome to “accept a bribe to throw, fix, or illegally affect the outcome of a game.”

Jones directs the Canadians to the area where Herschel Walker dresses for practice and tells them “this sure isn’t like it was when I was playing at Arkansas, where they had us stacked in there hiney to hiney.” He adds that his new coach, Jimmy Johnson, has actually expressed some concerns about the opulence of the entire layout.

“Jimm-uh thinks this country club atmosphere isn’t conducive to mental toughness,” Jones says. He adds that the operational budget of Valley Ranch is not conducive to the financial stability of the franchise.

“We’re spending $11,000 a month on the lawn,” says Jones.

“On laundry?” gasps one of the gawking Canadians.

“No, no. The lawn. The landscaping. I realize that this place is the Pentagon of sportsdom and all, but we have to start making adjustments.” Who knows? Perhaps during the off-season, Troy Aikman, the Cowboys’ $11 million quarterback, will be seen pushing the power mower while Walker mans the weedeater.

The Canadians finally leave and Jones retreats into his office, the one that used to belong to Schramm, who resigned in April to run the NFL’s proposed European expansion league. Tex’s collection of twenty-nine years’ worth of Cowboys memorabilia has been cleared out, save for the football-shaped Lombardi Trophy won by Landry’s 1978 Super Bowl champions. Jones’s only decorative touch is an Arkansas Razorback hog hat painted Cowboys silver with a blue star on the side. He emphasizes that this unusual creation, a gift from friends, will not be a permanent fixture.

Once inside the privacy of the office, Jones begins to key down and gradually transforms himself into the type of person that so many of his Arkansas connections keep insisting is his genuine persona, the one that Cowboys fens and the public in general have yet to see. Jones, in a one-on-one conversation, becomes an open-faced sandwich. This is perhaps one of the benefits of having grown up in the sticks. The man is simply not guileful enough to be manipulative, even if he wanted to be.

“Once you get to know the guy, you’re gonna like him,” his Little Rock running buddies promise. But then, it has been suggested that his Little Rock running buddies are men of modest expectations.

Jones reveals that all of the media criticism (Frank Luksa of the Dallas Times Herald says he’s a “real oink”), not to mention the venom in the letters to the editor, has bothered him. Bothered him a lot. “I’m told I go to great lengths to keep people from being mad at me. So, yes, I’m sensitive to the criticism,”

He concedes that his performance at the now-infamous press conference, where he kept pounding his fist on the podium as if squashing imaginary boll weevils, was unfortunate.

“Unbelievable” is how Randy Galloway, the Dallas Morning News columnist, described it. “Jones was completely lost. Had no idea of what he was doing. I don’t think he had any idea of what it meant in Dallas to fire Tom Landry and I don’t think he cared. Every time he opened his mouth, he got deeper into trouble.

“In a lot of ways,” says Galloway, “Jones reminds me of Brad Corbett [the former Rangers owner who was so unpopular that, on more than one occasion, drunken fans loudly implored him to jump from the roof of the Arlington Stadium press box]. Like Brad, he has no concept whatsoever regarding PR or how media really works around here. I ripped Jones good in my first column about him, but he agreed to come on my TV program and then my radio program after that. He’s not afraid to face the heat. And I kind of agree with those pals of his and the media people from back in Arkansas who say eventually he’ll be liked around here.”

Jones says that he’s never critiqued the videotape of his press conference and is not sure that he ever will. “I’m not trying to make excuses, but when I finally faced the media, I had no sleep for four days and had been through those negotiations with Bum Bright, which is the most difficult thing I’ve been through in my life.”

Banker Bright is, according to Jones, a man with a good heart who also happens to be brutally difficult in matters involving the realm of the coin. “People have said that Bum only cares about the bottom line and that he didn’t care a goddamn thing about the Cowboys,” says Jones. “But look at it this way. He could have sold America’s Team to the Japanese.”

Jones confirms that when the sale terms eventually reached a $300,000 impasse, Bright produced a shiny new quarter and suggested they flip for the 300 grand, winner take all. Jones called tails. It came up heads. Bright had the coin mounted and framed and presented to Jerry Jones one week later.

“So I’d gone through all of that, and then had to go down to his Austin house by the golf course and tell Tom Landry that I was replacing him,” Jones says.

When he got back to Dallas, Jones faced the media and a live television audience. “I started off by saying that it was like Christmas for me.” he says, “not realizing that firing Tom Landry overshadowed Jerry Jones buying the Cowboys. I’m just glad I didn’t say some things that were worse than what I did say.

“This sounds awful, but I think Lyndon Johnson might have been experiencing similar emotions when he was sworn in as presifaraway time in the pre-steroid era of college athletics, when the entire roster of every team in the Southwest Conference was whiter than the Confederate general staff.

Jerry Jones worked his way up from thirteenth string to eventually become a starter, though hardly a star, on an unbeaten team. He is remembered for an open-field tackle that prevented an upset against Baylor.

Jones remembers himself as being naive but extremely eager to learn how to have what many grown men regard as a good time. “I didn’t have my first beer until I was in college,” Jones says. It would not be his last. He says that he is grateful that drugs were not around in those days.

faraway time in the pre-steroid era of college athletics, when the entire roster of every team in the Southwest Conference was whiter than the Confederate general staff.

Jerry Jones worked his way up from thirteenth string to eventually become a starter, though hardly a star, on an unbeaten team. He is remembered for an open-field tackle that prevented an upset against Baylor.

Jones remembers himself as being naive but extremely eager to learn how to have what many grown men regard as a good time. “I didn’t have my first beer until I was in college,” Jones says. It would not be his last. He says that he is grateful that drugs were not around in those days.

Jones’s most significant accomplishment was the successful courtship of a campus heartbreaker, Eugenia (Gene) Chambers, whose father, John Ed Chambers, virtually owns his own county in Arkansas.

Jones himself started building his financial destiny in an insurance company bankrolled by his own father, Pat Jones, who owned a North Little Rock supermarket that was something of a landmark before it burned down. Pat would bring in someone known as Brother Hal Webber from Forrest City, the state’s premier radio personality, to do live broadcasts while Pat himself would prance about in a cowboy costume. “People would come from all over and they’d be laughing and grinning and listening to music and buying groceries. I remember that. I sure do,” says Jerry Jones.

He says that because of his parents’ positive influence, it was preordained that he (Jerry) was going to get rich doing something. “If I didn’t, then they should have drowned me as a pup,” Jones says.

Jones’s father, who later started a drive-through zoo in Missouri, now says of his son: “There’s never been anyone who’s had any more desire than Jerry or anyone that will do more to get it done. I’m not into football, but I think what he’s got in Dallas is great. I’ll look for the Cowboys to be number one because he’s got to be number one. I just wish him good health because he’s like me, a workaholic.”

Jerry Jones branched out into oil and gas and formed his own company, Arkoma Production Company, which ultimately generated millions. Now a very wealthy man, Jones remains a well-liked, though not particularly well-known figure in his home state. But not for long.

It seems likely that Jones will soon become an accessory at least to a hot contest for the 1990 governor’s race back at the source of his origins in the Hormel provinces. Jones has a close pal, hunting and fishing companion, and alleged former benefactor, a Little Rock lawyer named Sheffield Nelson. Nelson, who is also former chairman of Arkla, the utility company that supplies gas to the entire state, has announced his gubernatorial candidacy.

So has Arkansas Attorney General Steve Clark, and Clark is contending that Nelson teamed up with our boy Jones in what is sometimes known as a “brother-in-law deal.” In 1982. with Sheffield Nelson in charge, Arkla sold acreage to Jones’s firm, Arkoma, which committed to drilling for gas. Arkla committed to buying Jones’s gas at a predetermined rate. It is estimated that Jones sold more than $43 million worth of his gas to Arkla, although not all of that came from the leases that Jones had bought from ArkJa.

The state Public Service Commission investigated the deal and concluded that this transaction had no impact on the ratepayers. Just the same, the Arkla-Arkoma (read Nelson-Jones) alliance was canceled in 1985 by Nelson’s successor at Arkla, Thomas F. McLarty, and in 1987, Arkla bought out Jones’s interest for $49 million.

Political observers in Arkansas are watching the current Steve Clark-Sheffield Nelson sparring sessions the way weather forecasters monitor tropical depressions in the Gulf.

“If the [Jerry Jones] deal was such a good deal for Arkla, why don’t they open their books?” demands Attorney General Clark.

“If Clark has such a problem with the deal, why didn’t they investigate it in 1983?” counters Nelson.

In an interview with D Magazine, Sheffield Nelson did not elaborate on his financial arrangement with Jerry Jones, other than to confirm that “we sold him some acreage.” Nelson, not surprisingly, says he won’t count on much visible support from Jones during his campaign. “Jerry will have his hands full in Dallas,” says Nelson. “In reality, the Cowboys own him.”

The candidate said that he and some other of Jerry Jones’s Little Rock confederates were concerned about the harsh reception that their pal seemed to be receiving in Dallas. “He’s been the victim of some sharp-shooting down there,” Nelson says. “It’s something that he’ll have to deal with. He’s been misinterpreted in Dallas. Those people are not used to seeing a man in his mid-forties in charge of something as big as the Cowboys,” Nelson says. “They expect to see someone much older, in their sixties, running that show.”

Jones’s friend made these remarks during the week that the cheerleader hassle came to full boil. “There again, I think that is an area in which Jerry is being misunderstood down there. Jerry has the utmost respect for women.”

Jones maintains a power base of old friends back in Little Rock, Steve Clark notwithstanding, who applaud his every move. These men are all men, who, like Jerry, maintain the utmost respect for women. And they are enthralled with his capacity to swing the big deal.

“Steve Clark is mostly misinformed when he says that the Arkia deal made Jones the money he needed to buy the Cowboys,” says Little Rock executive Jack Fryer. “One month before he bought the team, he cut a deal in which he imports Canadian gas to Pacific Gas & Electric-and that includes Los Angeles-and after that happened, Jones told us, ’Boys, I just made enough money to buy five Cowboys.’”

Jones says that he survived the oil price crunch, while so many of his colleagues were sinking like rocks, because he was not encumbered with heavy debt when hard times came a-knockin’. “I’d like to say it was by some grandiose design that I found myself in that situation,” Jones says. “But it just worked out that way.”

A person familiar with Jones’s business fortunes, who requested anonymity, explains further. “I was at a Christmas party at Jerry’s house in about 1982,” the man says. “Everyone was pretty drunk and Jerry had some banker pinned up against the wall and was telling the guy how Arkansas bankers didn’t know the first thing about making energy loans. Jones said the bankers who knew what they were doing were the ones he did all his business with-this being the Penn Square bank in Oklahoma City!

“The Arkansas banker told Jones that the feds were coming in to bust Penn Square and that they’d call his note on the spot and that Jerry wouldn’t have the money to meet the obligation, and that’s precisely what happened. The feds attached everything.

“How Jones survived the next two years is a miracle. The pressure must have been unbelievable, enough to drive the average man insane.” Eventually, a bank, Continental of Chicago, came in and bought up Jerry’s loan. He had some disposable collateral, drilling equipment and the like. “The bank put a full-time guy at Arkoma to make sure that they got paid first,” says the source. “They do that a lot now, but it was sort of a novelty at the time.

“Then he rooky-dooed that deal with Sheffield Nelson at Arkla, and that sure must have helped turn things around. The key had to be his financial guy, Mike McCoy. If Jimmy Johnson is a genius, and Jerry Jones assures us, again and again, that he is, then McCoy is Einstein. He’s got high blood pressure because his brain works so damn fast. It’s going to kill him before long.

“They dodged some bullets big time. That deal that he worked out with Bum must be so convoluted and strange that nobody could understand it. That’s the real reason it took so long for the NFL ownership to approve the sale. That business about routine delays involving paperwork was a sheer joke.

“When he says he stayed up for four days, without sleep, when he cut the deal with Bum, that’s undoubtedly true. The guy never sleeps. He’ll call people at three and four in the morning, talking deals, and can’t understand why certain people are annoyed when he does that.” As far as the clumsy way Jones has handled personnel matters with the Cowboys, that’s right from the script. He doesn’t know any better. Jones is just a lone wolf entrepreneur.

“The concept of at least calling somebody in and thanking them for all they’ve done for the company, while you’re letting them go, is alien to the guy.”



NOW, WHETHER ANYBODY LIKES IT or not, the fact remains that the deal is done and Jerry Jones is the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. “Gene and I are here to stay,” he says. They have rented a condominium at the Claridge high-rise on Turtle Creek.

According to Jones, to Arkansas natives in those quaint towns with names like Slow Leak and Dry Socket, a trip to Dallas to go shopping is an adventure in ecstasy. “To actually move to Dallas is everybody’s ultimate ideal. You take the top l0 or 15 percent of the brightest and best people in Arkansas, they all wind up in Dallas,” he contends.

If you’re out celebrating a rare Cowboys victory or mourning another loss, don’t be surprised to see Jones on the nightlife circuit. He’s the first to admit that he parties with the same intensity that he chases deals. He’s a boogie-till-you-puke all-nighter.

Well, he used to be anyway. As owner of the Cowboys, he swears that he intends to curtail those activities. “For one thing, in order to operate the football team and run Arkoma, I’ll have to add two or three hours to my work day,” Jones says.

“The important thing I have to remember now. though, is how public I’ve become. I can’t be seen lying on a table in some restaurant and I know that if I get a traffic ticket, it’ll wind up on the front page. Or, God forbid, a DWI.”

Several times a day, Jerry Jones walks through the Valley Ranch offices, past the big graphic murals of Lilly and Staubach and the rest of the Cowboy heroes. “Every time I walk out of here, I still have to pinch myself to convince me that this is really happening.” Whenever people think of Landry and Schramm and Clint Murchison, and the style and decorum that they used to inject into the Cowboy operation, they probably feel the same way.