The year is 2057. The average temperature in Dallas is 121 degrees, and ERCOT would prefer you set your thermostat to a balmy 83 to conserve power on the grid. D Magazine remains available in print but also transmitted directly into your brain via microchip. And we are still, somehow, getting fresh drama between Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson.
From the afterlife, presumably, although you’re a fool to dismiss the idea that Jerry will outlive us all. But after yesterday, you’d be even more foolish to suspect this will end before we’re able to commute to work via jetpack.
I bring this up after an eight-minute sitdown Jones did last night with NBC 5’s Newy Scruggs, which the sportscaster closed by telling Jones that “it seems very petty” Johnson was not yet in the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor a year after Jones announced his two-time Super Bowl-winning coach would someday be inducted. Jones interrupted by literally calling B.S.—a battle-tested strategy for warding off accusations of pettiness—before going on to say the following:
“How I do that, what I do, I get to make that decision. And it isn’t at the end of the day, all tailored around whether Jimmy is sniveling or not.”
It’s the “sniveling” part that’s rankling people, and it’s especially rich if you remember the bit of sniveling Jones himself did last summer, when he admitted he “fucked [their relationship] up” more than a quarter century ago. It also came out of nowhere, a peacetime salvo after the two former college teammates seemingly reached détente last year around the time of the Ring of Honor announcement and Johnson’s induction into the NFL Hall of Fame.
Hence the feeling that we will be hearing about Jerry and Jimmy’s relationship (or lack thereof) sometime around the time we’re able to mind-meld with dolphins. Maybe a medium communes with the two of them from beyond the grave, whereupon we’re privy to sniping about whose funeral was attended by more Super Bowl winners. Perhaps one placed a bigger posthumous wager than the other on the Arkansas Razorbacks’ national championship-winning team of 2039 (jk, Arkansas is never winning another national title).
More likely, it’s going to be one of the old standbys—about how the Super Bowl teams fell apart, or who deserves more credit for them. And why a minute of airtime and one choice verb brought us back here once more, just when things finally seemed OK again.
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