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From the archives: Family matters

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Sept. 28, 2015. The following are excerpts from a SportsBusiness Journal profile of Stephen Jones.

When Stephen Jones played peewee football, his father was his coach. The Jones family lived in Little Rock, Ark., but back then Jerry Jones was a wildcatter drilling oil wells, working from an office in Oklahoma City. Many times, Jones would leave a meeting early in the afternoon, telling his partners and staff he’d be back to rejoin them that night at 8. He would fly to Little Rock but not go home, heading directly to the football field to run practice. When they finished, he would return to the airport and fly back to Oklahoma City.

Earlier in the day, Jerry sat behind a desk in the converted hotel suite that served as his training camp office, reflecting on those trips he’d make home for weeknight practices.

So deeply engaged was he with that team, he’d sometimes find his mind wandering during meetings. While others thought he was taking notes, Jones was scribbling Xs and Os.

“Multimillion-dollar meetings about spending money to drill wells,” he smiled, looking up and down from a legal pad. “And I’m working my plays.”

The man who parlayed those millions into a $4 billion NFL franchise put his pen down and leaned across the desk.

“I’ve gotten to play on a national championship team and I have gotten to be with the Cowboys for 25 years and three Super Bowls,” he said, tearing up and then grunting to clear his voice. “I don’t want to get emotional, but I got to tell you something. The greatest, absolute greatest, most rewarding, beautiful time was the time spent with those kids, practicing them and diagramming plays and being involved with them. Worth more than all the rest of them.

“I thought I was doing it for them. But the one who got the most out of it was me.”

Stephen nodded when told of his father’s words. It reminded him of a story of his own. He was speaking at a YMCA fundraiser about his time coaching his kids’ teams. He told them about a Sunday a few years earlier, when the Cowboys were on the road for a 1 p.m. game and John Stephen’s fifth-grade team was playing for the league championship late that afternoon. Jerry let his son take the G-V so he could be home in time for the game.

Someone in the crowd suggested that it sounded like if he had to pick between the Cowboys winning that Sunday or his son’s team taking the championship, he’d have chosen the latter.

“I think he was probably right,” Stephen said. “And I think Dad was the same way.” …

Family has been at the center of much of Jerry’s decision-making through the years.

When the Cowboys opened their exhibition season against the Chargers, family schedules made it impossible for the three Jones siblings’ spouses or children to make the game. So as the car left the hotel for the stadium, there they were, Jerry and Gene side by side, with Stephen, Charlotte and Jerry Jr. in the seat behind them.

How long had it been since it was just the five of them in a car?

“I remember when we were growing up, Stephen always got the main big seat,” Jerry Jr. said. “Back in the ’70s, those cars were huge and you could put a sofa back there. Charlotte was laying on the floor. And I was laid up in the back window. And there we took off driving to Grandma’s house, the three of us sleeping. If there was any horseplay, Dad would be snapping his fingers, cut that out back there.”

Jerry Jr. had to clear the emotion from his throat when connecting the dots of that story to the advice Jerry and Gene have given to their children. Time spent with your kids is like a deposit in a savings account, they said. You spend most of your life making deposits. The withdrawal comes when they are grown and they pick up the phone to tell you about your granddaughter’s first day of school, or swing by for a visit because they miss you.

“That feeling of family was there in that car driving to the Chargers game every bit as much as it was when we were driving to Grandma’s house,” Jerry Jr. said. “We’re the way we are now because of the way we were brought up as children.”

— Bill King

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

“There are no hidden agendas here. We’re just transparent and we love each other.”
JERRY JONES JR.

“The track record of the growth of our organization speaks to the fact that that model has worked. All of us respect that and I don’t anticipate it changing. Who at the end of the day evaluates all the opinions in the room and decides which way to go is, quite frankly, irrelevant in my mind. Once we leave that room, we’re united as one front in the direction that we’re going. So the process behind that door is simply that: The process behind the door.”
CHARLOTTE JONES ANDERSON

“We could all sit back and let other people run the team. You could hire a CEO and a president and a chief marketing officer, and we could all go sit on boats and talk on the phone and go over financials and have board meetings every month. You could do that. But that’s not the way we’re built. We weren’t brought up that way. We were brought up to work. Charlotte works her ass off. Jerry works
his ass off. I work my ass off. And we’re all doing it for a common cause.”
STEPHEN JONES

                                                                                                                                 Compiled by Bill King


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