Ask Jerry Jones about his decision to buy the Dallas Cowboys 28 years ago and he almost certainly will start by reminding you that while they were America’s team, they also were the NFL’s money pit, bleeding out at a rate of about $1 million a month.
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Ask him about building the stadium that became the envy of the NFL when he opened it in 2009 and he will flash back to a day a year earlier, when Lehman Bros. collapsed and the credit markets seized up, leading him to question the wisdom of a project that initially was supposed to cost $650 million but came in at almost twice that.
Ask about his Cowboys-themed real estate project, The Star, which has turned out to be yet another enviable endeavor, and he will walk you through the “I don’t think I’m up for that again” conversation he had with his children, who were bullish about the upside and had to persuade him to stay true to his roots and take a chance.
Staring down risk is how Jones earned the wealth it took to buy an NFL team, drilling for oil on stretches of Oklahoma land that others thought a waste of time. That tolerance for risk — or “ambiguity,” as he prefers to describe it — also has been the hallmark of his ownership of the league’s most valuable franchise.
An avowed wildcatter who spent his early years in the NFL as an outlier, only to emerge at the core of its power structure after decades of against-the-grain innovation, Jones is the recipient of the SportsBusiness Journal/Daily Lifetime Achievement Award for 2017. He will be honored May 24 at the Sports Business Awards in New York City.
Lifetime Achievement
Award winners
■ Peter Ueberroth
■ Billie Jean King
■ Paul Tagliabue
■ Jerry Reinsdorf
■ Dan Rooney
■ Dick Ebersol
■ Bud Selig
■ Jerry Jones
“One of my favorite expressions is tolerance for ambiguity,” Jones said during a SportsBusiness Journal interview last year. “The idea is that an individual can have a high tolerance for not knowing what is going to happen at the end of the day, the end of the week or the end of the month. This guy not only can tolerate not knowing, but he functions better when he doesn’t know. The Mississippi riverboat gambler. Charming. When he doesn’t know the end result, he functions better than if he has been assured that at the end of the month he’ll have had some success.
“A high tolerance for ambiguity is necessary to be an option quarterback. You wait until you’re down to your last choice to make your decision. You leave all options open as long as you can. That’s the theme of the Dallas Cowboys organization.”
It has been that way from the beginning, when Jones paid $140 million for the team against the counsel of his financial advisers. Jones’ first act as owner was another that went against convention, the firing of beloved coach Tom Landry, whom he replaced with Jimmy Johnson, the University of Miami coach who was his teammate at Arkansas.
Those decisions didn’t sit well with Cowboys fans. Nor did some of his other early business moves. But Jones forged forward, unlocking the economics of the franchise. Building around the trinity of Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin, the Cowboys would win three Super Bowls in four years, all with Jerry Jones and son Stephen making the final call on football matters.
While the Cowboys rose to the top of the league on the field, they collided with it off the field. Though the NFL controlled all team marks, Jones circumvented that authority by signing companies under the guise of Texas Stadium. The NFL had a Coke deal. The Cowboys signed Pepsi. The NFL had Visa. The Cowboys went with American Express. And so on. When the league sued the Cowboys for $300 million, Jones countered with a $700 million antitrust suit.
The result was a settlement that not only allowed the Cowboys to make the most of their own marks, but opened the door for other franchises to do the same.
It was the first of many times in which Jones would stake a position opposite many of his fellow owners, and then pave the way for them to follow when it turned out he was right.
