I grew up hating the Dallas Cowboys. Actually, “hate” is not a strong enough word. Detested? Loathed with the heat of a thousand suns? If you were around in the ’90s, you had no choice but to have a strong opinion about them.
They were cocky, they were very good at football, and worst of all, they were inescapable. In Texas, they were bigger than Jesus Christ, capitalism, gun ownership, and a lifted Ford F-150 all rolled into one.
If you lived on Texas soil, you couldn’t escape them. You could try, but “HOW ‘BOUT THEM COWBOYS” would still track you down, hogtie you, and demand tribute.
As a kid, every fiber of my just-moved-to-Texas soul despised them. But hating them was like hating a mountain. You could do it, but who cares?
Enter the new Netflix documentary, “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys.” I watched all eight hour-long episodes, fully primed for some delicious hate watching, only to realize how inextricable they were from my formative years.
Even worse, I sincerely regret to report that, as the years have gone by, my feelings toward the Cowboys have actually softened.
The things I used to detest — especially their stupid drawling owner, Jerry Jones — I’ve come to begrudgingly appreciate, like a loud uncle who’ll give you a swig of his Coors if you don’t tell your mom.
They’ve been there my whole life, at least the parts that stand out the most.
I have so many memories tied to this team. Let me take you back to the glorious late ‘80s, when the Cowboys sucked. The Super Bowl teams of a decade prior were long gone, replaced with the “Cowgirls,” as every adult around me called them. One season, I bet a friend that they’d win, max, a single game. I won.
It was in this halcyon environment that Jerry bought the team in 1989, when I was in junior high.
This was not popular, to put it mildly. People were furious; they complained endlessly about him.
I’m 49 now, and people are still complaining about Jerry Jones. He’s been with us forever. Steadfast, and extravagantly wealthy, no matter how hated. He’s basically our Queen Elizabeth.
But Jerry Jones’ kingdom is the Cowboys, which makes him far more powerful than any British monarch. This despite the fact that he’s an interloper from Arkansas who bought the team, swept away the old guard (including beloved coach Tom Landry), and brought in his own people. He didn’t care that people hated him. He was busy making moves.
The best move he made was hiring coach Jimmy Johnson, who replaced Landry and promptly built a dynasty out of scrap metal. The team traded star running back Herschel Walker to Minnesota in exchange for a mountain of draft picks, giving them the ammo to build one of the greatest teams of all time.
And boy, howdy, did it work. They quickly started winning, culminating in two Super Bowls, back to back in 1993 and 1994.
Seemingly overnight, the Cowboys were everywhere: commercials, talk shows, video games, grocery store checkout lines.
I can still name almost every player on those damned teams. I still remember that Troy Aikman’s favorite last-ditch target was tight end Jay Novacek, who always came though on a third down conversion, specifically to crush my Cowboy-hating soul.
And success, as always, has a million parents. Who gets credit for building that Cowboys dynasty is still a matter of debate. Jerry says it was him. Jimmy feels otherwise. And judging by the documentary, they’re still arguing about it.
Their partnership started to show cracks when Jerry mouthed off to reporters, saying that 500 coaches could have coached the Cowboys. Naturally, Johnson did not appreciate this.
Which led to an old interview, dug up for the documentary, where the two are uncomfortably sitting side by side. The reporter asks Jimmy, “Do you respect Jerry Jones’ football knowledge?” And Jimmy, God bless him, basically said, “Nope.”
And that was that. Jerry’s pride couldn’t take someone working for him who wasn’t forever in ass-kissing mode. So, in one of the dumbest, most self-destructive moves in sports history, he ran off the coach who had just won him two straight Super Bowls.
From then on, Jerry was in full control, free to make every dumbass football decision that Jimmy would have blocked.
It’s like when you finally move out of your parents’ house and realize you can eat ice cream for dinner every night. It’s fun until you gain 20 pounds. Jerry’s been eating ice cream for dinner since 1994.
It’s Shakespeare. The clearest possible case of “be careful what you wish for.” (That’s not Shakespeare, but you know what I mean). An ego devouring everything until there was nothing left to eat.
Case in point: News broke last week that Jones had traded the team’s best player, superstar rusher Micah Parsons, because he didn’t want to pay him. In fact, ESPN published a report Tuesday revealing that Parsons made one final effort to stay with the Cowboys, which was flatly denied by Jones. Anyway — shocker — most people think the trade was a terrible deal!
Still, in the immediate aftermath of Johnson’s departure, the team was so good, they still managed to win another ring with Johnson’s leftovers in 1996. Three Super Bowls in four years. Everyone hailed them as the next big dynasty.
But without Johnson running things, the center could not hold. Everything spectacularly went to shit: cocaine trials, assaults, tabloid chaos, you name it.
For his part, Johnson went on to a cushy broadcast career, and while he participated in the documentary, he has said he thinks it’s skewed towards Jerry’s interpretation of things.
Still. There’s always been that haunting “what if.” How many could they have won together? Five? Six? Twenty?
Since then, the Cowboys have had good seasons but never great ones. A handful of playoff wins, no more.
So why do I feel for Jerry Jones now? Because, despite him being a shitty rapacious billionaire who cannot stand dissent, I understand his point of view. It’s his fucking team. He’s the one who mortgaged his family’s future to buy a floundering NFL franchise. He’s the one who turned it into a global juggernaut — the most valuable team in all of sports, in a league the rest of the world doesn’t even care about. And it would take another 1,500 words to get into the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, which Jones and his daughter Charlotte have turned into a $50 million brand entity all their own.
Jones is the one who turned $140 million of borrowed money into $13 billion. Sure, has he paid a (suspected) love child money, instead of taking a paternity test? Has he cavorted with strippers as a married man? As the saying goes, there are no good billionaires.
But I love that he’s a Southern-fried huckster at heart — the dude grew up dancing for customers in his parents’ grocery store, got a master’s degree in business, and never looked back. He understood before anyone that the Cowboys weren’t just a football team, they’re a brand. That’s why they’re always in the headlines, always in the spotlight. Other teams have drama too (I’m a Saints fan, trust me), but Jerry makes sure the cameras are rolling when it happens.
And boy, does it work. The Cowboys are still the most popular football team in the U.S., despite being aggressively mid for the last 30 years. Stephen A. Smith will spend time every day talking about the Cowboys, even if they have a grand total of two wins. That’s because of Jerry Jones.
So, why shouldn’t he call the shots? It’s his room, his toys, and we’re just the kids he invited over. If he wants to fire the coach, then by God and Jesus and Ronald Reagan, he gets to fire the coach. He gets to make the fuckups even if he’s still dealing with the fallout of his original fuckup all these years later.
Which brings us to now: both Jerry and Jimmy are 82. And they’re still themselves, but less so. Time dulls the edges. And the grudges don’t seem as sharp when you’re staring down the end of the road. They make up at the end of the documentary.
(And yet, even decades later, you still hear Jerry grumble about who really pulled off the Herschel Walker trade. And I love that so much.)
Because that’s life. We all get old, we all have regrets, and we all wonder about the mountains we almost climbed.
If you’re Jerry Jones, you’re left alone in a room, surrounded by your trophies and toys, with a building full of people still telling you how great you are — and a lifetime of “what ifs” you’ll never quite shake.
And while I’ll never love the Cowboys, I don’t hate them anymore, either.
I’ve gotten older, too.