Advertisement
This is member-exclusive content
icon/ui/info filled

sportsCowboys

Flashback: Chargers owner Jerry Jones? A closer reality than most may remember

A look back at the team the famed Dallas Cowboys owner tried to purchase first, and why it didn’t happen.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 29, 2013. We’re bringing it back ahead of the Cowboys’ game against the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday.

He was a 23-year-old kid fresh out of the University of Arkansas, brimming with the exuberance of youth but loaded down with a net worth of zero, when the idea struck that he could somehow buy a professional football team.

It didn’t really matter which team. He just wanted in. He had played the game in college and saw unlimited potential in the business of professional football. Besides, it sure beat selling insurance in his daddy’s agency.

The year was 1966, and the upstart American Football League appeared to offer the best opportunity, not that he was ruling out the more established NFL.

Cowboys

Be the smartest Cowboys fan. Get the latest news.

Or with:

“The question was,” Jerry Jones recalled, “how could I finagle and figure out a way to make it happen?”

And so from the home office in Springfield, Mo., Jerry Jones doggedly crisscrossed the country in pursuit of his dream. In the infancy of his undertaking, he confided only in his wife, Gene. It was paramount that his father, whom he knew would disapprove of such foolishness, could not know.

Advertisement

Jones took to loitering in hotel lobbies during NFL and AFL meetings, hoping to meet some of the wealthiest men in the land and make them take notice.

Lobby talk in Houston filtered down that in Miami, Joe Robbie, who had agreed to buy an AFL expansion team, was looking for partners.

When Jones arrived in Miami to meet Robbie, the former offensive lineman was first charged with carrying furniture up a flight of stairs into the team’s new headquarters.

Advertisement

For the good will from his sweat equity, Robbie offered Jones a minority interest in the team. Jones declined. No control meant no deal. Even if his financial plan called for him to use other people’s money to buy a team, Jones knew he would have to run things. Silent partner was not in his DNA.

Jones’ interest quickly shifted cross-country when he learned the San Diego Chargers were for sale.

Chargers majority owner Barron Hilton was more concerned with the health of the family hotel empire than a football team that bled money faster than he could sell rooms.

Jones agreed to an asking price of $5.8 million. The money would come from a group of investors already committed to putting him in the pizza business in Missouri.

Hilton especially liked that Jones had produced a $1 million line of guaranteed credit the hotel magnate insisted be brought to their first meeting in Chicago.

Jones was giddy at the prospect that he might own the Chargers. He told himself he had found his life’s calling.

Only one obstacle remained. It wasn’t league approval, for he was sure that would come.

After all, he already had met with league mover and shaker Lamar Hunt and secured his blessing.

Advertisement

Robbie had passed Jones to Hunt, and it had been the Dallas oilman and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs who pointed Jones to the Chargers.

At their lunch in the Kansas City airport, Hunt had told Jones how impressed he was that such a young man had enjoyed enough success that he now wanted to enjoy the luxury of buying a football team.

Jerry Jones looked Lamar Hunt straight in the eye and told him, “I didn’t make any money.” And then Jones quickly added there was nothing to worry about. He was certain he could raise it.

“The thing I could do better than anything back then was borrow money,” Jerry Jones said, recalling the moment more than 47 years later.

Advertisement

Just imagine...

Jerry Jones, in his 25th season as owner of the Cowboys, remembers the intricate details of the deal he had in place to buy the Chargers as any 70-year-old man might remember intimate details of a first failed courtship.

Had he bought the Chargers back in ‘66, Jones would not have been sitting in his grand office at Valley Ranch early last week. He instead might have been in the San Diego owners’ office in Mission Valley or La Jolla.

Or maybe, just maybe, he would have been up the road in Los Angeles. He might have moved the team from San Diego, which has steadfastly refused the Chargers financial help for a new stadium to replace 46-year-old Qualcomm Stadium.

Advertisement

Days before his Cowboys traveled to San Diego to play the Chargers, Jones wouldn’t hear talk of what might have been.

“I wouldn’t dare speculate,” he said in a rare moment of restraint.

But Jones did volunteer that he would have been a hands-on owner, involved in every aspect of the team, much as he has been with the Cowboys.

Still, he tells his San Diego story with gleeful exuberance, matter-of-factly dropping the names of some of pro football’s most storied owners whom he met when he owned only a dream.

Advertisement

He recalled that AFL patriarchs such as Hunt and Robbie and Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson and Tennessee’s Bud Adams still remembered him from the San Diego days when he stepped in to buy the Cowboys.

Early in the storytelling, Jones asked his executive assistant, Marylyn Love, to pull a newspaper clip from Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat, dated Sunday, Feb. 20, 1966.

Under the headline “Jones To Buy Team?” the story about the former Razorbacks offensive lineman opened:

“Peppery Jerry Jones, 23, wants to return to the game of football and sometime next week in Chicago, he may get his chance to purchase a professional football team.

Advertisement

“That’s when the former University of Arkansas guard-fullback is slated to meet with Barron Hilton …”

To update readers, the newspaper pointed out that “Jones is currently in the insurance business with his father J.W. (Pat) Jones in Springfield, Mo.”

And just like that, Jerry Jones’ California dreaming was about to suffer an ignoble death.

Son eclipsed

The story made its way back to Missouri, where Pat Jones, a former grocer in Little Rock, had built himself a thriving insurance business.

Advertisement

When his son returned from his meeting with Hilton, Pat sat the boy down and explained in no uncertain terms the intricacies of a financial balance sheet. It would be lunacy, the father preached, to get into the business of the AFL, where there was an unbroken history of negative cash flow.

For his deal to buy the Chargers to move forward, Jerry Jones needed to come up with $50,000 to keep exclusive negotiating rights for 90 days.

Pat Jones wasn’t interested in investing the money, in loaning the money and certainly not in gifting it. He convinced his son he shouldn’t be chasing rainbows. For good measure, the father told a member of the inquiring media that he feared his son would not amount to anything because all he did was dream about pro football.

“I don’t think he’s going to be worth a hill of beans,” Jerry Jones recalled hearing his father say.

Advertisement

“Well, he didn’t really say ‘hill of beans,’” Jones confessed seconds later. “He said something that can’t be repeated in the newspaper.”

And then Jones volunteered the exact word that perfectly punctuated the thought.

Defeated, Jones notified Hilton that he would have to withdraw his offer. He dutifully went back to selling insurance.

Meanwhile, back in Dallas, Lamar Hunt and Tex Schramm were meeting secretly to try to merge the AFL and NFL. Hunt had never even hinted to Jones of the possibility. Hunt had told Jones the AFL was ready to wage a bloody economic war. He never mentioned sleeping with the enemy.

Advertisement

In June 1966, a merger was announced.

Two months later, Barron Hilton sold the Chargers to businessman Eugene Klein, a one-time used car dealer who owned movie theaters across the country. The price was $10 million.

The Associated Press reported that it was “the highest ever paid for a professional football team, surpassing the $7.1 million paid for the Los Angeles Rams in 1962.”

Jerry Jones said his father, who died in 1997, spent the rest of his life telling “people how he talked me out of an investment that doubled in price in six months.”

Advertisement

“And it substantiated that I wasn’t nuts in chasing the Chargers,” Jones said.

Jones said he is not one who believes things happen for a reason. Not getting the Chargers didn’t open the door to buying the Cowboys. But there were times between 1966 and 1989 that he wondered what might have been.

“Too much of life is effort and risk,” he said. “You can’t rely on fate. You don’t chase, you don’t win.”

+++

Advertisement

Find more Cowboys coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.