By Richard Hoffer

Part I:

His "tolerance for ambiguity" -- his phrase -- is high enough to register somewhere between impudence and daredevilry. Where else would you put it? When the big oil companies, who are hardly in the business of prudence, abandoned their dry holes in the late '60s, it was Jerry Jones who offered to lease their failures. He barely understood their caution anyway. Spending $14 million to drill, say, 18,000 feet and then just walking away because of something called budget -- was that any way to find oil or gas? "Unthinkable," he says. "That's just unthinkable."

Jones, an independent operator and not answerable to anything like budget, kept drilling, and who knows how many times he embarrassed the big oil companies with his finds. A dry hole, after all, is simply a gusher without conviction. Jones, then as now, supplied all the conviction necessary. Maybe if he hadn't made 12 strikes in his first 13 tries -- drilling between dry holes in Oklahoma's Red Fork Wells -- he'd have had less of it. Then again, we're talking about a guy who, as a 23-year-old in 1966, nearly bought the San Diego Chargers from Barron Hilton with money he didn't have. (Jones had arranged for a letter of credit from a labor union.) "You sure are young," Hilton told Jones, who was born with all the conviction he'd ever require.

But let's not make him sound pathological, either, as if he lacked a mortal's ability to recognize consequence. He never actually drilled to the center of the earth for oil, and the times he came close he sweated it. When he pledged his wealth and all receivables to buy the floundering Dallas Cowboys -- America's Team or not, this was a failing outfit in 1989 -- he needed two hands to steady a cup of coffee. Who wouldn't? In those days Dallas was the epicenter for one of the oil industry's worst depressions. Oil, to the extent that anyone was bothering to look for it, was $10 a barrel. Titans were being wiped out, banks closed, skyscrapers shuttered. Loans were being sold for a nickel on the dollar. Why did the Cowboys, the one club for which Jones would revisit his childhood dream of owning an NFL team, have to come up for sale when there was blood on the streets?

Of course his hands shook. Even beyond the economic climate, the deal was punishing, a sophisticated form of extortion, really. It was bad enough that he had to pay a $65 million for the Cowboys (quite literally America's Team, considering the federal government owned 12% of the franchise after a lending bank failed). The team was not very good, and, after three losing seasons, home sellouts were even harder to come by than victories. But -- here's the extortion part -- he was forced to absorb the $75 million leasing rights on Texas Stadium as well. (The total purchase price was a record for an NFL team.) In those days NFL stadiums were essentially rentals, some place you visited on Sundays. They had no income or marketing worth to NFL owners.

He had to have those Cowboys, though. He was no longer that 23-year-old "turnip" (as he says) but a fairly wealthy businessman. He'd only recently celebrated a strike that would produce -- understand, this was one well -- $80 million toward his interests. That was not the sort of fortune to be frittered away on a hobby, a college kid's whim. He'd moved beyond that fantasy. He was 46! But that April morning, on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, having decided to forgo a fishing trip on account of too much tequila the night before, he rattled his newspaper open to see that the Cowboys were for sale. And he knew he might be in trouble. "The Cowboys were my devil," he says. It was the one team, the only franchise, that could tempt him at this point in his life. Oh, he was in trouble, all right!

Part II:

The deal done, Jones barely had time to count the empty suites, consider the previous season's 3-13 record, bemoan the NFL's failure to negotiate improved TV contracts and get over the surprising fact that the Cowboys had lost $9.5 million on just $41 million in revenues the year before, when the bills began to come in. They totaled $105,000 a day. "If you want to get motivated," Jones suggests, "strap that on."

O.K., that was then, and now here's Jones in his splendid office at Valley Ranch in Irving, the three Super Bowl trophies always in his line of sight. He's fit and trim (down 60 pounds), a ball of energy at 64, impossibly charming, and when it comes to enthusiasm, a carrier. Things turned out, more or less, even after he fired a legend, got sued by the NFL and kept hiring old Razorbacks to coach the Cowboys. That pitiful team he bought is valued by Forbes at $1.2 billion (shades of Red Fork!), and he has turned that albatross of a stadium into his biggest revenue producer. But what's the fun of this business, really, if your hands aren't shaking?

"Let's go see the stadium," Jones says, and we're off in a black Town Car to 140 acres of mud within sight of the Texas Rangers' Ballpark at Arlington. This is the latest, possibly the greatest, edifice to be constructed for the people's entertainment in this great land of ours, maybe the final frontier in sports-related architecture. Glass panels 120 feet high will open at each end for autumn breezes, a roof will retract at night to reveal that iconic hole familiar to Texas Stadium (and close during the day to maintain a sensible temperature), the glass skin will produce a shimmering effect. It's all concrete and cranes for now, naming rights are still up for bid, and the place won't be open for business until 2009, but it's undeniably a doozy. At the site the lead contractor explains how the four concrete buttresses that support the two quarter-mile steel arches running lengthwise are sunk as deep as 70 feet. Oh, and the Statue of Liberty would fit under the roof, the torch not even singeing the trusses.

Jones, who did not answer to budget here any more than he did in the Oklahoma oil fields, did not stint on anything, even when the original cost of $650 million ballooned to $1 billion. The city of Arlington's share was capped at $325 million, meaning that Jones pays for every add-on doodad -- such as two 60-yard-wide flat screens hanging over the field -- out of his pocket, 100%. "And I'm an adder-oner," he says.

It turns out Jones is a bit of a stadium freak as well, going way back. Before playing Nebraska in the 1965 Cotton Bowl, his Arkansas team stayed in Houston and got a tour of the new Astrodome. "When we saw that thing -- glistening -- I couldn't stand it," he says. "It sucked the air right out of you." Many years later (he won't say when because it embarrasses him to admit how old he was on his first visit to New York City) Jones paid a cab driver to take him to Yankee Stadium first thing. He got out, touched it and returned to business.

Part III:

When it became obvious to him that simply renovating 36-year-old Texas Stadium -- "And by the way," he says, "I didn't have to do even that" -- wouldn't cut it, he plunged into the new venture with his usual gusto. There were trips to London's Wembley Stadium, New York's Bloomberg Tower, even Sydney's Opera House. He got the idea for his giant screens while watching a Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace. He was visually discombobulated by the screens behind her, redundant to the Canadian songbird's performance, but mesmerized all the same. "You didn't know what you were seeing," he says, "but you knew it must have been good."

Still, the Cowboys' future home is going to be one of a kind, nothing like the "racetrack" concourses most owners have thrown up since Jones first inspired stadium fever all those years ago when he started milking his building for previously unheard-of revenue. Its glassine luminescence aside, the new stadium will be the biggest in the NFL. Jones talks dreamily of a "media" experience, meaning the place has to be as much about presentation and sensation as football, but he also insists upon the aggression of its sheer size. It can be configured as attendance warrants -- normal capacity will be about 80,000, up from 65,529 at Texas Stadium, but fully fitted it will be able to seat more than 100,000 customers.

We meant to say paying customers. Because the ability to boost attendance revenues is not so insignificant. When this new facility is finished, it will likely be the most lucrative stadium ever. Texas Stadium has only 15,000 square feet devoted to club space; the new facility will have 15 times that. There will be 200 luxury boxes, some of them at field level. Do you think some fans might pay a premium to have a suite that basically has a patio right behind the team's bench?

The ability to amplify the Cowboys brand, to further exaggerate its already fearsome marketing opportunities, does not argue for parity. Corporate sponsorship in this new stadium is worth more than in, say, Carolina. The Cowboys will profit accordingly without having to spend one more penny on football than the Panthers. So the NFL pretty much lines up small market versus big market, resentments flowing as a consequence. And thus Jones's bid to host the 2011 Super Bowl was not a formality. In fact, the final vote, in May, passed by only 17 for Dallas to 15 for Indianapolis, reflecting more of a grudge than economic sense. A Dallas Super Bowl, just because of the size of this monster, will return upwards of $20 million more to the NFL in ticket revenue alone than an Indy Super Bowl possibly could. Go figure.

But there's a kind of fairness at work here, giving Jones the last at bat. (Well, almost; the New York Giants and Jets have a smaller but pricier stadium in the works.) Remember, when he came into the league, stadium revenue was an afterthought. That he was able to squeeze some income out of Texas Stadium only speaks to that hand-trembling urgency to pay his bills. He didn't begin selling stadium sponsorships in 1995 to Nike and Pepsi simply to sandbag the NFL (which believed it owned all sponsorship rights); he did it because he needed the dough. After the league conceded, owners no longer thought of their stadiums as rentals but as income streams. And as the owners began to gain control of stadium revenues, the team itself became a kind of loss leader. Sure, there are the national TV contracts, plus attendance and luxury-box income. But is there any easier money than the $30 million-plus contract the Cowboys have with Pepsi?

Part IV:

Bob Kraft, who owned the New England Patriots' stadium before he bought the team in 1994, understands Jones's innovation better than most of his peers. "I think he's part of what's best about the NFL and its future," Kraft says. "He knows how to sell the sizzle, he understands what the NFL experience is for a fan, and he's always pushing the envelope for the most creative and fan-friendly things."

Kraft says the NFL has almost become a cultural imperative. "Between 1 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. on Sunday there are 120 million people watching games live," he says. People like Jones understood the potential, creating business templates that would turn stadiums into delivery systems for ad and marketing dollars. But Jones also was attuned to the long-term welfare of the league. It was he who resisted his colleagues' inclination to sign another flat contract with the networks in 1994, inviting Fox into the negotiations. The league, guaranteed at least one outside bidder in every subsequent contract negotiation -- the "panting dog" effect, somebody called it -- has been awash in money ever since.

But Kraft says Jones has something else going for him: geography. "It's Texas," he says. That means football, and that means big. And Kraft says Jones is clearly building a stadium that will satisfy the requirements for both. This stadium, whatever it's called and at whatever price, could be the most efficient delivery system for marketing opportunities yet. The Cowboys brand ensures a regional fan base, and if the stadium performs as expected in 2011, it's hard not to imagine it joining the Super Bowl rotation and returning to national consciousness every five or six years.

Of course, when the owner insists on things like frits and fins, cost be damned, nothing is a sure thing. The NFL is the monster of the moment, its popularity allowing for a tremendous margin of error. Yet this stadium, as costly as it is, must work for 25 to 30 years to make business sense, and who knows what we'll find entertaining then. Anybody remember horse racing? Boxing? Could Jones, in his dotage, reconfigure the stadium to accommodate cage matches for bloodthirsty crowds 20 years from now?

Jones actually seems to delight in the possibility of failure, however slim it really is. As he conducts a tour of his pile -- "There," he points to some concrete at field level, "is where the players will come onto the field. Through a stadium club!" -- you can enjoy a secondhand exhilaration. This is what it's like to commit $1 billion! "I'm writing a one-million-dollar check every day," Jones says, aggrandizing his risk the way any gambler would, the way he always has, the tab just higher these days. "That will keep your eye on the ball." He couldn't seem any happier.

Jones is mindful that his critics might see a hillbilly pharaoh throwing up his pyramid. He knows it's useless to deny a vanity at work, even if he can't quite acknowledge it himself. "It's healthy," he says, "because it causes you to go the extra mile." All those people out there, who can't quite think of something to do on their own, will have a place to go and cheer together because a maniac owner went overboard with some blueprints. The pharaohs had to wait for centuries, and an unanticipated travel industry, before their monuments had any real utility. You can buy a suite from Jones right now and watch the Boys on a 60-yard big screen in just two years.

What Jones really feels, he says, is responsibility. He says over and over, in a variety of ways, that he's never felt like the owner of the Cowboys but rather a caretaker. The stadium is a little different because it's going to be hulking out there, a reflection of his taste for decades. The financial overhang is minor in comparison; Jones is too sharp a businessman to get hurt here. (He was buying scrap-metal futures before construction to hedge against price increases.) It's really about the Cowboys. That's where it started for him, and that's where it will end.

Part V:

From the beginning, there have been rough patches. Jones earned widespread enmity, in Texas and beyond, by firing iconic coach Tom Landry upon purchasing the Cowboys, replacing him with Jimmy Johnson, a former Arkansas teammate. Though Johnson won a Super Bowl in his fourth season and another one in his fifth, in the end fared no better than Landry, in the sense that he left, too. Jones then hired Barry Switzer, one of his Razorbacks coaches, and wrung a Super Bowl out of him, but the Cowboys have been in a state of decline since, not having won a playoff game, let alone a championship, in more than 10 years. The great Bill Parcells got Jones within a botched snap of a playoff win last year, but . . . still. Parcells chose not to go through that again, and he's been replaced by Wade Phillips, whose legend is lightweight in comparison. Jones, as you might expect, has gotten smacked around a bit since the Super Bowl years and in 2001 was surprised to see his face on the cover of Texas Monthly with horns sprouting from his head.

The middling failures since those triumphs have left him open to even more criticism, especially as he intends to stay as hands-on as ever. When the owner is going to coaches' meetings, watching tape of practices when he might otherwise be attending to the fortunes of the nearly 2,000 wells he still has interests in, and pacing up and down the sideline during games, he can be characterized as a meddler. "Jerry's a polarizing figure here," says former quarterback Babe Laufenberg, who played for the Cowboys when Jones bought the team in 1989 and now chronicles them for the CBS affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth and on radio broadcasts. "He's obviously out front. I don't know if there's a more visible owner in the league. I mean, he has his own [TV] show."

As owner -- and general manager -- Jones doesn't feel the need to step back. (Although he made a big show of turning over the reins when Parcells came on board, we'll see what he does with someone less headstrong.) He says things like, "I didn't have to build a new stadium; I was happy just coaching football." Jerry, did you just say "coaching?" Caught, he says, "I was just being playful." But why would he step back? He's given the fans three Super Bowls. Sometimes, he says, when the criticism becomes too much, he'll snap, "I'm sorry I can't win you one every year."

The reason he's a meddler, of course, is that he really thinks he can win one every year. Gone is the arrogance from those early seasons when he said any one of 500 coaches could win Super Bowls with the players he assembled ("Whiskey talking," he said later). But it hasn't been replaced with the humility you'd expect from an owner whose stadium might get into a Super Bowl before his team. You know, no such thing as a dry hole. Tony Romo could be the real deal after all, and, well, the Boys are back in business, right? His enthusiasm is unreal.

If Jones is charging into an uncertain future, as we all are but with smaller stakes, he at least has the comfort of a place in Dallas history. In February, Michael Irvin, an artifact of those glory years, was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Irvin dumbfounded Jones by asking the owner to present him at the Aug. 4 induction ceremony. It makes you wonder about the loneliness of these men at the top when Jones says, "I can count on one hand the times I've been that happy." So, in a back-at-you kind of way, Jones threw a party for Irvin, renting the Ghost Bar high atop the W Hotel in downtown Dallas and inviting anybody with any possible link to Cowboys greatness for a night of drinks and snacks. While four cheerleaders danced go-go style and TV screens replayed games from the '90s, alums pressed through the crowd, clacking longnecks with former teammates. Troy Aikman hugged Daryl Johnston, who hugged Emmitt Smith -- all remnants of that first, innocent flush of glory. Irvin, predictably late, caused a flash-popping frenzy, even in this crowd. Not many people, you have to admit, can share what they could. Jones just glowed.

If you were driven to catch some air in this ceremonial melee, you might have escaped to the balcony, which, 33 floors above Texas, had a vertiginous view of new skyscrapers -- not shuttered ones -- and about a million square miles of twinkling sprawl, as far as the eye could see. Who knows how many people (most of them fans probably) each light in the distance represents? It is Texas. But after enough drinks and snacks it made you think. You wonder if Jones, however secure in his ambitions, could bear to endure this dark vista, to see such responsibility spread before him, to see all those people wanting to be entertained, demanding satisfaction.

Well, this isn't for everybody, is it?

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