There’s No Doubt Who Was MVO of the Super Bowl

In the most recent Super Bowl, they gave the game ball to the cornerback, Larry Brown, who intercepted two crucial passes. But who was the really big winner of Super Bowl XXX?

I’ll give you a clue: He never threw a pass, made a block, caught or ran with a ball, kicked or blocked a punt, sent in a play or fell on a fumble.

Give up? Well, how about Jerral Wayne Jones? His position on the team? Owner. A non-platooned position.

He was the big winner because he had the most to lose.

Consider this: If a coach sends in a bad play or a worse player, he’s the goat of the game. Ditto the owner.

Two years ago, owner Jones made a team substitution that could have come back to haunt him: He fired his coach, Jimmy Johnson, just after Johnson had won his second Super Bowl in a row for Jones’ Dallas Cowboys.

Then, he announced that any one of 200 coaches could coach the Cowboys into a Super Bowl--and proceeded to try to prove it by hiring Barry Switzer.

Now, Barry Switzer is a nice enough guy if you want to hang around a pool hall or cruise the West Texas honky-tonks--you know all you need to know about Barry when you know his ex-wife and girlfriend, or was it his wife and ex-girlfriend?--shared the same hotel room with him at Phoenix. Barry is football’s version of a hound dog. Scruples are not his long suit. Class is something you buy on an airplane.

When he coached at Oklahoma, his squads and athletic dormitory were so shot through with drug-selling and firearm-toting, you didn’t know whether his star players would get their pictures in Sports Illustrated or in the post office.

He was perfect for Jerry Jones.

The only way he could have embarrassed Jerry Jones was by a) not getting to the Super Bowl; or b) getting there and losing. Thanks to Larry Brown (or was it Neil O’Donnell?), neither happened. Jones was vindicated.

Jerry Jones is profiled in a new book by an old friend, the newsman Jim Dent, late of the defunct Dallas Times-Herald, and it’s a fascinating study.

You get a glimpse into Jerry Jones when you know that in the pre-Super Bowl news conferences where it is customary for players to sit in interviews with microphones on tables in front of them, that Jerry Jones had his own table right in the midst of backup quarterbacks, first-string running backs and Pro Bowl linemen. No one ever thought to put an owner in that setting before. Jerry took the position he was as important and newsworthy as any old hired hand.

He might have been right. When Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys, they had the squeaky-clean image of “America’s Team,” 11 John Waynes wrapped in the flag, apple pie, homemade fudge and vanilla ice cream.

Jerry Jones took care of that image right away. He fired the coach, the Rev. Tom Landry, a four-square American original who believed in God, Texas and the flex defense in that order.

Then, he hired Jimmy Johnson, whom nobody ever mistook for a moral crusader.

Jones spent $140 million for the Cowboys and he reminded everybody constantly that this came to $45,000-a-day interest. The only way to recoup that kind of money was with an annual Super Bowl.

No one could keep up with this Jones. Brought up over a family grocery store in Dogtown, Ark., a poor suburb of Little Rock, little Jerry learned early the value of work and risk. He made money the old-fashioned way, he borrowed other peoples’ money and risked it. Jimmy never saw a hole card or a dry hole he could resist pushing all his blue chips out for.

For him, the hole cards were all aces and the dry holes gushers. Little Jimmy was lucky.

It must have been an Arkansas decade. Jones, Johnson, Switzer, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their assorted wheeler-dealers all came out of that same Arkansas era, and while nobody ever mistook any of them for aristocrats, they all made it to the top.

No one more than Jones. In Dent’s book, “King of the Cowboys, the Life and Times of Jerry Jones,” Jones comes off as a fearsomely energetic entrepreneur, a man who can bounce around gin mills till 4 a.m. and still show up in the office at 6 with a cellular phone in his ear and the fax machine running.

Jones is un-embarrassable. He’s out to make money, not friends. He’s out to make Super Bowls, not character.

As usual, he got lucky. In all the annals of pro football, there has never been a more disastrous trade than the one in which the Cowboys slickered the Minnesota Vikings in 1989. For an over-the-hill running back, Herschel Walker, the Cowboys got seven draft choices plus five players. It was the biggest heist since Brink’s. Dallas got, among other bonuses, Emmitt Smith and Russell Maryland out of that Minnesota debacle.

Jones just figured he had turned another dry hole into billions of barrels of oil.

Having conquered on the field, owner Jones turned his attention to the board room, the league itself.

The NFL is a co-op. It takes the position it is one entity; it splits TV revenue, logo merchandising revenue and gate receipts (save for the ever-lovin’ luxury boxes and personal seat licenses.)

Owner Jones didn’t like sharing. In the matter of retail merchandising of NFL-logoed apparel, a business in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Cowboys’ jerseys and jackets outsold all others and accounted for more than 30% of national sales. Jones soon announced he would be cutting his own deals with advertisers and distributing his own T-shirts and caps and jackets. He signed with Nike in defiance of the league’s association with another shoe company and he defied the league contract with Coca-Cola by signing the Cowboys up with Pepsi.

The rights were not his to sell, Commissioner Paul Tagliabue argued. Revenue-sharing is a concept put together to keep a league functional, to keep the small-market franchises competitive. The Dallas Cowboys cannot compete in a vacuum. Without shared revenue, the league charges, they will find themselves sitting there with a great team asking “Where is everybody?”

Of course, they’re always telling Jerry Jones the hole is dry, the oil has gone. He didn’t get where he is listening to traditionalists. After all, if he can win a Super Bowl with Barry Switzer, anything is possible.