Jerry Jones’s interview on 105.3 The Fan revealed some details tying the St. Louis baseball Cardinals to the Dallas Cowboys that people may not have been privy to. The question was posed what Jerry would have done if he had caught the 62nd homerun ball hit by Aaron Judge. To paraphrase, Jerry said it would depend on if he was poor or not. Which is about the answer one might get from anybody. But it’s nice to see that his booming wealth hasn’t dissolved his rationale. His answer unbundled further memories from long, long ago.
According to classmates.com, Jerral “Jerry” Wayne Jones graduated in 1960 from North Little Rock High School in North Little Rock, Arkansas. He had played on the high school football team where he was also the captain. Additionally, he was on the track team as well as the publications staff.
Many in the south were Cardinals fans
About two thirds of the way through the last century, when he was still young, Jerry recalled that many in the south were Cardinals fans. He implied that, like everyone else around him, he was also a Cardinals fan. Jerry can be known to beat around the bush. He did eventually get to the point after a verbal bush beating routine. His answer shed light onto an interesting tidbit about the Cardinals. The ramblings of Jerry Jones are almost always a bundle of joy to unpack. See below for further details:
“My part of the world in Arkansas you couldn’t go down the street in a subdivision or you couldn’t go down the street in just a street and people would be sitting on the porch, and they’d be sitting there in a chair and gathered around listening to the radio and listening to the St. Louis Cardinals. It was just like the sun going down.”
Jerry was really in full form telling the story to the podcast’s listeners. After wading through all the “ums” to shake some hesitation and uncertainty from the story, it was about to get more interesting.
Jerry continued. “As a matter of fact, the extent of the sophistication of my purchase of the Cowboys was that the Cowboys were losing so much money… about a million dollars a month to be exact…that my idea was… that the way to right that ship was to do something like the Cardinals had done in their association with Anheuser Busch and Budweiser. And that surely that association… that made Anheuser Busch and Budweiser what they were, and I dropped it at that, that was enough for me to go and be involved with the Cowboys.”
The veins of the Cowboys
Jerry Jones is not known for his ability to get directly to the point. Even by his own admission, he is known to ramble on. Seemingly more often than not, he will share more information than he had planned. Even if it were the case in this instance, he’d probably not regret it.
Jerry continued. “…I never dreamed that as time would follow, I knew I had to have something other than tickets and television to make it work. So, they were in their own way a little role model for me as to maybe how to justify somehow getting the juice to flow through the veins of the cowboys.”
The process of translating Jerry’s murmurs can sometimes feel like driving through the mud with bald tires. But one doesn’t have to spin their wheels too long to read between those lines. The Cowboys were bleeding money. Emboldened by their success, Jerry stood on the shoulders of the Cardinals branding wisdom and used their success as mental fuel for his bold investment. After some brutal personnel decisions, he made the team profitable; and the world would never view him or the Cowboys in the same light again.