Love him or hate him, Jerry Jones’ impact on the NFL, and thus on American culture, is undeniable. He took a popular sport, and through his relentless gambles and media savvy, pushed it to the center of American entertainment skyrocketing its value into the billions of dollars. He was able to do this in large part because he was the owner of the most popular and successful team of the 1990s, the Dallas Cowboys. Chapman and Maclain Way’s eight-episode Netflix docuseries “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys,” charts the rise and fall of this dynasty from Jones’ purchase of the team, through its three Super Bowl wins and current drought, but it all largely serves as a trip down memory lane rather than shining a new light on Jones’ ownership or the team’s larger place in American culture.
Cowboys fans should find plenty to love in seeing their favorite players reminisce, but everyone else is left with what feels like in-house PR for a multi-billion dollar company.
For those unfamiliar with the Cowboys’ story, there are worthwhile notes here in seeing how Jones bought and remade the team. The central figures, in addition to Jones, are coach Jimmy Johnson, his replacement Brian Switzer, and Hall of Fame players Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman, Charles Haley, Emmitt Smith and Deion Sanders. All of them discuss the team’s chemistry, going from abysmal losing seasons to back-to-back championships, the severed relationship between Jones and Johnson, finding success with Switzer and then how the team went its separate ways. As these things typically get rendered, especially through the prism of producer NFL Films, it’s less about Xs and Os and more about personalities. Jones and Johnson both had massive egos, both wanted credit for the team’s success, and then Johnson and Switzer had radically different approaches to coaching.
The Ways believe they have a captivating series based on personalities alone, and you can see them framing the whole enterprise not as a sports story, but as an epic Western complete with sets meant to evoke the vistas and towns of the genre as well as a score that leans heavily on Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold” from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” When we meet our main players, it’s not a talking head here to offer information. It’s “Starring…Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, etc.” This framing feels more like we’re still inside the Cowboys’ PR machine where these figures are getting to weave their own narrative. There may be contradictions like the friction between Jones and Johnson or Aikman and Switzer, but these battles feel more like sports bar fodder that fans can pick over for a few more decades. It’s not a great sign when the most frequent talking head outside of the organization is blowhard Skip Bayless.
There are no sports historians here or journalists to speak to the changing media landscape of the 1990s, but there is Rupert Murdoch calling Jerry Jones a visionary gambler for the way he pushed the league to partner with Fox for the broadcast rights.
Jones is the center of the show, and that’s already a curious place for an owner to be. By portraying Jones as a gambler, it leans on the idea that he can see the future and takes risks no one else does. This is also tied into tropes of American masculinity where the series opens with Jones talking about being $50 million in debt but hitting a gusher of an oil well that allowed him to buy the Cowboys. This vision of Jones as the center of the action continues later when the Cowboys’ first Super Bowl win under his tenure is intercut with scenes of Jones hunting, the cross-cutting placing him on the same level as the players on the field. That’s how Jones wants to see himself, and the Ways largely grant him that status regardless of how odd it is to say that this billionaire is similar to Aikman taking nine concussions during his career or Irvin having to retire because his spine could get severed.
Instead, the most fascinating incongruities about Jones and what make him a compelling character tend to exist at the margins of the show. Jones fashions himself as someone who’s forward-thinking about the league as a business, but his emotional motivations are all rooted in the past. The show heavily implies that Jones hiring Johnson to replace the beloved coach Tom Landry was due to Jones and Johnson playing together at Arkansas in the 1960s, and that Jones is trying to recapture that sense of youth and victory. Following the Cowboys’ three Super Bowl victories, Jones is now trying to recapture that success, and do it without anyone assembled by Johnson to prove that Jones is a true football genius, not someone who may have to share credit. And yet even as the team hasn’t come close to another Super Bowl since their 1995 victory (making them the team with the longest NFC championship drought), their revenue has only skyrocketed, making financial success separate from success on the field. If there’s a tragedy for Jones, it’s that he’s too good of a businessman to have his football decisions matter. He could chuck darts at a draft board and he’d still have the most valuable NFL team.
When asked why he doesn’t give up the General Manager position, Jones replies, “I like the pain,” which is a non-answer. There’s simply a different set of rules for him as the owner/GM; no one else would be allowed to have this much failure in overseeing the team if they weren’t also the owner. And no one will push back because all the major organization positions are staffed by Jones’ children. That’s why the framing of “The Gambler,” always rings a little hollow because those gambles are now long in the past, and you have a guy who’s not sitting at the table, but the owner of the casino. If Jones is truly upset about the Cowboys’ lack of a Super Bowl in the past 30 years, he could look in a mirror, but that kind of self-reflection would conflict with the mythologizing he and this documentary seek to construct.
Instead of seriously interrogating Jones and his legacy (it’s borderline comical how the docuseries blazes past his involvement against the Civil Rights movement as a youth or the way he attempted to gloss over Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality), we’re left with useless grandstanding or re-litigating silly controversies. Yes, there was a media firestorm when Michael Irvin was on trial for two counts of drug possession, but when we’ve seen the violent crimes perpetrated by other NFL players, Irvin’s crimes seem quaint. Is anyone truly shocked that Cowboys’ players kept a house where they could party, do drugs, and have extramarital affairs? Do we really need almost half an hour on Irvin’s minor infractions that fizzled into a plea bargain?
For those who still own their Michael Irvin jerseys and other 90’s Cowboys paraphernalia, this may be worth revisiting, but for the casual sports fan, there are only the occasional glimmers of a story beyond nostalgia. It’s worth exploring whether or not the vastly different coaching styles of Johnson and Switzer were irrelevant if both could lead the team to Super Bowl victories. It’s neat to get insights on the relationships between Johnson and Aikman or Switzer and Haley. But these are minor notes in an eight-hour parade of past success that doesn’t fully grasp (or wish to acknowledge) that past bravado has calcified into permanent ineptitude. The documentary shows how Jones held out on making Emmitt Smith the league’s highest paid running back despite his contributions to the team and how they suffered without him. It’s fairly easy to draw a parallel to Jones’ obstinacy then and his attitudes now towards star defensive end Micah Parsons.
I doubt there will be much interest in all eight episodes beyond the Cowboys faithful and those so hungry for the return of football that they’ll hop in a time machine and relive the team’s glory days whether they like the team or not. But those hoping for a slyly insightful work like Greg Whiteley’s “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” which uses the guise of NFL cheerleading to tell a larger story about low-paid labor, will be left wanting.
Even Jones seems to end the series with a shrug, his decades of work in the NFL amounting to nothing more than “What a ride.”
“America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys” is now streaming on Netflix.