Jones never shy to take risks

At the time, we had had two flat television negotiations in the NFL. The NBA was booming. Talk of maybe becoming more popular than the NFL. I bought 13 percent of the team from the government because it had been foreclosed on. It was losing a million a month in cash flow. And I paid more for it than had ever been paid for anything in the history of sports. About $154 million.

The first time I came down with an eye to buy the team, the owner at the time, Bum Bright, had Roger Staubach sit with me, (my wife) Gene and (our daughter) Charlotte, and we watched the Cowboys play a home game against the Giants.

On one side of the field was Bill Parcells.

On the side I was on, you had Tom Landry with the Cowboys. Thirty-two thousand people were there — 32,000!

And just to make sure that I could handle it, I went down in the fourth quarter and sat in the stands. The stadium couldn't sell beer and liquor, but they let coolers come in. So people had beer and liquor in coolers. So I was sitting there, with 80,000 beer cans on the floor, whiskey bottles everywhere. They were just remnants of the people that were there. I just wanted to sit there and see how it would feel if I had made that commitment, to see if I could handle those conditions. I must have thought I could, because I bought the team.

It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off here. There were things around this town that were selling for a nickel on the dollar for what had been loaned against it three and four years earlier.

A nickel. Because nothing could move, nobody could borrow any money, and only cash talked. If it hadn't been that way, the opportunity to buy the Cowboys wouldn't have been there.

No. Just look at our new stadium. I thought I'd danced with the devil when I bought it and lived to tell about it, and then turned right around and was 50 feet in the ground when we had the worst economic hit of anyone in our lifetime. That's not risk aversion.

Our interest in Los Angeles is at the highest levels of any kind of measurement that you want to measure.

Right now.

We in the NFL unquestionably are in sports and competition, but we're also in entertainment, and that's the entertainment capital of the world.

It just bowls you over when you see the opportunity in L.A.

Television has always been our No. 1 competition. But I know firsthand that you can create an experience you can't get on TV.

I also know that the social experience has an appeal. When you come to our stadium and look at the aura of 100,000 people. You look up there and see an Army tank coming at you. You see it on a TV screen it's one thing. You see it at a movie theater that's something else. When that thing's coming at you 70 feet high and 180 feet long, that looks like a tank.

We're being very selective. I never had naming rights at Texas Stadium. Because in our case, when we put a name on that stadium, we will name the Cowboys. It's almost going to be like the Pepsi Cowboys. It will be that dominant. We have great relationships with other services and brands that the benchmark for what the naming right would be has to be so special — not just dollars, but it has to fit the Cowboys. Because this stadium is arguably one of the most visible buildings in the United States, and will get more so as time goes along.

I liked it condensed. The league is very aware that that created a bonus interest with fans that hadn't been anticipated. You couldn't have anticipated that. sam.farmer@latimes.com