Tinkering Jerry Jones keeps Meddling with Cowboys

Dallas Cowboys fans should know the tune.  Sing along to the “Ballad of Jerry Jones”! Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jer’ Played Razorback football with the Hogs up there. Then one day, after graduating school He poked holes in the ground into a gas pool Methane, that is…Contract guaranteed…Take or pay! Well the next thing you know, Jer’s a multi-millionaire. His kinfolk said, “Time to move away from there – Dallas, Texas is the place you ought to be” So he bought the Dallas Cowboys in the 1980’s. For $140 million – worth nearly $8 billion today!!! Two years ago, I recorded that silly little ditty about the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.  Several of my friends are long-time faithful fans of the Cowboys.  They pray – regularly – that someone is going to magically appear, buy their favorite football team, and finally remove Jerry Jones as the de facto head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. Based on JJ’s actions just this past weekend, another new chapter of the egotistical team owner’s interference with the football team just occurred.  It has now been 27 years since the Dallas Cowboys and their endlessly meddling owner have participated in a Super Bowl. Let’s take a closer look at the man who might be the most despised man in Dallas, Texas: Step 1 – Become a millionaire in the natural gas business! Now 80 years old (like the current US President), Dallas Cowboys owner Jerral Wayne Jones was not born rich. Jerry’s parents moved to Little Rock, Arkansas when the lad was just three years old.  His parents ran a local grocery store until Jerry graduated from high school in 1960. Once Jerry Jones went to college in Fayetteville, Arkansas to play football as a 185-pound offensive lineman for the Razorbacks, his parents moved north to Springfield, Missouri where his father (Pat) built a successful life insurance business. When Jerry returned from college in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he was named Executive Vice President of his father’s insurance company.  He would return to Fayetteville to obtain a Master’s degree in 1970 and decided to go into a different business. By 1981, Jerry Jones and his oil and gas partner Mike McCoy (a petroleum engineer) formed an oil and natural gas entity called Arkoma Production Company.  In 1982, Arkoma obtained (for a reported $15 million) thousands of acres of leases from a Little Rock-based natural gas energy conglomerate named Arkla, Inc. In return for Arkoma’s agreement to drill and develop hundreds of lower risk/moderate reward developmental wells into a “you almost can’t miss” region of prolific natural gas reserves in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma (hence the company name “Arkoma”), the natural gas pipeline utility portion of Arkla agreed to purchase the newly discovered production. Step 2 – Timing is everything! In what would turn out to be extremely fortunate for Jones’