While I am going to be deep in the Winter Olympic Figure Skating Team event this evening, it’s also the Super Bowl tonight, and as you know by now, I’m a bit of a NFL fan. But it’s lucky I’ve got the Olympics to distract me, because once again the Cowboys aren’t in it. It’s been a while now. I’m starting to lose patience, but what can you do they’re my team and you have to stand by them even when they’re playing terribly. But while the Vince Lombardi won’t be heading back to Dallas this year, I thought I’d write about Netflix’s documentary about the Cowboys and the team’s owner Jerry Jones.
The official title for this is America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, and that’s very much the tone of the doc – this is the story of Jerry’s Cowboys: how he bought them and what he did with them. And it’s quite the ride. Thirty plus years on from the start of the Jerry Jones era it’s easy to forget – or depending on your age not really appreciate what happened in Dallas in the decade from the mid-80s to the mid 90s. And this will give you that – the main focus of the bulk of the episodes is the building of the team that won three Super Bowls in four years and the stories and excesses around it.
The success of this is that its has managed to get pretty much everyone involved in the rise (and fall) who is still alive to take part. And that’s some feat given the feuds and the strong feelings that people have about it all. The Jerry Jones-Jimmy Johnson situation was quite something, for perspective it was only in 2023 that Johnson was inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor – nearly 20 years after the three key players of the Super Bowl winning teams that he coached. And they’re all pretty frank too. It’s very warts and all – not just with the backroom staff, but with players admitting their drug use and the special treatment they got from the police. So there’s plenty of salacious stuff in here for the casual view and fan.
The thing that really struck me was that it felt like while the massive success was happening, the players and the organisation didn’t really seem to think it would come to an end – like this is the Cowboys domination era and it will continue. And these things never go on forever in sports – whether it’s Manchester United in football or Ferrari or Red Bull in F1 you can’t stay on top forever no matter how hard you try. I also found it really interesting to help understand some of the decisions that the organisation (well Jerry!) has taken since. Even though the documentary glosses over the last thirty years quite a lot, if you’ve been following the team you can see Jerry trying to recreate the trades or the deals that brought them to that early 90s domination in the hopes that it will bring it back again.
And that explains why fans can get so exasperated with the Cowboys – it’s the most valuable sports franchise in the world according to Forbes (and has been since 2016) but it hasn’t won the SuperBowl or a Conference championship 1995. Jerry is the General Manager of the Cowboys as well as the owner – and that’s not a usual thing. But watching him in this, he’s supremely unbothered by what people think of him – he wants to do it his way or not at all.
This one is on Netflix – if you’re a sports fan it’s an interesting watch but if you’re a casual viewer and only going to watch one documentary about the Cowboys though, it should still be the first season of America’s Sweethearts!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 