Dallas Cowboys Netflix show shines light on ‘entertain first’ mentality

Jerry Jones wants to be the main character. Watching even five minutes of documentary The Gambler and His Cowboys would make that clear to the uninitiated. The owner of the Dallas Cowboys sits behind his desk with the freedom to rehash his own mythology, with the result being released on Netflix ahead of the new NFL season. Based on the approach that the Cowboys have taken in the past week, no-one bought into that lore more than Jones himself.

For anyone without the desire to dive into yet another sports documentary, Jones bought a fading version of “America’s Team” at the end of the 1980s. Having captured the hearts and minds of the country with Super Bowl wins in 1972 and 1978, they were reinvigorated under Jones’s ownership, winning three titles in four seasons in 1993, 1994 and 1996.

It is undeniable that Jones revived a sleeping giant and created one of the all-time great sporting dynasties.

The way he talks about it, he also invented modern sport. His argument is persuasive. Whether it was prancing cheerleaders, celebrity onlookers or a squad so chaotic one player stabbed another in the neck with a pair of scissors, Jones was an early adopter of the concept that winning was good, but attention was even better. Doing both was a surefire way to hit the jackpot.

Given this, the decision by Jones to trade the Cowboys’s best player, Micah Parsons, to the Green Bay Packers on the eve of the NFL season is entirely in keeping with who Jones is. No-one will say that it makes sporting sense. In return the Cowboys got defensive tackle Kenny Clark and two first-round draft picks. But as performance art? As one pundit said ahead of the Cowboys’s defeat in their first game against the Philadelphia Eagles this week, “it’s been a pre-season all about the Cowboys”.

It is important to note that it has been nearly 30 years since the Cowboys last won a Super Bowl. It is even more important to note that a lopsided deal where the Cowboys traded their star player for a raft of draft picks did kickstart their sprint to stardom. However, no-one thinks they will achieve anything even remotely equivalent as a result of this trade.

In their opener against the Eagles, Jones’s team were somewhat upstaged on the shock front when Eagles defensive tackle Jalen Carter was ejected after only six seconds for spitting on Cowboys’s quarterback Dak Prescott. The positive news was that the Cowboys, playing their first game under new head coach Brian Schottenheimer, went toe to toe with the Super Bowl champions. There was a lengthy weather delay which disrupted the flow of the game – it is American sports after all – and when the sides reappeared, the Eagles did go on to win 24-20. It is hard to know who the result reflects worse on at this point of the season.

The Parsons trade has clearly made the Cowboys a less talented team, certainly for now and almost certainly in the future. The Green Bay Packers made him the best paid non-quarterback of all time to give a sense of the level he is at.

But Jones’s logic has always been that sport could be soap opera. That headlines were as good as stat lines. What mattered was if people were paying attention.

It is a far cry from the clean-cut American look that was cultivated under head coach Tom Landry since the beginning of the franchise. George W. Bush’s line at the start of the Netflix documentary summarises what people thought about the team: “The hole in Texas Stadium was so God could watch his favourite team. That would be the Cowboys.”

Since then, the Cowboys have had everything from drug scandals to violence issues. A bad trade is the least of their worries.

But the essence of what Jones was getting at in the 1990s has become only more true. Sport is increasingly about the gossip and the drama and who can speak loudest. Politics is, too.

The Cowboys’s lack of success over the past 30 years has made their original moniker drift away but it actually feels truer than ever. An ageing man, supremely confident on the basis of his past successes, deciding what he wants to do without consequence. It’s certainly not unfamiliar to people in the United States.

It feels unlikely that the Cowboys’s desperate trade does anything to help them reach the Super Bowl. The question to ask is whether that was what they wanted it to do. There is no doubt that every franchise owner wants to win. But if that’s not possible, being talked about is second best. That is a concept that many people across the world have taken to heart. Where could it be more fitting than at “America’s Team”?

Photograph by Matt Slocum/AP