In his biggest gamble yet, wildcat owner Jerry Jones is spending a billion dollars on a new stadium -- a shrine to his Cowboys and a 100,000-seat symbol of his reign over the NFL's marquee franchise

	Though Jones's new football temple won't be open for business until the 2009 season, he has already landed Super Bowl XLV in 2011. Darren Carroll/SI

By Richard Hoffer

His "tolerance for ambiguity" -- his phrase -- is high enough to register somewhere between impudence and daredevilry. Where else would you put it? When the big oil companies, who are hardly in the business of prudence, abandoned their dry holes in the late '60s, it was Jerry Jones who offered to lease their failures. He barely understood their caution anyway. Spending $14 million to drill, say, 18,000 feet and then just walking away because of something called budget -- was that any way to find oil or gas? "Unthinkable," he says. "That's just unthinkable."

Jones, an independent operator and not answerable to anything like budget, kept drilling, and who knows how many times he embarrassed the big oil companies with his finds. A dry hole, after all, is simply a gusher without conviction. Jones, then as now, supplied all the conviction necessary. Maybe if he hadn't made 12 strikes in his first 13 tries -- drilling between dry holes in Oklahoma's Red Fork Wells -- he'd have had less of it. Then again, we're talking about a guy who, as a 23-year-old in 1966, nearly bought the San Diego Chargers from Barron Hilton with money he didn't have. (Jones had arranged for a letter of credit from a labor union.) "You sure are young," Hilton told Jones, who was born with all the conviction he'd ever require.

But let's not make him sound pathological, either, as if he lacked a mortal's ability to recognize consequence. He never actually drilled to the center of the earth for oil, and the times he came close he sweated it. When he pledged his wealth and all receivables to buy the floundering Dallas Cowboys -- America's Team or not, this was a failing outfit in 1989 -- he needed two hands to steady a cup of coffee. Who wouldn't? In those days Dallas was the epicenter for one of the oil industry's worst depressions. Oil, to the extent that anyone was bothering to look for it, was $10 a barrel. Titans were being wiped out, banks closed, skyscrapers shuttered. Loans were being sold for a nickel on the dollar. Why did the Cowboys, the one club for which Jones would revisit his childhood dream of owning an NFL team, have to come up for sale when there was blood on the streets?

Of course his hands shook. Even beyond the economic climate, the deal was punishing, a sophisticated form of extortion, really. It was bad enough that he had to pay a $65 million for the Cowboys (quite literally America's Team, considering the federal government owned 12% of the franchise after a lending bank failed). The team was not very good, and, after three losing seasons, home sellouts were even harder to come by than victories. But -- here's the extortion part -- he was forced to absorb the $75 million leasing rights on Texas Stadium as well. (The total purchase price was a record for an NFL team.) In those days NFL stadiums were essentially rentals, some place you visited on Sundays. They had no income or marketing worth to NFL owners.

He had to have those Cowboys, though. He was no longer that 23-year-old "turnip" (as he says) but a fairly wealthy businessman. He'd only recently celebrated a strike that would produce -- understand, this was one well -- $80 million toward his interests. That was not the sort of fortune to be frittered away on a hobby, a college kid's whim. He'd moved beyond that fantasy. He was 46! But that April morning, on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, having decided to forgo a fishing trip on account of too much tequila the night before, he rattled his newspaper open to see that the Cowboys were for sale. And he knew he might be in trouble. "The Cowboys were my devil," he says. It was the one team, the only franchise, that could tempt him at this point in his life. Oh, he was in trouble, all right!