SOMETIMES A RIVERBOAT gambler doesn't need to be smart. He just needs to be lucky.

Long after George Strait's last bow after his final song, Jones is behind his suite's long bar, splashing Johnnie Walker Blue (about $200 per bottle) into a few of his guests' plastic Cowboys cups. It's coming up on midnight. Tipsy and waving his arms, he begins gushing about the stadium's splendor: Five years now, can ya believe it? He points at the floor. "Go downstairs -- you'll see the floors are clean ... pristine." He lets that last word hang there a moment. "They'll pick up garbage -- that's how much people love this place."

Then a man taps Jones on the shoulder, says Adrian Peterson wants to say hello and hands over an iPhone. Jones says hi to the Minnesota Vikings' star running back and listens, nodding but not smiling. "Well, I understand, Adrian," he says into the phone. The slanted smile returns. "I'd like that, too. ... Well, I love your story. I love your daddy's story. I've always respected what you've been about. I've always been a fan of yours."

Listening to half the conversation, it is obvious Peterson is telling Jones he wants to play for the Cowboys. Peterson, 29, is in the fourth year of a seven-year, $100 million contract that will pay him $11.75 million this autumn to play for the Vikings.

"Well, we'll see what we can do, if we can make that happen," Jones is now saying. "Hmm-hmm. ... I'd like that, too. ... Well, we're talking pig Latin here, but let's see if we can do that." Jones listens, nods and says again, "We're talking pig Latin here, but let's see what we can do about that. OK, Adrian, thanks."

Jones returns the phone to its owner, who turns out to be a Morgan Stanley money manager who is a friend of Peterson's. Jones' conversation with the league's marquee running back occurs about a month after Jones decided to pass on Johnny Football.

Adrian Peterson would make one helluva consolation prize.

LONG BEFORE JERRAL Wayne Jones Sr. gambled on drilled holes and draft picks, he worked as a salesman. At age 9, he began learning the art of the sale inside his father's grocery store in the Rose City area of North Little Rock, Arkansas. Jerry's mother, Arminta, dressed her son in a black suit and bow tie and positioned him inside the store's front door. "Can I help you find something, ma'am?" young Jerry would ask.

His father, J.W. "Pat" Jones, was a natural-born salesman who knew how to attract customers, learn their names and keep them coming back. At local parades, young Jerry, dressed as a cowboy, rode a pony with a sign advertising Pat's Grocery Store. "He was very good at selling himself," Jones says of his father, who died in 1997 at age 76.

Every evening after football practice and every weekend, Jerry was required to restock the shelves, sweep the floors, make homemade ice cream, whatever his father had asked. Often working into the wee hours, Jerry collected a few nickels and life lessons.

Jones brought those lessons with him to Fayetteville. During his first full day on the University of Arkansas campus in August 1961, he met Eugenia "Gene" Chambers, a Miss Arkansas USA beauty queen from a wealthy northwest Arkansas family. Jones and his Razorbacks teammates attended a mixer with the young women of the freshman dorm. After dinner, they all went to the county fair. For hours, Jerry played the midway's games, tossing footballs through tires and baseballs at milk bottles to try to win Gene a stuffed prize worthy of his affection.

"Well, he wasn't having that much luck winning," Gene recalls. "So suddenly he just disappears. And I'm askin' his friends ... 'What happened to Jerry?' All of the sudden, we see him come marching down the aisle, and he's got this huge teddy bear." She laughs. "He had slipped off and bought this big teddy bear -- 'cause he couldn't win it!" (Jerry had told Gene, "I finally won one," but didn't fess up until a year later; by then, they were engaged. They married in January of their sophomore year and have been married for 51 years.)

Jones began as the Razorbacks' fullback but moved, before his junior year, to offensive guard and played on the 1964 Arkansas team that went undefeated. On the road, players were assigned roommates based on the team roster's alphabetical order. So Jones roomed with Jimmy Johnson, a fireplug kid from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas. Johnson and Jones played for Frank Broyles, one of America's most innovative collegiate head coaches and who, at 89, remains an Arkansas legend. "He wanted to play and win more than just about anybody," Broyles says. "So did Jimmy -- well, they had that in common, at least." Not much else in common, really, except a hard-headed nature and a love of the spotlight. But those things never mattered in Fayetteville.

In college, Jones continued to sell -- first shoes, from a catalog, then, life and educational insurance policies, on commission, for his father's newly founded insurance company in Missouri. "He was interested in making money," says Barry Switzer, a Razorbacks star who was then an assistant coach, "while the rest of us were out at the Shamrock Club or the Tee Table, enjoying the weekend with the sorority girls."

On the team bus, Jones had read the Life magazine article about young Art Modell and dreamed about owning a pro football team. (As evidence of his ambition, Jones wrote a business school master's thesis titled "The Role of Oral Communication in Modern-Day Football.") This was an audacious goal -- after all, Jones was making only $1,000 a month drawn against commissions -- that greatly displeased his father. Become an NFL owner? Jerry had the same chance of buying a damn casino.

Without telling anyone, Jones scraped together airfare to fly to Houston to attend American Football League owners meetings. His hope was to meet and impress Lamar Hunt, Ralph Wilson and Bud Adams, the top team owners of the upstart league then attempting to challenge the mighty National Football League. "I'd do nothing but hang around the lobby," Jones recalls. "And just sit there and wait for those guys to come out of meetings, just to get to go up and talk to 'em or say hello to 'em. And just maybe thinking something might drop on the floor, I guess."

When hotel magnate Barron Hilton announced in 1966 that he was selling the AFL's San Diego Chargers, Jones, then 23, tried to buy the team -- with someone else's money. Hilton's asking price was $5.8 million. With far more chutzpah than cash, Jones managed to put together a group of wealthy investors (mostly bankers) who extended him a $1 million letter of credit to land a meeting with Hilton, who was stunned that a recent college graduate wanted to buy his team.

Jones had met with Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, who explained that, without substantial TV revenues, the league would continue to struggle in its bid to compete with the NFL. Still, Jones could have secured a 120-day option to purchase the Chargers, for $50,000.

So Jones told his father about his desire to roll the dice despite the grim financial prospects. "This is my lifelong dream," Jones told his father.

"You aren't old enough to have a lifelong dream," Pat Jones replied. He then explained to Jerry that the sale's massive debt would put him "behind the eight ball." Financial recovery would be nearly impossible.

"The truth is," Jones says now, "he talked me out of it."

Shortly after Jones withdrew his interest, the AFL announced it was merging with the NFL. Instantly, the Chargers' value nearly doubled to $12 million. It was a story Pat Jones would tell for the rest of his life: how he talked his son out of making $6 million.

Despite the missed payday and opportunity, Jones insists he never felt even a momentary pang of resentment or bitterness toward his father. "I knew how much he loved me," he says, his voice cracking with emotion. "And so he was giving me advice selfishly as a father. I guess we're all selfish as fathers. But he certainly was doing it for my best interests."

SOON ENOUGH, Jones traded the insurance racket for a far riskier game -- oil and gas wildcatting, forming the Arkoma Production Company in 1981. Initially with borrowed money, Jones drilled holes across Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. He often tells stories about nearly drowning in $50 million of red ink, using guile and moxie to juggle the banks' notes, as well as dealing with the indignity of watching a Dallas car-rental agent cut his credit card into pieces for failing to pay a bill.

The gushers came soon enough; in one stretch, Jones hit 17 in a row. Thanks to Arkoma's spiraling profits -- and savvy investments in real estate and banking -- Jones amassed a personal fortune of tens of millions of dollars. Wealth buys influence, and Jones flexed considerable muscle in Arkansas politics, although he did it quietly enough to remain largely invisible.

That changed in 1982 after Jones struck a highly lucrative and politically toxic deal with Arkla, the Arkansas state utility. Headed by Jones' old pal and hunting partner, Little Rock lawyer Sheffield Nelson, Arkla agreed to buy nearly all the natural gas produced by Jones' company, an arrangement that smelled to some like the mother of all sweetheart deals. By the mid-'80s, the public utility was buying from Jones at a locked-in rate that was as high as $2.74 despite a glut that had dropped the market price to 16 cents.

A lengthy investigation concluded the companies had done nothing illegal. Arkla ended up settling a massive lawsuit filed on behalf of ratepayers for a $13.7 million refund. (The lawyer who filed the lawsuit later marveled that Jones had struck "a very shrewd business deal.") During the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial race, the Arkla deal became a rancorous campaign issue, and Bill Clinton used it to help defeat Nelson.

In 1988, Jones sold his interest in the Arkla deal for $140 million, a windfall that would soon come in handy. Both Jones and Nelson deny that Jones' Cowboys purchase was financed, indirectly, by Arkansas' gouged utility ratepayers. "We didn't get Jerry the money he needed for the Cowboys," Nelson now says. "He wasn't some poor peddler on a street corner before he came to us."

IT HAS BECOME football lore that Jerry Jones was inspired to buy the Cowboys after waking up with a five-alarm hangover during a fishing vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. After downing too many margaritas with his then-23-year-old son, Stephen, the night before, Jones stayed behind at the hotel and, in a day-old newspaper, stumbled upon a brief story: "Bum Bright to Sell the Dallas Cowboys."

"Well, I wasn't up to par," Jones says. He called the office of Cowboys owner H.R. "Bum" Bright and said, "You don't know me from Adam. My name's Jerry Jones. But if I live, I'm gonna come straight back to Dallas and buy the Dallas Cowboys."

Jones returned home on the next plane and quickly became the team's top suitor. A fierce negotiator, Bright decided the final $300,000 separating him and Jones on a price would be decided by a coin flip. (Jones called tails and lost.) The morning after they shook hands on the $151 million price tag, Bright called Jones at home and told him a group had just offered to buy the Cowboys for $10 million more. Jones said no to flipping the team for a quick $10 million profit. "I don't think Jerry would have sold the Cowboys for $100 million more," Nelson says. Bright had come to despise Tom Landry, the legendary first Cowboys coach who had won two Super Bowls in 29 years and almost always had the team competitive. But in 1988, the Cowboys finished an embarrassing 3-13, and many despondent fans were convinced the game had passed by the 64-year-old Landry. Bright offered to fire Landry before selling the Cowboys to Jones. Jones insisted he do it himself because, he says, "I needed to man up."

Hours after firing Landry, Jones introduced himself to the Dallas media as the team's new majority owner. "This is Christmas to me," Jones, then 46, told reporters. "The Cowboys are America. They are more than a football team." He spoke far more about hiring his old friend Jimmy Johnson, the University of Miami coach with a 52-9 record and a national title -- "the best football coach in America," Jones called him -- than about the legacy of the just-canned Landry. "I intend to have a complete understanding of contracts, jocks, socks and TV contracts," he said. Now Jones admits that his tin-eared exuberance and lack of proper respect paid to Landry and original Cowboys president and GM Tex Schramm, who stood during the news conference while Jones sat behind a microphone, were unbecoming. The performance helped him stumble with practically everyone in Texas, and first impressions are hard to break. "Jones was completely lost," Galloway, The Dallas Morning News columnist, wrote then. "Every time he opened his mouth, he got deeper into trouble."

Aghast at the criticism, Pat Jones (who, this time, had not attempted to talk Jerry out of buying a pro football team) called his son. "Jerry, I had no idea," he said. "I don't care if it works or not, you gotta make it look like it does. You use mirrors, smoke screen or something, because if you don't, you'll be known as a loser the rest of your life."

ON A SHELF behind a couch in Jones' long office at Valley Ranch, the Cowboys' five Super Bowl trophies are arrayed in a straight line. In the center is the last trophy won by the Cowboys in Super Bowl XXX on Jan. 28, 1996, in Tempe, Arizona, by a team built by Johnson/ Jones but coached by Barry Switzer, Johnson's successor. This is the Lombardi trophy Jones tells me he cherishes the most, by far. "Because when we were handed it," Jones says, "Barry said, 'We did it our way, baby!'"

We. Jerry Jones is all about the We. In fact, he values that lone Super Bowl he won with Switzer "10 to 1 ... 1,000 to 1" more than the two he won with Johnson, he says angrily aboard his plane. "Just simply because I guess I am still that damn frustrated with the way everything happened with Jimmy."

This is two-decades-old history now, but the question still burns hot and fresh in Jones: Why can't the owner/GM and the head coach share equally in their team's success? The question is as important as ever to Jones because the answer helps determine his legacy as a smart football man.

Jones' first two Super Bowl trophies were won by teams coached by Johnson. But Jones didn't have much fun, obsessing over Johnson's "backbiting, undermining and whispering" to the media about his lack of football smarts ("My girlfriend knows more about football," Johnson told them). In March 1994, two months after the Cowboys won their second straight Super Bowl trophy, Jones and Johnson parted ways, which stunned and angered fans.

In the end, there just wasn't enough glory for the two men to share.

In my time with Jones this summer, Jimmy Johnson was a constant topic of conversation. That's because back in March, on the 20th anniversary of his departure, Johnson chatted with Tim Cowlishaw, the Dallas Morning News columnist, and stuck a jagged shiv into Jones' ego.

"What anniversary is this one?" Johnson asked, laughing. "They're always having some kind of anniversaries down there. ... I guess because they don't go to Super Bowls anymore."