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Close to midnight on October 11th, 1989, Jerry Jones sat in a restaurant in Irving, Texas, across from Herschel Walker, the best player on the winless Dallas Cowboys. Jones had owned the team for 7 months and was paying $40,000 a day in interest. His coach, Jimmy Johnson, wanted to trade Walker to Minnesota for 5 players and a stack of draft picks.
Jones’s first answer to the trade had been, “You can’t get rid of Herschel Walker. We won’t score a point.” He had 2 choices. Pay Walker $1.25 million to leave, or keep him. He paid, and Johnson used the Vikings’ picks to draft Emmitt Smith and build the team that won 3 Super Bowls in 4 seasons.
What if he had kept Herschel Walker?
This week we hit CTRL+Z on the dinner in Irving, and follow the ripple to today: Emmitt Smith answering a call from Green Bay on draft day, Dan Marino winning a Super Bowl in Miami’s own stadium with that same running back behind him, Jimmy Johnson’s Arizona Cardinals beating his old college roommate in a playoff game in Dallas, and Herschel Walker retiring after 12 seasons, every one of them as a Cowboy. Jerry Jones is 84 and has won 1 Super Bowl in 37 years as owner, because one night in 1989 he wouldn’t pay his best player to leave.
