JERRY JONES has claimed he received death threats after he bought the Dallas Cowboys and sacked popular head coach Tom Landry.
The 82-year-old has spoken about the fervent atmosphere that descended after the bold act.
Landry led the Cowboys to two Super Bowl wins and had been head coach since 1960 before his 1988 sacking by Jones.
Unsurprisingly, Jones was not a popular figure in Dallas and he claims he even received death threats.
He explained what that period was like in new Netflix doc – America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys:
Jones said: “I was Darth Vader.
“They’re serious about their football in the state of Texas, almost as much as we are in Arkansas.
“The firing of Coach Landry was certainly one of the great PR missteps, maybe of all time, because I still wear that.
“With all that hate, I could stop and cry or I could just keep going.
“But I’m not gonna take my marbles and go home. I can’t, I burned all my ships when I landed.”
Jones replaced Lander with his longtime friend and fellow University of Arkansas team-mate Jimmy Johnson.
Fortunately, it was a move that paid off as the Cowboys won the Super Bowl in 1992 – their first since 1977.
They repeated that feat a year later and won the Super Bowl again in 1995, under a different head coach – Barry Switzer.
Jones recently announced he battled cancer for over 10 years.
He had stage 4 melanoma but beat the cancer after undergoing four surgeries.
He then shared that the initial skin cancer diagnosis occurred in 2010.
For the next 10 years, Jones had four surgeries, two on his lungs and two on his lymph nodes.
He credited the experimental drug PD-1, which is short for Programmed Cell Death Protein 1, for beating the cancer.
