Jerry Jones, Skip's Name & Reading fan tweets
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There would have been no 90s Cowboys without Jerry Jones. That guy is the Michael Jordan of my Dallas Cowboys. Here we go. This is the Skip Bayless Show, episode 118.

How time flies. This, as always, is the Un-Undisputed. Everything I cannot share with you during Undisputed, the two and a half hour debate show. Today, I will tell you why the five hour interview I'm about to do for this upcoming bombshell Netflix documentary on the cowboy dynasty of the 1990s, why it has torn me apart.

And today, I will get to a good number of your probing, provocative questions, including one that asks, when was the last time I read the comments under my tweets? It's been a minute, and I will get to that in a couple of minutes. But first up, as always, it is not to be skipped. I'm about to empty my heart and empty my soul about Gerald Wayne Jones Jr.,

the man once known as Jethro Jones, the hick from the Arkansas Sticks, as he was called when he somehow managed to buy My Dallas Cowboys back in 1989. Jerry Jones presided over, was the driving force of, three Super Bowl championships in four years in the early 1990s. Now he presides over the entire NFL.

as the most powerful owner. I can't believe those words are coming out of my mouth. Yet the team that Jerry Jones still owns and still operates hasn't even been back to an NFC Championship game for going on 30 years.

Since that 1995 season, I chronicled in my third and last cowboy book called Hell Bent. If you're watching right now as opposed to just listening, I'll hold it up for you. Hell Bent. I'll get to it in just a couple of minutes. Yep. The most valuable sports team in all the world. Just last January,

At home, in a playoff game against the 7 seed in the conference, the 7 seed fell behind 27 to nothing before halftime. And I'm wondering, I'm searching my soul for whatever happened to the Jerry Jones I knew so well from 1989 through 1995. The man I spent literally hundreds of hours around with,

in interviews for these three books that sit before me, my babies, my cowboy trilogy. Whatever happened to that man, I came to like, I must admit, immensely. A man I came to respect far more than so many people in the media did as they derisively viewed him and portrayed him many times from 1989 through 1995.

Trust me on this. Through those early 90s, Jerry Jones constantly displayed greatness. And I don't use that word lightly, as you know. Greatness. He constantly leaned on his, like, God-given, Midas touch. I don't know where it came from. It felt like it came from God. And his almost internal divining rod that he had inside him for striking oil.

and then striking NFL gold. Jerry's business genius, don't use that word lightly, is still on full display as he runs the National Football League. But now, when it comes to owning and operating the Dallas Cowboys, my Dallas Cowboys is a lifelong diehard Cowboy fan, Jerry unfortunately seems to have turned back into...

the way millions of Cowboy fans originally viewed him back in 89 and 90 as Jethro Jones. I'm talking about Jethro from the Clampetts, from the Beverly Hillbillies, Jerry Jones. Jethro Jones. Jerry Jones, Jerry Jones, wherefore art thou Jerry Jones? So this Saturday, I am scheduled to be interviewed by

for this upcoming Netflix documentary on the 1990s Dallas Cowboys. They're asking for five hours. I have no idea if they'll keep me for five hours. I have no idea if they'll use one single thing that I say. I have no control over that. Don't care. Happy to do it because I could talk for 25 hours on those teams of the early 90s. I did write three books on those three teams and I could argue...

that my three books, which sit before me, could serve as a combined roadmap for this documentary. And by the way, I didn't actually write these three books. They wrote themselves. That's how great this story is and was. The word is that this documentary could be even bigger than, as you'll recall, the pandemic pandemic.

ratings bonanza that became The Last Dance, the inside story of Michael Jordan's last Bulls team in 1998, a team I actually covered in Chicago as the lead columnist for the Chicago Tribune at that point. How blessed have I been to get Michael Jordan at his apex after I got Troy Emmett and Michael at their apexes in Dallas in the early 90s?

I can tell you this, though. The story of the 1990s Cowboys is bigger and wilder and deeper and ultimately way, way better than even The Last Dance was. And I know you watched it and I know you loved it. And I know we all enjoyed it because we were pretty much prisoners of our homes at that point.

And yet I'll give you this. No, no, no. Neither Troy Aikman nor Michael Irvin nor Emmitt Smith was Michael Jordan. But when you season those Cowboys seasons with the five alarm hot sauce of Jerry firing Jimmy after winning back-to-back Super Bowls and Jerry hiring Barry Switzer off his couch in Norman, Oklahoma and winning another Super Bowl, well...

Trust me on this. Those Cowboy teams are at least a touchdown favorite over the 1998 Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls. So think about this. Who will be the Michael Jordan of this Netflix documentary? Believe it or not, Gerald Wayne Jones Jr. will be Michael Jordan. He will be the central figure of

He will be the sun and the moon of this entire, I think it's going to be 10-part series of

it will revolve around Gerald Wayne Jones Jr. I cannot believe those words are coming out of my mouth, but that is the God's truth. That a guy who did start at offensive guard at about 195 pounds for the 1964 Arkansas Razorbacks, who did win the national championship via vote, but they did win it,

That guy, who never even had a second thought about trying to play pro football, that guy who went on to strike it very rich in the oil and gas fields, that guy is the Michael Jordan of my Dallas Cowboys. It has come to that. And trust me on this. This is just me. This is my take after these three books.

There would have been no 90s Cowboys without Jerry Jones, without his brilliance and his buoyancy. There would have been no 90s Cowboys, no Dynasty, no Netflix documentary. That man steered that team, those teams, those seasons, those coaches, through so much potential season-wrecking controversy. Trust me on that. So the other night,

I thumbed through my three cowboy books, it's been a while, just to refresh my memories for Saturday's interview. And I started with my first book, God's Coach, about the rise and fall of Tom Landry. And it struck me that after the introduction I wrote in God's Coach, first book I ever wrote, that it starts and it ends, as it has to, with Gerald Wayne Jones Jr. And

I open up the book now to, you can read what you want into this, starting on page 13 with the actual first chapter after the intro. I'll read you the first few words. Jerry Jones felt as if he had been tackled in his sleep by two tall Jones.

Okay, so this passage is about Jerry Jones, the oil and gas man,

who had become so successful, who had made so much money by that point at age 45, that he was so bored with making so much money that he was looking for something else in his life. He and his son Stephen had gone to an oil and gas convention in San Diego. They had departed early because they were just bored with it all and decided to hit Cabo for a couple of days.

to hang out and go deep sea fishing. Yet the night before, they had visited a bar called the Giggling Marlin, in which turistas got hung upside down if they so desired, and they could drink all that they wanted for free as long as they were hanging upside down. Jerry participated. Jerry drank way too much, and according to Jerry, he was so hungover the next morning

in his hotel room that when Stephen said it's time to go fishing for marlin, Jerry said the last thing I want to do is be out in that boat on those open deep sea waters. And Jerry hung back, bored, lying on his bed. He reached over for a newspaper he had taken from the day before from San Diego and happened to notice a little blurb about how the Dallas Cowboys were for sale.

and that Salomon Brothers out of New York City was brokering the deal. And Jerry had a flash that changed life for all of us Cowboy fans. It wouldn't have happened unless he had been hungover. It wouldn't have happened unless he had gotten drunk the night before at the Giggling Marlin. Jerry threw on some clothes, marched straight downstairs. This is long before cell phones, remember. This is 1988.

and asked the woman behind the desk if she could call the states for him, and she said, sure, stand by. And Jerry stood at the front desk as they got Salomon Brothers on the phone in New York City, and Jerry said into the phone to whoever answered, you don't know me, but my name is Jerry Jones, and I'm going to buy the Dallas Cowboys. So the irony of this moment was,

that the then owner of the Cowboys, named Bum Bright, was ready to sell the Cowboys because he thought he had been taken to the cleaners by Cowboy Mystique. As Bum told me for my book, God's Coach, and I quote, he said, I was blinded by the Mystique. It was my fault. He had no idea what he was getting into with Landry, Tech Schramm, and Gil Brandt.

these media icons, these larger-than-life figures who weren't what they appeared to be. Tom Landry had cold-shouldered Bumbright to the extent, even including at Christmas parties, that Bumbright finally said, you know what? I'm going to sell this team, and I'm going to find somebody who will fire Tom Landry. And that somebody became that hick from the sticks from Arkansas, that guy Jethro Jones.

whose offer for the Cowboys was far under major bidders, including Jerry Buss, who then, of course, owned and operated the Lakers, Marvin Davis, the Denver oil man, a Japanese conglomerate, much bigger offers. But Bumbright began to get a kick out of this guy, Jerry, from Arkansas and began to get a kick out of the notion that if he sold to Jerry Jones at a much larger

less price, much lower price. If he sold to Jerry, that Jerry had already vowed to bring his great friend Jimmy Johnson, his former teammate from the University of Arkansas, to be his new head coach. Bumbright got a great kick out of the whole concept of Jerry Jones will fire Tom Landry and then it'll be good luck and God bless you, Jerry Jones.

So even though Bum told me that Jerry, up against the other bidders, effectively had no more than rubbing two nickels together, that he had to rob Peter to pay Paul, that his deal was held together by bailing wire, basically, Bum said, you know what? I'll take a little bath here because I want to see Jerry Jones own them cowboys. How about them cowboys? And here it went. And

Here came Jerry Jones and he bought the Dallas Cowboys and immediately said, well, I've got to be man enough to fly down to Austin, Texas during the offseason and face Coach Landry, who at that moment was out playing golf on a Saturday, and tell him to his face, you're no longer the coach. And Jerry did just that. Fell right into the media trap and became this chicken fried Judas,

who cold-bloodedly fired Tom Landry then flew straight back to Dallas to hold what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Here was Jerry acting like a kid on Christmas morning, "I just bought me the Dallas Cowboys," while Cowboy Nation was mourning the loss of the great and powerful Tom Landry, God's coach, Mount Landry, the man in the hat. And the more excited Jerry got,

the crazier the sort of cowboy lynch mobs out there got wanting Jerry Jones' scalp because he had done in the most beloved man in the state of Texas. That's what Jerry walked into, and that's what he so beautifully began to navigate. As a Dallas columnist at that point, I think I was the only one I could be wrong about this, but if memory serves...

I was the only one who began to defend Jerry Jones because I liked what he had to say. I liked his command of the situation. I liked that it was going to be all new and it felt like it was going to be good new, not bad new to me. And I was correct about that because very quickly, Jerry and Jimmy began to turn, as Jimmy said, turn the thing around.

They took over a team that had fallen to 3-13. They took over a house of smoke and mirrors that was hemorrhaging money out at their old headquarters at Valley Ranch, and they began to turn the thing around. It was an amazing thing to watch that right away they decided to trade Herschel Walker, and as Jimmy called it, they pulled off very quickly Herschel.

The great train robbery of Herschel to the Minnesota Vikings for all these players and all these picks that gave them the foundation for the 1990s Dallas Cowboy dynasty. This led quickly to my second book called The Boys. I will hold it up for those who are watching. This is the paperback version, which came out actually after Jerry had fired Jimmy.

After the 93 season, Hardback came out after 92, and this is a season inside the breakthrough Cowboys of 1992. But this book is about Jerry Jones versus Jimmy Johnson. This book broke the story that, no, they weren't actually friends at all at the University of Arkansas, even though the media portrayed them as

as the former roommates and co-captains and best friends at Arkansas, as Jimmy quickly made clear to me, no, we were only road roommates because of alphabetical order. Johnson Jones were forced to room together because they just went right down the list and paired them two at a time together in alphabetical order. And as Jimmy pointed out,

We were co-captains because every senior on the team was a co-captain. So that's how they got to be co-captains at Arkansas. But the media ran with that story, even though behind the scenes, it got to be a bloody battle in 1992 between Jerry and Jimmy. And I must tell you, once again, I liked the heck out of both of them. And I felt for both of them. But you have to understand where Jimmy was coming from.

Jimmy Johnson started his coaching career at the bottom. He was an assistant coach at Picayune Mississippi High School to start with. While Jerry went off into the oil fields, lost his shirt once, had his credit card cut in two by a woman at Love Field at the rent and rental car counter, and then he died.

He won his shirt back and he won a whole closet of shirts back because he struck it richer than Jed Clampett in the Oklahoma oil fields. And he bought himself a pro football team and immediately named himself the general manager of said football team.

and he learned at the knee of Al Davis, the late, great Al Davis, that you have to coach the coach. So he began to coach Jimmy Johnson in good ways. And I gave, in this book, The Boys, Jerry full credit for the two moves that he pulled off, that he masterminded, or at least drove home, acquiring Charles Haley and Thomas Everett, the two key pieces, especially the pass rusher Charles Haley, and safety Thomas Everett,

The two key pieces that made possible a breakthrough year, a year before that team deserved to break through in 1992. But it got worse and worse between the two of them, all the way down to the last game of that season, the last regular season game, in which at home they beat Mike Ditka's Chicago Bears, clinched home field advantage, and into the postgame locker room marched Jerry Jones with an entourage that

featuring prince bandar who was then the ambassador for saudi arabia to the united states one of the most powerful men in the middle east at that point was prince bandar jerry understood promotion jerry understood

media creation. Jerry understood rubbing elbows with the right people at the right time, and Jimmy wanted no part of any of that. Jimmy only wanted to go monomaniacal on winning football games, and did they ever clash? It got uglier and uglier. I witnessed some of it, and for me, it did not surprise me at all that it took 30 years for

before Jerry, as we know, last season, before the actual halftime of the Detroit game, finally let Jimmy into the Cowboys' ring of honor. Did not surprise me at all. So this book, The Boys, predicts they won't last more than one year together after 92. And I took a lot of abuse in Dallas, Texas, for writing this book and ending it that way.

It basically starts and ends that way. Lots of inside details, lots of quotes from assistant coaches, all saying it's not going to last. In fact, after the Bandar episode in the locker room that night after they had clinched and were entering those 92 playoffs, a lot of the assistants thought Jimmy was going to quit that night because he went nose-to-nose with Jerry up in the party suite after the postgame locker room.

And yet, he finally pushed Jerry too far at the league meetings following the 93 Super Bowl championship, and something happened that will never, ever happen again. After back-to-back Super Bowl championships, the coach got fired by the owner. And I must say, maybe I know too much, but I understood why Jerry fired Jimmy.

And I think there was a part of Jimmy that was relieved because he was never going to be quite happy having to answer to Jerry Jones. He was always going to have a boss. As long as he was the cowboy coach, he was going to have a boss, and his name was Jerry Jones. And it was hard for Jimmy to stomach that and harder for Jimmy to live with that, which brought me to my third cowboy book. I'll hold it up for those watching. It's called Hell Bent.

This one definitely just wrote itself. I didn't even want to write it, and it just fell in my lap. Subtitle at the top, how Troy and Barry, Jerry and Dion, and Emmett and Michael won it all in spite of themselves. That's the God's truth. That's what happened. They won it all in spite of themselves. So think about this. Jerry Jones had said that night after he fired Jimmy Johnson that 100 coaches,

could win a Super Bowl with this Cowboy team because it was so talented. A hundred coaches. Well, if you'd give me a list that night, I would have put Barry Switzer as number 100, if not 101 on that list. I knew Barry through friends of mine who played for Barry at Oklahoma. Obviously, I grew up in Oklahoma City loving the Oklahoma Sooners and Barry was legendary. And yet Barry

had had his issues. Barry had gotten fired. Barry had been on his couch in Norman for a couple of years, been completely out of football. When Jerry, who looked up to Barry, who was ahead, he was four years ahead of Jimmy and Jerry at Arkansas, and they looked at him as the ultimate man's man. He was like a man when he was 18 years of age. Nobody I've ever been around had more charisma than Barry Switzer. I loved the man.

Can he be a little crazy at times? Yep, he can be. Is he the polar opposite of Jimmy Johnson? You better believe it. So now we get to the final irony. Troy Aikman spent the high school years of his childhood in Henrietta, Oklahoma with his father who was working in Henrietta. Henrietta is the sister town, if you will,

of a little town called Oak Mulgee, Oklahoma, where my grandmother lived and where I often had to go for Christmas and in the summertime. I know Oak Mulgee back and forth. I know Henrietta, which is just a couple of miles down the road. And Troy Aikman spent his high school years playing for the Henrietta Hens? Seriously? He did. Couldn't make any of this up. This book wrote itself. So,

What Troy should have done, he should have gone to play for Jimmy Johnson, who was then the head coach at Oklahoma State, because they would have thrown 50 passes a game. But no, most kids in the state of Oklahoma, no offense to Oklahoma State, but most kids grow up wanting to be Sooners. And so did Troy Aikman.

So Barry Switzer basically gave Troy a scholarship back in the days of, what, 80 scholarships that they could give to keep him away from Jimmy Johnson at Oklahoma State. I couldn't make any of this up. And Troy commits to play for the Oklahoma Sooners, who under Barry Switzer run the wishbone, throw five passes a game out of the wishbone. Well, it's the wrong place, wrong time, but somehow Troy was so gifted...

that he finally got to start for a team that early in the season played at home, the Miami Hurricanes, then coached by Jimmy Johnson. Couldn't make this up. And what happened in that game? Troy Aikman attempting to run the wishbone, got hit by the late, great Jerome Brown, and his leg was broken. And in came a freshman from out here in Southern California from Long Beach named Jamel Holloway.

And off my Sooners went after losing to Miami at home, getting trounced by Michael Irvin and company. Off they went to winning a national championship thanks to Jamel Holloway, who was born to run the wishbone. Couldn't really throw it, but didn't matter. He could really run it and he could really pitch it. He was a slick operator of the triple option wishbone offense. And Troy?

Broken leg, broken man, wound up out here at UCLA playing for Terry Donahue, where he certainly threw it well enough and performed well enough that he was able to reestablish himself as the first pick in the draft, which belonged to, at that point, I'm not making any of this up, the Dallas Cowboys coached by Jimmy Johnson.

They inherited that pick because Tom Landry's team had sunk into the sunset at 3-13 and fallen to the number one pick overall. Troy Aikman was a Dallas Cowboy playing for Jimmy Johnson. They didn't immediately click because right away, Jimmy, in that summer, there was such a thing as a supplemental draft. With the number one overall pick in the supplemental draft, Jimmy Johnson took Steve Walsh, the quarterback pick,

with whom he had won a national championship at the University of Miami. Troy, not a happy camper, and I don't blame him a bit. But finally, he and Jimmy began to click. After Steve Walsh was traded, Troy began to see that Jimmy was exactly what he needed and wanted because Jimmy was as driven to win championships as any man who ever walked this planet.

Jimmy was as great a locker room force field as any coach I have ever been around. Nothing like him. Nothing. The energy he could generate. The details with which he drove his football team. The way practices were down to the second. This is what Troy lives for. Troy's

bedroom was always his all of his shirts and suits he had them perfectly laid out because everything with troy every planet had to be perfectly aligned in his solar system for him to operate at the highest level and here came barry switzer who was as far from jimmy johnson as you could get here was barry switzer whose battle cry became with the cowboys of 94 and 95

Win the game, win the party. That was Barry Switzer. While Troy was completely buttoned up, Barry, if you will, was, let me say, unbuttoned. And that Cowboy team was unhinged, often featuring Michael Irvin, life of many post-game victory parties. That team could celebrate like no team I have ever been around. There's much of that in Hellbent.

But in the end, Hellbent is about Barry Switzer versus Troy Aikman and sometimes Troy Aikman versus Barry Switzer. I was very close to many people around Barry and the gravity of the mudslinging and the paranoia that operated between Switzer's supporters and Aikman and his supporters was spellbinding and much of it is contained in this book.

Troy and Barry did not speak to each other from December 4th, I remember it because it's my birthday, all the way through that Super Bowl. And yet they won it, you could say, in spite of themselves. They won it because they were way better than everybody they played, including the Pittsburgh Steelers in that Super Bowl. Jerry Jones did a masterful job of navigating, of refereeing,

of mediating Troy versus Barry and Barry versus Troy. About mid-season, many of Barry's supporters in the organization believed that Troy, through his media friends, was trying to get Barry fired. And frankly, there are times when you'd say, well, he should be fired, that he doesn't have the discipline or dedication to coach a championship football team. But Jerry knew that Barry had a spark to him that definitely...

affected that locker room, especially the black players on the Dallas Cowboys. They loved Barry Switzer, would run through locker room walls for Barry Switzer. Troy saw that. Troy loved that part. But Troy, if let's say Michael Irvin were five minutes late after a night off in training camp, they gave him Wednesday nights off. So for Thursday morning's practice, if Michael showed up five minutes late, Barry's like, what the hell?

And Troy's going to come unglued because that's just not the way you operate a championship football team. And at that point, Troy did have two Super Bowl rings to fall back on and to say, I know what it takes. Barry had national championships. Troy had Super Bowl rings. Fire and ice did not click, did not match, did not combust, did not speak to each other for the last...

what, almost two months of the season. And yet Jerry Jones was always there to put out the fires. I once, it got so bad in December, I actually called Jerry Jones and said, he was, I think he was in LA for something. And I said, this is so bad that I think it's about to explode. And he said, well, tell me what you know. And I told him what I saw, what I heard from both sides. And he said, okay, I got it.

I'm going to cut my trip short by a day. I think it was. And he said, I'll be there. I'll fix it. I've got you. And he did. And to the bitter end, the mudslinging, the rumors, the back and forth between those two camps was astounding to me. And yet in Scottsdale, Arizona and in Phoenix, they won the Super Bowl. I actually attended the Dallas Cowboys postgame party that night after they won that Super Bowl.

And it was something to behold. Win the game, win the party. They all won that party. Barry Switzer won that party. If you had stopped me that night and told me that Jerry Jones Dallas Cowboys wouldn't even sniff an NFC championship game for the next 30 years from that point forward, I would have laughed in your face. Impossible. The man is just too gifted. There is no way

Jerry Jones teams will not even touch an NFC championship game for 30 years, and yet it has happened. It's possible, as I read through my books, it's possible that maybe it just boils down to the fact that Jerry has never been able to find his Troy. Went through a slew of quarterbacks post-Troy.

as you longtime Cowboy fans know, went through Tony Romo, going through Dak Prescott, not Troy, not Troy, not Troy. Maybe it's as simple as that. Maybe because he and Jimmy lucked into, inherited the number one overall pick in 1989, and they obviously did the right thing. Some people liked the offensive tackle Tony Mandridge. Green Bay liked him, loved him. But because they went with Troy,

even though there was some skepticism about Troy at that point. Was he a great deep thrower? No, they said, we're going with Troy Aikman. Maybe that's the magic move that made it all happen. Or maybe in the end, like all the icons before Jerry, Tom Landry, Tech Schramm, Gil Brandt, maybe he too went over the edge into media crazed caricature of himself. All I know is that

Now I feel like I'm stuck with Jerry Jones. And for now, all I have left are the greatest memories of my career in these three books.

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Let's get to your question, shall we? This is Enzo from Phoenix. Does anyone call you Mr. Bayless? Enzo, I do get called a whole lot of names, but this is an interesting question. Yeah, some people do call me Mr. Bayless. I think out of respect for my age and my station in life, my stature maybe, I do appreciate and respect that.

But I prefer to just be called Skip, no matter how much younger you might be than I am. Ernstine, my wife, is always amazed. Saturdays, we take our daughter, our little Maltese, Hazel. She's a big little Maltese. Is she ferocious? We take Hazel out here on the west side of LA to Century City Mall. It's outdoors. It's a parade of dogs and people on a

sunny Saturday, which is redundant. It seems like they're all sunny out here in California, Southern California. But I do wear usually my Vanderbilt baseball style cap sunglasses. I don't get recognized that much. It sort of comes and goes. It's in spurts. The other great thing about living in LA is that there are so many stars out here. I'm just some minor bit player.

People are less likely out here to run up and say, hey, can I have a selfie or whatever? But it does happen usually a couple, three times per trip to the mall. And yet when it does, when there's a group of younger kids, like sort of 12, 13, 14 year old kids, Ernestine is always amazed that they call me Skip. And she's always amazed that they treat me like I'm their age.

And I always tell her, you don't understand. We're just speaking the same language because of our passion for sports. That I have their energy and they have my energy. I have, if you will, kid energy because, man, I jump out of bed every day at two o'clock in the morning to get ready for Undisputed. And I'm watching games at night.

Like I'm 12 or 13 or 14 years old and sometimes acting very childishly when my teams blow it. And I'm screaming words that I can't repeat here. And Ernstine is refusing to speak to me the rest of the night. And Hazel's looking at me like I'm out of my mind. But the point is, I'm just Skip to those kids at the mall. And I love that. And I've mentioned this before, but

I wouldn't have wished my parents, back in my days growing up in Oklahoma City, on anybody. It was not a happy home. But my parents did do one great thing for me accidentally. They gave me my first name by accident. I was the first born. And when my mother and father were, whatever they were doing, dating, I guess, courting in those days, my father actually called my mother

skipper because you're the skipper of the ship. I don't know. It's just one of those silly dating things. And so before I was born as the firstborn, my father said, well, let's name him after me. My father was John Edward. So let's call him John Edward II. And that went on my birth certificate, John Edward II. Yet my mother always told me that the moment my father picked me up

Where do you go in the, which room is it called? Where you go, where you pick up the child for the first time? My guy, Jonathan Berger, is here with me. No, but is that, do you get to go in to, Jonathan just had a child, at the hospital when you first go in? It's the nursery? Yeah. Okay, so when my father first went in to the nursery and actually held me in his hands at that point, he said, there's my little skipper.

Wait, he was calling my mother that. So is it like a unisex name? I don't know. I don't really care because it stuck. All I know is that

My parents never, ever, one time in my life, called me John. Not my mother when she got mad at me, which was often. Not ever did she say, John Edward II, how dare you? I never heard a peep about John. Not once did my grandmother on either side call me. Nobody called me John. I was Skipper from the start, which obviously, as I grew older, just became Skip.

It was hard on me because when I went to what was then called junior high school and seventh grade, on the official records, you're John. Well, the kids from my grade school, and there were like eight grade schools that fed the junior high, but the kids from my grade school, Mayfair grade school, first day of class, junior high school, I get called John in roll call and they're looking at me like, what?

John? And I raised my hand to the teacher. Could you please call me Skip? No nicknames. We don't do nicknames. Well, I'm sorry. It's not my nickname. It's my name. Well, and you have to go up after class and try to explain that most of them understood. Okay, I got you. So you're Skip. Well, I'm Skip and I've always been Skipped. And I like Skip and I appreciate Skip. And if my mother ever did anything for me, my father ever did anything for me, it was to give me

a name that stuck. And in the sports media realm, I guess I'm mostly known on more of a first name basis, which I appreciate. I'm just Skip. When I trend on Twitter, it just says Skip.

I don't know. It's an unusual name. A lot of people think it's just a silly name. A lot of people have asked me as I grew up and then grew older, don't you want to change your name back to... No, I already legally changed my name from John to Skip. And I like Skip. I'm going to keep Skip. And Enzo, if you want to call me Mr. Bayless, that's fine. But I prefer Skip. Thank you for that question. This is David from Colorado.

Is your car the biggest purchase you've ever made? My car, okay. No, I can't go that far, David, and I'll tell you why. My car is a 2019 ZR1. It's already a classic. Might be worth, as we speak, I don't know, maybe twice what I did pay for it. But it wasn't expensive to start with, certainly by great car standards.

but it was made especially for me by the great people at the corvette factory in bowling green kentucky and it was the very last corvette made

in what's called the C7 category. Now they're C8s, but C7s went from 2014 to 2019. And so because I love the ZR1 so much and I couldn't find one out here in Los Angeles because they didn't make very many, when I finally got a hold of the right person in Bowling Green, Kentucky, they said, well, let us... There were some fans of the show there. They said...

We could pull this off. Give us a little bit of time, but we're already starting to make the C8s, which is the whole different new style, if you know Corvettes, with the engine. We're in the mid, it's mid-engine. I don't know. I'm not a big fan of that car. I just love this car, this ZR1 model, 755 horse, and they even made it with a stick shift just for me. I'm old school. I want a clutch. I want standard transmission. I want to be able to shift...

from light to light. Not a paddle shift, not an automatic shift. I want to be able to push in the clutch. Never had a car that wasn't clutch driven. So they did it all, down to every spec that I wanted. It's my dream car. It's my perfect car. And because it's become such a classic so quickly, I'm pretty sure it's worth twice what I paid for it. Well, I only paid, I don't know what it was, $150,000 for it. So it's not exactly a splurge.

It's some money, but $150, it wasn't like what I ended up paying for Ernestine's car. She drives a Bentley. It's a 2018 model Bentley. It's called a Supersport. It's 700 horses, and it is a great car. And...

It was an investment, we felt like, because we felt like she could drive it for, I don't know, 10, 12, 15, who knows, God willing, how long we'll be here. But it's such a great classic car that it was well worth the price tag. I think it was $450,000. So that was a splurge for me, but I thought it could be worth it in the long run. So out here in Los Angeles, if you know the real estate market,

The biggest purchase you're going to make is your house because we're, as we speak, looking at houses. We've been looking at houses for a couple of years and we think about buying a house. But to get anything in the ballpark of what we would want, and I'm talking about pretty standard average looking house in the right neighborhood, you got to start at 10 million bucks. My friends in Oklahoma City say, what? What?

$10 million. So we're living in a place now that we really love. And I think we paid $2.5 million, my friends in Oklahoma City. You paid $2.5 million? You could get the best mansion in town, in Nichols Hills in Oklahoma City, for in that ballpark of $2.5 million. So to me, $2.5 million was the biggest purchase I've ever made. And the more we look and the more we think about in

you know, sinking, what, $10 million into a home? My problem is I would pull into the driveway and cringe every time I pulled into the driveway. I would look at this and say, I put all my life into this house. Well, it's not worth it to me. So in the end, the point is I didn't grow up with money. And it's very interesting to me what happens to a lot of my friends in the media business is

As you make money, and I have made good money, what do you do with it? Well, silly me, I just save it. I did get a nice contract about four years ago. We haven't splurged on one thing in the last four years. We didn't buy another car. We didn't buy a house. We haven't bought anything because...

I did grow up with some financial insecurity from my father who drank himself to death at age 49 over financial insecurity. How can I provide for a wife and three children? And I don't want that hanging over my head. So it's an interesting question you asked, David, because I see friends of mine in the media business who make money, who just spend it like crazy, and they didn't grow up with money either. So it's interesting how some people who didn't have money

Just need to spend it quickly like it's going out of style because it's literally going out of style. It's literally going out the door and I'm just not built for splurging. School is back and Dick's Sporting Goods has what you need to win your year. We've got everything from cleats to sambas, dunks, and more. Plus the hottest looks from Nike, Jordan, and Adidas. Find your first day fits in store or online at Dick's.com. This is Kyle from Columbia, South Carolina.

When was the last time you read the comments under any of your tweets? I do appreciate this question hugely. Kyle, I'm going to say 2012 was the last time. So for the first, I don't know, six, eight months that I was on Twitter, I religiously read all the reactions to every tweet that I tweeted. And I thought, this is great. I get instant feedback.

really helped me program First Take as sort of the executive producer of First Take in those days, putting the runs downs together. It would really help me to see, oh, that worked and people were really excited about that or they really had a lot to say in response to that. And then I started to comprehend the evil depths of negativity that my tweets could inspire. I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.

I don't think anybody in sports media can detonate a bigger backlash of hate that I am able to detonate. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's just me. It's just who I am. I don't play to the crowd. I just tweet fearlessly and honestly, and I do consider myself a truth teller. And I have my opinions, and I definitely want you to have yours in response. But

The more I started reading comments in 2009, 10, and 11, the more I realized how much I was starting to allow those comments to infect my psyche, to insinuate themselves deeper and deeper into my subconscious. And I began to see many of the men and women I worked with back in my ESPN days, worked with on air, starting to let Twitter control

and dictate and define their very self images. If Twitter told them, pardon my language, they look like shit today, then I would watch them feel like shit. And if Twitter told them that it loved a stance that they were taking, I would see them, see their confidence just grow leaps and bounds. And

They would become fuller and fuller of themselves because Twitter was backing them to say things that I'm not sure they completely believed. And then during commercial breaks, I could see these compatriots of mine open their phones and bask in the applause in their comment section from what they just said on air for better and then for worse.

Heck, I found that as thick as I like to think my skin is, if some loser out there, probably still living with his parents at age 35, told me that my, I don't know, my hair looked like a toupee.

it would start to eat at me the rest of the day because I'm thinking, no, my hair is a thousand percent real. Trust me, it's not a toupee. It's real. Thank you, God, for that. I haven't lost my hair. Not yet. Knock it on wood. But my hair is real. And yet if somebody said your hair is obviously a toupee, I would start to let that affect my mood the rest of the day. And then just before the 2012 NBA Finals, as I've mentioned before,

which was back in my hometown of Oklahoma City for game one, Heat at Thunder, LeBron at KD. I began to read death threats on my Twitter from Thunder fans defending Russell Westbrook against my criticism. I still feel like I was ahead of the curve on Russell Westbrook, and I stand by every last word I've ever tweeted or said about Russell Westbrook. But I began to read comments saying,

such as, if you dare to set foot back here in Oklahoma City, it'll be the last time you come back to Oklahoma City, you effing traitor. I read comments like, you'll come home to be buried at home. We will find you. We will put a stop to you. And after a while, I got a little concerned and I passed along, I don't know, six or eight different tweets to ESPN security ahead of those finals. And they took them very seriously.

We wound up hiring a man who was actually the bodyguard, the right-hand protector, the chief of police of Los Angeles, California, to come to Oklahoma City and then go to Miami with me to watch over me 24 hours. And fortunately, after games one and two in Oklahoma City, the series did not return because the Heat won the next four games after the Thunder won the opener. So we didn't have to go back to my hometown of Oklahoma City.

But that was the last time I ever read my comments. Have I received more death threats in the years since 2012? I'm sure I have, but I don't care. I just accept the fact that I'm always a target wherever I go and I can live with that. But now I'm much happier and much mentally healthier because I don't read the comments under my tweets. Thank you.

And finally, we have Casey from Tarrytown, New York, who asks, do you drink Diet Mountain Dew after you finish your workouts? What? Casey, you mean like to celebrate that the workout's over? So I'm going to down a dew? No, no, no, no, no. Look, Casey, I've said this from the start. You got me.

I do love me some Diet Mountain Dew. It is my one vice. I don't get a penny from Diet Mountain Dew to talk about it on the air. I just like it. Maybe I should. Maybe I should seek some sort of endorsement possibility. But I kind of like it that I don't because I just honestly...

truthfully like it. I like the taste of it. And I especially like the kick of it in the morning before Undisputed when I do need a little jolt of caffeine. And I don't think it's good for you. I don't recommend it to you for your health's sake. I don't recommend caffeine. I don't recommend the ingredients of Diet Mountain Dew. But it is refreshing to me.

And I do try to keep it to the one diet Mountain Dew a day about, let's see what time I popped the top on it. Let's see, we get here at four-ish, maybe around five o'clock in the morning ahead of the 6.30 a.m. kickoff, tip-off for Undisputed, I do my one Dew. And yet I will be the first to admit, especially on a Wednesday, and I'm taping this on a Wednesday,

There are times I get home because it's been a long day because I did have Undisputed and then have to prep and execute this show that I get home, I take a quick nap, and I always, always, always, I never miss a weight workout or a cardio. But on Wednesday, I do my weight workout. And it'll be late afternoon in the 4 o'clock range until 5, 5.30. And sometimes I'm just dragging. And sometimes I say...

I'm going to allow myself half a do just for the jolt, just for the caffeine kick. And so I will drink it during my workout to fuel my workout, Casey, but never to celebrate. Even I wouldn't go that far. But thank you for thinking about me. And I do say Diet Mountain Dew, the breakfast of champions, the nectar of the gods.

That's it for episode 118. Thank you for listening and or watching. Thanks to Jonathan Berger and his All Pro team for making this show go. Thanks to Tyler Korn for producing. And please remember, Undisputed every weekday, 930 to noon Eastern, The Skip Bayless Show, every week.