Lawrence A. “Larry” Jones knows plenty of people would kill for his job—and on some stressful days he’d like to hand it to them.

“But most days not,” Jones says, sitting at his cluttered desk on the Fox Studios lot in Century City.

As chief operating officer of Fox Sports, Jones, J.D. ’76, played a key role in securing the broadcast rights to many of the world’s premier sporting events. In the past year, Jones, father to past Student Government vice president and current UM employee Molly Jones, B.S.C. ’08, has attended the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the college championship game, to name a few.

But don’t think the New Jersey native, who was legal counsel for a circus after graduating from UM’s law school, is a sports nut. “It’s not my big passion in life,” he says.

Jones is passionate about helping sports fans pursue theirs, however, and loves the magical, unifying force of The Big Game. “Where else can you find people who have never met high-fiving each other?” he notes.

Now 58, Jones joined Fox in 1988, two years after the upstart network was created to challenge the Big Three—ABC, CBS, NBC. He successfully launched Fox Night at the Movies and its 24-hour cable service, so when Fox won a stunning $1.58 billion bid to wrest National Football Conference games from CBS in 1993, he was enlisted to the new sports division.

“We actually called it the sport division ’cause we only had one,” he remembers.

Not for long. Jones also helped Fox acquire rights to Major League Baseball, NASCAR races, and other prime programming, including the college Bowl Championship Series.

Today, he credits the executive producers at Fox Sports for its top ratings. All he does, he says, is figure out how to execute and pay for their bold ideas.

Not bad for a guy who, rather than watch TV sports, prefers to read (he’s working through a list of 100 top novels), surf off his Pacific coast ranch, and tend the exotic protea flowers he sells.

“If you have the basic skills and right attitude,” Jones explains, “the subject matter is irrelevant.”

—Maya Bell