Crystal Wise
My first order of business before, well, I order is asking Mama’s Pizza chieftain Jordan Scott where exactly the revered Fort Worth institution stands in the pie marketplace since he put it on a growth trajectory after taking over the business almost 20 years ago.
It’s as good as it’s ever been with Mama’s again expanding past the territorial jurisdiction of Greater Fort Worth. In the past, a relative lifetime ago, there were stores catering to the collegians in Abilene Christian, College Station, and Lubbock. Today, 15 stores are standing — or soon will be — in the Greater Fort Worth area, one in Dallas, and another in Houston. Two more, Jordan says, are planned for the Space City.
That’s not a problem, Houston, this iconic brand (well, iconic to us) moving into the neighborhood. The product is as fulfilling as a Bible verse. Yes, the Mama’s experience is somewhat religious. And, of course, the characters who crossed its doorframes, from the owners to the people who gormandized the righteous product (and a little — or a lot of — beer, perhaps), are as legendary as any others who have roamed these parts.
Four of the stores are corporately owned. Eleven are owned by franchise operators, including, yes, the store in Houston. Jordan says his goal is 15 franchised stores, so, he has four to go.
A query followed: Why cap it at 15 if there’s demand for more?
“Well,” Jordan says, “I want to play video poker, too.”
One thing to know about Jordan Scott: He is not an all-work, no-play kind of guy.
Living a complete, well-rounded life includes a number of other things not called pepperoni and all the glorious things that can go with it on top of a pizza.
Skiing, for instance. He and wife Nicole are taking a couple of trips a year to do that. Fishing. There can be lots of that, but a trip to Port O’Connor on the Texas coast with his dad, Tim, and good buddy Cole Durham is on the calendar annually. In the past, the three would take off for Alaska one year and Canada the next in search of fish. But the price is better and the fishing as good in Texas, Scott says, though salmon and halibut not the targets.
And there’s hunting, of course.
Crystal Wise
“Did I mention video poker,” Jordan kids.
It’s actually not really a joking matter, this video poker. Jordan enjoys playing and competing. Gambling in Las Vegas is certainly an avocation. Blackjack and craps were, and still are, go-tos. But he remembers not long ago seeing a gentleman making a career — or let’s call it several hours — at a video poker machine.
Jordan’s curiosity got the best of him.
“I went up to him and said, ‘What are you playing?’” Jordan says. “He told me and said it had the best odds.”
The gentlemen sent him a book, a Mensa guide of some sort on casino gambling.
“I read the book,” Jordan says. “Now I’m addicted.”
Jordan has had a nice little run on video poker, but, ultimately, it’s hunting that makes demands on his free time. He has less of it these days, now that he’s married and raising a little girl, Leighton.
But hunting is a passion that takes up some of his energy. Jordan has a lot of that, energy. He’s really an avid sportsman. Jordan hunts birds, too. Talking about his late bird dog almost brings him to tears. He has constant reminders of her all around his home office with pictures sitting in a couple of different corners.
He got hooked on deer hunting through Chris Farkas, his godfather and second owner of Mama’s. Farkas and his brother bought the pizzeria, originally located across the street from Texas Wesleyan, on East Rosedale, from the original owner, Ed Stebbins, whose mother-in-law was “Mama.” Farkas, who died in 2003, left the business to Jordan.
As an aside, Farkas, too, had his obsessions. One was studying archaeology and anthropology with an interest in the various techniques used to produce usable tools from various types of stone, like flint weapons, arrow points, spear points, and most other instruments made of stone.
Farkas also, ahem, had a passion for TCU athletics, so much so that it caused him and TCU some grief when it was uncovered that pizza for football players had a little sumpin’ sumpin’ under the pizza. Some extra greens, if you will, for a game well played, perhaps. That’s all water under the bridge today, all that stuff of 40 years ago.
It was Farkas, however, who introduced Jordan to deer hunting. Farkas took him to his ranch in Junction, Texas. He was somewhere between 18 and 20 years old and then a student at Texas Wesleyan, where he played baseball. Jordan later transferred and graduated from TCU, though not exactly on time. (There’s a story there, too. Just hold on a second.)
“The adrenaline rush when you shoot your first deer,” Jordan says, trailing off, distracted by his iPhone which he’s looking for a picture of a favorite kill. He’s actually looking for a few of them. I’m distracted by the aroma of pizza, which he has offered me.
“I think I shot it in the afternoon. I needed to get back that night for school the next morning. I was able to drive six hours and not even bat an eye of sleep because I was so pumped up.”
How keen was he on this new hobby? Even college graduation took a back seat to it. Jordan was set to graduate from TCU but couldn’t make the ceremony because of a hunting trip to Germany.
“Here’s the funny part,” Jordan recalls. “I went into the [adviser’s] office and said, ‘Hey, I’m supposed to graduate in December, but I can’t.’ She looked at me and said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I’m supposed to go to Germany, hunting. Is there any way I can graduate in the spring. She said, ‘I’ve been here 27 years. You’re the first person to ask me not to graduate.’ But she said, ‘Sure, OK.’”
That trip, too, was set up by Farkas, who also served on the city’s Sister City International delegations to, among others, Budapest, Hungary, and Trier, Germany. He chaired the initial Sister City hunting exchange. Fort Worth exchanged hunting trips with Budapest and Trier.
Jordan tagged along on many of those trips and continued to do so even after there was no affiliation with the trips and the Sister Cities. He estimates his hunting trips to Hungary at 10. Lots of Russian boars — not boors, though we certainly know they exist — and red stags.
In Budapest he was introduced to all the ceremony and tradition of hunting. There, on your first kill, you are given a twig off a tree dipped in blood to stick in your hat. The same in Africa. That’s where Jordan asked Nicole for her hand. What better way to do that than to hunt afterward. And she fell in love with it, too, there.
His office at home is full of taxidermied heads from his travels. You’ll see the skull of a warthog or two, too. Jordan is also fair. He doesn’t hunt high fences ranges and no big game in Africa.
“I don’t shoot cats, elephants, or giraffes,” he says. “Those animals are better alive than dead. It’s all plains game animals.”
“And we eat it all,” Nicole says. “Or we donate it to local villages.”
Along those lines, Jordan is adamant that the springbok and gemsbok are the best things you will ever eat. “It’s so much better than beef.”
Jordan has been all over the world harvesting wild food (and sometimes just as a nomad with no permanent abode might have done it) and in every province in Canada, except Alberta. Saskatchewan, the deer capital of the world, is where he harvested his most prized beast.
Locating and shooting a double drop tine white tail is a one-in-2.5-billion proposition, but, sure enough, Jordan found him in Saskatchewan, a place he doesn’t hit much anymore for the reasons you would expect from a native Texan accustomed to his climes.
It’s too cold. “It’s a beating.”
The Canadian province, though, is the location of one of his best hunting stories.
“The first year I go up there, it’s negative 25 for a high. Fahrenheit. That’s the real temperature,” he says. “Not wind chill. I’m in the hunting blind with like this full-bodied sleeping bag, like, where there’s sleeves for your arms and legs. I’m up there for a couple of hours and decide to eat the sandwich I brought. It was rock hard. Frozen. My soda: frozen solid.
“That’s how cold it is. So, that afternoon, here comes a pretty good-sized deer. I go to look at him through my binocular lens, and you start to breathe pretty hard. Well, the fog from my breathing gets onto the lens. Freezes instantly. My dumb ass decides to pull a “Christmas Story” and licks the lens. My tongue freezes to the lens.”
He laughs at the memory. So, do I, of course. Who doesn’t laugh at another’s expense?
“I tell the old man and woman I’m renting a room from the story, and she’s just dying. She says, ‘You’re the biggest entertainment we’ve had in 25 years.’”
Now you can see why Jordan Scott doesn’t want too many stores to oversee.
He’s got things to do.
