The more things change, the more they stay the same. A tired and hackneyed adage for sure, but one that holds remarkably true as the Cowboys play their last season in this old gray mare they call Texas Stadium.
That new park over in Arlington? Now that's going to be nice. The huge screen hanging over the field, a football first. The luxury boxes right down at event level, very nice. A drop-top roof, well that's nothing special anymore, is it? But those sliding glass walls in the end zones? And the lavishly decorated concourses? A fella could get used to this treatment. Some say the Cowboys new digs may even be able to blast right into orbit. And, just by looking at the place, that doesn't seem so far fetched.
But thinking big is nothing new for the Dallas Cowboys. See, 40 years ago all the same things were being said about the team's Irving playground. Consider Sports Illustrated's first take on the place, from its Aug. 14, 1972 edition:
"A tackle in the middle of the field can look up and see himself on TV screens and at the same time see people with glasses of champagne watching him watching himself. And they are all together inside what resembles a Hilton space station - with a mile of carpeted halls, escalators, heating and air-conditioning outlets, 1,433,000 watts of lighting and tourist tours three days a week. All the customers in the chair seatsÂ…are treated superbly, as (Clint) Murchison promised they would be."
In so many ways, Texas Stadium set the bar for what a football stadium should be - even for the modern generation of plants.
"There was a time when you could subject sports fans to any indignity, but that day is past, although most sports promoters don't yet realize it," said Murchison, the original Cowboys owner, in the same article.
This is the story of how the house with the hole in the roof came to be, and how it almost didn't. Of how the Cowboys went from being "next year's team," whose rabid fans suffered through the splintery bleachers of the Cotton Bowl with little on-field reward, to the white-collar darlings who earned polite applause and approving nods as they rolled through the 1970s NFL.
Fair Park's Cotton Bowl underwent a recent renovation, but in the Cowboys' early years there, the reasons for complaint greatly outnumbered the home offense's point totals.
There wasn't enough parking. The bleachers were cramped. They were hard and uncomfortable. Where were all the bathrooms? The water fountains? It. Was. Sooooo. Hot.
That, and the place had all the aesthetic charm and character of an East German slum. They didn't even have cheerleaders back then, if one can imagine. At least not like we've come to expect today.
By 1965, Murchison was ready to build the Cowboys a venue all their own, one with the creature comforts of home, since he and many football people saw the league's primary box office competition as television. Back then, NFL teams were making good money from the league's TV deal, but certainly nothing like today. If the stadium experience was so uninteresting and inconvenient that it kept fans from the game, this created a problem not just for stadium coffers, but for the league.
These were the days when TV blackouts were a serious worry for Cowboys boosters. If attendance wasn't high enough, the home audience was in real danger of missing out on the action. The more people went to the game, the more likely the contest would be broadcast, the more likely the ratings would be higher, the more likely next year's TV deal would be even richer.
In 1965, Murchison met with Dallas and state fair officials to discuss the possibility of building a brand new Cotton Bowl. Talks continued throughout the '65 season, though little headway was made, and Murchison began to prefer a downtown Dallas home for the 'Boys.
City planners, including Mayor Erik Jonsson, wanted a renovated Cotton Bowl, but Murchison found little reason to compromise. He envisioned a shining jewel of Texas, a crowning achievement for the city. Eventually, that's what he got.
"The Cotton Bowl was such a traditional place. There were so many big games played there," said former Cowboys running back Calvin Hill. "I remember going over to Texas Stadium. It was just so unique with the hole in the roof, the boxes, etc. You had the (turf); it was just so pristine. I remember we went to practice there and Bob Lilly says, 'I wonder if it's okay if we spit on the carpet.' It just seemed like you were in an opera house or something. It didn't seem like a place where you were going to sweat and bleed."
After sneakily buying up land on a teardrop-shaped plot in Irving and quietly making plans with the suburb's city council, Murchison abandoned any hope of his dream location in downtown Dallas. The citizens of Irving twice passed votes to allow the city to issue bond options to potential season ticket holders. A forerunner to today's personal seat licenses, the bonds sold for $250-$1,000, a pretty penny in those days, and gave fans the right to purchase season tickets. Not even the $6-a-month for 50 months option could make the seats affordable for some Cotton Bowl patrons, and Murchison fell out of favor with many of the team's Average Joe supporters.
"There was a lot of negative vibes from how Mr. Murchison had to build it," said former safety Charlie Waters. "He had to do that because he didn't get the help he wanted from the city of Dallas, and he had to go to Irving to get that."
"I played in the first game that was ever played at Texas Stadium," said former running back Walt Garrison. "It was so much different than the Cotton Bowl. I loved the Cotton Bowl, but I loved Texas Stadium, too, because it was, at that time, probably the classiest football venue in the NFL."
"It was a totally different environment," said former lineman Jethro Pugh. "Texas Stadium was a little more upscale versus the Cotton Bowl. A lot of people couldn't afford Texas Stadium. Consequently, we lost a lot of what we called rabid fans. It was like a tennis match, they would all applaud a little when we played good.
"Women wore mink coats to the games. It was just different. After the game, you would go to shake the other team's hand and they would say, 'What's going on in this place?' It's different now, you can bring signs in, there're a lot of great fans yelling and screaming. It's changed a lot."
The stadium's luxury deck, a new idea at the time, became an instant hit at games. Suddenly, there was spectacle above and below, in front and behind, in the stands.
"I have the odd feeling that the game people came here to see is no longer entirely on the field, but has spread into the stands, especially into those opera boxes they call Circle Suites," one former Cowboy told Sports Illustrated's Edwin Shrake.
"It is in the Circle Suites that the game is becoming a special event - composed of cocktail partying, live entertainment and electronic stimulation. And everybody under the roof can choose to watch what is going on inside the suites as well as what is happening on the field," Shrake wrote. "A suite more conspicuous than most has been called, among other things, the Let-'Em-Eat-Cake Room. In order to acquire it, Frederic Wagner and J.L. Williams, like the other 157 boxholders, had to buy $50,000 worth of revenue bonds from the community of Irving - one of Dallas' neighboring towns, which owns the stadium with Murchison's backing. Then, they had to buy 12 season tickets at $10 apiece to fill the available spaces and agree to pay dues for 12 memberships to the Stadium Club, the only place besides the suites where the drinking of liquor, wine or beer is allowed. For this, Wagner and Williams received a bare room with a concrete floor and sheet-rock walls. So, they called in a decorator and spent close to $40,000 on a Louis XIV outfit with a vaulted ceiling, a chandelier with 1,000 prisms, velvet tufted chairs, oil paintings, a refrigerator, sink, ice-maker, freezer, telephone, television and a bar staffed by a butler in white gloves."
While a number of the well-to-do of North Texas debated the merits of mahogany versus oak, thousands of men who could never afford seats worked nearly three years, beginning in January 1969, to raise the gridiron Taj Mahal. Murchison promised the team would be in the new stomping ground by the beginning of the 1970 season. Mother nature, labor and financing trouble, and President Richard Nixon combined to push the first game back more than a year.
In the summer of 1970, construction screeched to a halt during a bricklayers' union strike, as other teams of workers on the site refused to cross their fellow workers' picket line. The next summer, wet weather slowed progress, as did a nearly three-month long plumbers' strike, which was lengthened due to Nixon's wage and price controls, an attempt to slow inflation. As the season approached, a deal was brokered and the work resumed.
"The first time I drove over, I thought it looked like a giant silver hamburger in the sky," Waters said. "I do remember we went over there to Texas Stadium to practice a week before the first game. That practice it was raining. You know, you look up through the roof and it always looks like it's just pouring down raining. And Cornell Green calls me over and he's standing on the sidelines against the wall. He says, 'Come over here,' and I go over there and he's dry. He said, 'This is screwed up. The fans are staying dry and we're the ones getting wet. This is not right.'"
The Cowboys would play the 1971 season's first two home games in the Cotton Bowl before finally christening the new park Oct. 24 with a 44-21 win over the New England Patriots.
"We were aware of the delays, but it wasn't like a big issue to us," continued Waters. "Coach Landry had us so focused on the task at hand, it just wasn't a factor. That first game that we played, it was very special. I fell in love with Texas Stadium."
Waters wasn't the only one. The 1971 team lost its next game in Chicago before going undefeated the rest of the season.
"When Mr. Murchison decided he was going to build this new stadium, it wasn't exciting just for the players, but for the fans, too," said Hall of Fame tackle Rayfield Wright. "It was very exciting for the players to go into our own stadium. That was our home. We wanted to perform well in our own home. It was the most beautiful stadium any of the players had ever seen."
The sense of awe carried over to visiting teams as well. The Cowboys would lose at home just three times the next two years. They capped Texas Stadium's inaugural season with a 14-3 win there against San Francisco in the NFC championship game and carried the momentum into Super Bowl VI in New Orleans, besting Miami 24-3.
From the giant silver hamburger in the sky to the doomed, yet cherished landmark it is today, the hole in the roof remains. The clock is ticking on Texas Stadium.
And though greener pastures lie ahead, it's hard not to look back.
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