Editors' note: Joe Nick Patoski is a former writer for Texas Monthly, the Austin American-Statesman and Rolling Stone who has been writing on Texas — and Texans — for four decades.
In 2008, he wrote a comprehensive biography on the life of Willie Nelson. In October, Patoski released his next great feat: a comprehensive history of "America's Team," the Dallas Cowboys.
Below is an excerpt from The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America. Check out CultureMap's interview with Joe Nick Patoski.
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Cowboys Stadium (aka JerryWorld; aka the Death Star) was all about superlatives — a $1.2 billion jewel, constructed with the help of the good citizens of Arlington, who kicked in $325 million, and the spectators paying from $2,000 to $1 million for licenses to dib seats that were each priced from $59 to $340 per game. With standing-room-only tickets going for $29, a $60 fee for a tailgating space, $75 for a close in parking space, $10 for popcorn, $12 for Cowboyritas, and $40 for a pizza, the revenue streams flowed.
Jerry Jones compared the look of the stadium’s exterior to “a really contemporary cell phone,” then to a tractor. “It’s a tool to entertain a lot of people,” he said.
Jerry Jones compared the look of the stadium’s exterior to “a really contemporary cell phone,” then to a tractor. “As beautiful and as proud of it as I am, it’s a tool to entertain a lot of people,” he said.
Dallas had long ago shed its stereotype of being an oil baron’s playground full of women with fake boobs and cotton-candy hair, a city that was once the divorce capital of the world. Twenty-first-century Dallas was a gay hotbed, according to Time magazine. Its officeholders included the country’s only big-city African American district attorney, a gay county judge, and a lesbian Latina sheriff.
Dallas had the largest rail construction program in the country (DART), with several new lines joining the existing lines, including a genuine subway that would eventually connect Fair Park, an area with the largest collection of art deco exhibition buildings in the world, with Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, one of the world’s busiest. The Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Meyerson Symphony Center, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art would soon be joined by four new buildings, including a theater and an opera hall, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects — a $300 million add on.
The city could brag that it had the top high school in the United States, according to Newsweek magazine (the School of Science and Engineering Magnet), and that four other high schools in the Dallas Independent School District had made the top half of the magazine’s list.
“This to me is what football can be for the future,” Jerry Jones proclaimed when Cowboys Stadium officially opened on September 20.
It was only fitting, then, that football’s finest showcase was the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
“This to me is what football can be for the future,” Jerry Jones proclaimed when Cowboys Stadium officially opened on September 20 with a game against the New York Giants.
His image on national television was followed by a video roll call of the Seven Man-Made Wonders of the World, concluding with the Roman Colosseum before the shot dissolved into the new stadium with announcer Al Michaels’s declaration, “What the Roman Colosseum was to the first century is what Cowboys Stadium is to the twenty-first century!”
Former president of the United States and Dallas resident George W. Bush, wearing a coat and tie, conducted the coin toss midfield to start the game. Flames erupted from cannons on the field as a hundred-yard-long flag was unfurled for the national anthem. Randy White, Bob Lilly, Rayfield Wright, the Triplets (Aikman, Smith, and Irvin), Roger Staubach, and other legendary Cowboy players were on hand.
Paid attendance for the first official game was 105,121 — an all-time record for an NFL game in the United States. The arena’s record is unlikely to be broken; Arlington officials complained that Jones sold close to thirty thousand party passes to access standing areas behind the end zones, prompting police to erect barricades and turn ticket holders away and inspiring some fans to chant curse words at Jones.
Thirty-seven arrests were made, including thirty on suspicion of public intoxication; two for public intoxication and assault; and one each for public intoxication and marijuana, public intoxication and resisting arrest, and public intoxication and evading arrest. “There [were] beer bottles flying around and a lot of pushing and shoving,” Arlington mayor Robert Cluck told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The prevailing sentiment was that by building the stadium, Jerry Jones had done something no one before him had.
“I don’t think we want to see a repeat of that.”
The televised game attracted 24.8 million viewers and a 15.1 final national rating, the largest audience in the three-plus seasons of Sunday Night Football for the NBC network. Locally, NBC’s Sunday Night Football telecast drew 1,700,608 Dallas-area viewers, while the Emmy Awards on CBS drew just 166,075 viewers, and ABC’s showing of King Kong counted 86,359 pairs of eyeballs.
The prevailing sentiment was that by building the stadium, Jerry Jones had done something no one before him had.
The Giants’ Lawrence Tynes kicked a field goal as time ran out, earning the visitors a 33–31 victory. At that point, it had been thirteen years since the Cowboys had won a playoff game; the first home game played in their new house did not suggest that this status would change come December.
Jerry Jones may have built something even bigger than the football team he owned. But Jerry Jones couldn’t be happy with that; he admitted a week later that he would love nothing more than to coach the team he owned. He wanted to be George Halas, the owner-coach of the Chicago Bears, a founder of the National Football League, and one of the key reasons the Dallas Cowboys even existed.
The prevailing sentiment was that by building the stadium, Jerry Jones had done something no one before him had. But somewhere on the other side, Clint W. Murchison Jr. was enjoying a hearty laugh. Poor Jones. All the hype, all the gripes, all the hoo-haw about this stadium was a rerun of what Clint experienced in 1971 when Texas Stadium opened as the home field of the Dallas Cowboys. Exactly what section of the other side Clint was on depended on whether his embrace of Christianity late in life had resolved the dilemma posed in Matthew 19:24: Was it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God?
Clint Murchison was the one who created the mystique and prestige out of nothing. Jones just bought it.
In other words, Jerry World was hardly the first state of the-football-art stadium in that metropolitan area. Clint Murchison (pronounced “Murkison”) built his palace expressly for football, designed the grandstands to be closer to the action than any comparable stadium’s before it, incorporated luxury suites into it like no stadium before it, and protected the seating area with a roof so the game could be played in the elements while the spectators stayed dry.
That’s where the similarities ended. Murchison was the one who created the mystique and prestige out of nothing. Jones just bought it.
To the old guard who remembered his backstory, Jones was still an uncouth, reptilian Arkie, no matter how fairylike his visage had been rendered. Until all the old farts were dead and gone, Jones’s past would not be forgotten.
The team before Jones was a whole other organization, led by a brain trust that designed the blueprint upon which professional football franchises were subsequently built. Dallas too was very different then, an adolescent city just beginning to flex its muscles as a powerhouse.
This is the story of that team, those people, and the city that made them.
The Dallas Cowboys by Joe Nick Patoski.
