Texas Stadium - History

History

In the mid-1960s, then-Cowboys owner Clint Murchison, Jr. realized that the area surrounding the Cotton Bowl had become unsafe and downtrodden, and it was not a location he wanted his season ticket holders to be forced to go through. Murchison was denied a request by Dallas mayor Erik Jonsonn to build a new stadium in downtown Dallas as part of a civic-bond package.

Murchison envisioned a new stadium with sky-boxes and one in which attendees would have to pay a personal seat license as a prerequisite to purchasing season tickets. With two games left for the Cowboys to play in the 1967 NFL season, Murchison and Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm announced a plan to build a new stadium in Irving, Texas.

Texas Stadium, along with the Pontiac Silverdome, Arrowhead Stadium, and Ralph Wilson Stadium were part of a new wave of football only stadia built after the AFL-NFL merger. Moreso than its contemporaries, Texas Stadium featured a proliferation of luxury boxes, which provided the team with a large new income source exempt from league revenue sharing.

The stadium would become an icon of the Cowboys with their rise in national prominence. Its field was surrounded by a blue wall emblazoned with white stars, a design replicated in Cowboys Stadium.

Read more about this topic:  Texas Stadium

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.
    Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)

    It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.
    Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)

    Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.
    Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)