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:

    “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
    —Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    “Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
    —Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)

    “There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
    —Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)