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 is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
    —Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    “Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
    —Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    “There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
    —Karl Marx (1818–1883)