Dallas Cowboys Stadium Ready For the 2009 Season
Accommodation has become the name of the game as the new sports economics changes everything from the size of stadiums to the demographics of the crowd.
Texas Stadium seated nearly 65,000, its replacement around 73,000 for regular games with the ability to accommodate more than 100,000 for the Super Bowl (coming in 2011) and other special events.
Owners now demand column-free spaces and as many luxury suites as the place can hold to pay for all those oxymoronically named “free agents.” (Cowboys Stadium has 300 at $100,000 to $500,000 per year.) These requirements combine to push upper decks higher and farther away from the field so that in many stadiums the game becomes only a rumor.
To aid Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones in paying the construction costs of the new stadium, Arlington voters approved the increase of the city’s sales tax by one-half of a percent, the hotel occupancy tax by 2 percent, and car rental tax by 5 percent.
The City of Arlington provided $325 million in funding, and Jones covered any cost overruns. Also, the NFL provided the Cowboys with an additional $150 million, as per their policy for giving teams a certain lump sum of money for stadium financing.
Fortunately, architect Bryan Trubey has been able to translate this over-the-top program, in which excess threatens to trump excess at every turn, into a fluid contemporary design that belongs to its own time. No retro camouflage like Rangers Ballpark in Arlington or American Airlines Center. No cheap nostalgia.
The stadium is easily the best of the current crop: more open and accessible than the Arizona Cardinals’ home in Phoenix, more rational than the hapless renovation of Soldier Field in Chicago and more immediately engaging than Trubey’s new stadium for the Indianapolis Colts, which has some of the dour industrial qualities of the oil company it’s named for.
At the same time, one of the major successes of the stadium is its transparency. Fans have clear, unobstructed views up, down and across the seating bowl to the not-so-scenic parking lots beyond.
