A night at the soap opera: Cowboys Stadium
I spent Sunday night at JerryWorld for the historic first Cowboys’ regular-season game in their $1.15 billion stadium. I like to say that Jerry Jones has built the second-best ballpark on Randol Mill Road.
The Ballpark in Arlington, which sits a block or two down the street from Cowboys Stadium, is much the better coliseum. Not as glitzy. Not as flashy. Not as otherworldly. But more stately. More beautiful. More character. Much more character.
Which is no indictment of the football stadium. It’s just that baseball parks almost always have more charm than football stadiums, which are bound by conformity. Football fields are regulated in size; baseball parks are full of nooks and crannies and odd little places that collectively can make up a stunning piece of architecture.
With all that said, the new Cowboys Stadium — what a horrid name; you almost long for the moment when Jones sells the naming rights to a corporation — was bubbling with excitement Sunday night.
The mass of humanity in the standing-room-only sections — perhaps as much as 25,000 fans — was a spectacle perhaps unseen in American sport. I’m glad I was nowhere near it. It looked like one giant mosh pit, with many of the fans drinking. Doesn’t sound like fun to me.
But again, the star of the show was the massive video board. OU fans who were at JerryWorld for the BYU game can attest to its dominance. Actually, the star was the camera that fed the video board. The closeups of the players’ faces are amazing. The eyeballs of Eli Manning and Tony Romo are like 15 feet tall. There’s never been anything like it in sports video.
Romo talked about the great crowd support, but from where I sat, the stadium seemed no more loud than when 75,000 were there for the OU-BYU game. The Cowboys historically have not had a rabid fan base like Green Bay or Denver or Cleveland. I don’t see where the new stadium gives the Cowboys any sort of extra homefield advantage.
The stadium was hot — temperatures near 90 at kickoff — and the roof was opened, surely for grandeur reasons. On television, the stadium look was spectacular with the roof and the ends opened. Inside the stadium, the open ends made for a great feel and effect, sort of like Allen Fieldhouse at Kansas or Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for day games, when sunlight shines through the windows at the top.
Traffic wasn’t even the nightmare I thought it might be. We left the pressbox probably 70 minutes after the game, and if you went the right direction, traffic had thinned out. We ran into construction up on Texas highway 121, 10 miles from the stadium, which cost us 30 minutes of backup, but otherwise, it ran smoothly.
And of course, the ballgame was spectacular. The NFL consistently produces the greatest sporting show. The Giants’ 33-31 was riveting from the opening kick. The better quarterback (Manning) beat the better team, which doesn’t always happen but sometimes does.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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