Old stadium will remain forever

It doesn’t matter where you fly from—if you’re arriving in Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, you can see Texas Stadium. Or at least, you used to be able to.

Yesterday, over a year after the Dallas Cowboys had their final game in the iconic stadium, Jerry Jones and thousands of Dallas-area residents were on hand to see it demolished.

The Cowboys have some new digs—a state-of-the-art stadium that’s more like a country club than a football stadium—and a replay screen the size of a small country.

Still, watching the video of Texas stadium crumbling was like watching my childhood disappear.

Growing up in Dallas in the ’90s meant staying up late on Sunday and Monday nights to watch the Cowboys. It meant you picked up T-shirts and sweatshirts with “BACK TO BACK” written on them for the whole family at the checkout line of the grocery store.

Cowboy fever is a tame term for the euphoria Dallas felt as the Cowboys started their short-lived dynasty.

I was six when the Cowboys won their third Super Bowl in four years, and the next day, it was all anyone in my class could talk about. The boys used to pretend to be Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, and Emmitt Smith at recess, and little girls dressed up as Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders for Halloween.

The Cowboys were on top of the world, and so were we. “How ’bout them Cowboys?” started every conversation. We were America’s Team, and we were damn good.

And with the Cowboys came Texas Stadium. The hole in the roof of the stadium created legendary shadows, and made the passage of time seem like something concrete. It wasn’t so much the clock, but the shadows eating away yardage that made you yell at the Boys to hurry up if they were behind.

Five banners hung from the rafters boasting the words “WORLD CHAMPIONS” followed by the year: 1972, 1978, 1992, 1993, 1995. Texas Stadium saw Emmitt Smith break Walter Payton’s all-time rushing record. Brett Favre never won there. And when Terrell Owens played for the 49ers, he got blown up when he tried to celebrate a touchdown on the famed 50-yard line star.

That stadium also saw the lowest years for the Cowboys, when the Cowboys of the ’90s had their own personal implosion as the White House story broke (a house near the training facilities where players would hire prostitutes and do drugs after practice), and when the revolving door at quarterback spun faster than the swings at Six Flags. Five different quarterbacks started between the 2001 and 2002 seasons. After the 2001 season, the Cowboys’ merchandising office refused to sell jerseys of quarterbacks unless they had played an entire season.

The stadium opened in 1971, and only housed 65,675 people. For an NFL franchise, the stadium was too small. That’s fair. But when you were there, the noise level reached decibels I haven’t heard at Jerry World. The parking lot of Texas Stadium was almost a city unto itself. Tailgating doesn’t do justice to the custom TVs, lawn chairs, and grills that peppered the stadium lots.
Jerry World is great. I’ve gone to two games there and still can’t get over the fountains, the Kobe burgers, or the Godzillatron.

But even though there’s still a blue star at the 50-yard line, and a new stretch of highway named after Tom Landry, Jerry World has a long way to go before it can compete with the memories of Texas Stadium.

Holly MacDonald is a Barnard College senior majoring in history and English.
sportseditors@columbiaspectator.com