KEEPING WITH TRADITION

Do elements of Cowboys Stadium remind you of Texas Stadium? That’s not accident.

By Mickey Spagnola

Friday, December 11, 2009 - 1:00am

ARLINGTON, Texas — So much is being made of the cutting-edge technology the Dallas Cowboys have saturated their $1.2 billion Cowboys Stadium with. You name it, it’s there.

The retractable roof.

The gi-normous video screens stretching nearly 60 yards wide and hanging over the center of the field.

The high-def, flat-panel video screens installed at nearly every turn throughout the stadium so not a single play need be missed if fans are walking through the corridors for whatever.

The retractable end-zone doors, when open giving this new-age stadium the feel of an outdoor arena.

The suites, the locker rooms, the club areas and even a kitchen area so large and so busy they run three shifts of workers out there to man the facility.

But as the Cowboys hurdled themselves into the future building the 3.0 million square-foot facility, they also did not forget their past, valuing the traditions established over 39 seasons at Texas Stadium by sprinkling many of them throughout what some are calling the space-age domed facility.

Like the infamous hole in the roof.

The ultra-recognizable cross beams cutting through the opening.

The Ring of Honor.

The white star-studded blue stadium walls.

And of course, the Tom Landry Statue.

“I give Jerry a lot of credit on this,” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said, referring to his father and 20-year Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. “We had 40 years of tradition of playing in Texas Stadium, obviously the hole in the roof so God could watch his favorite team play, those types of fun things.

“But in all seriousness, 40 years of tradition became our brand, and it was very important to our family and to Jerry that we keep that as part of our brand, and the hole in the roof was one of the first things he pointed to and felt like we needed to keep, obviously along with such things as the Ring of Honor and the Tom Landry statue, those types of things.

“All were very important to continue that brand.”

And the HKS, Inc. architects and Manhattan Construction seamlessly pulled this off in the 80,000-seat stadium that will expand to 100,000 seats when Super Bowl XLV comes calling on Feb. 6, 2011.

When the retractable roof opens, the opening unmistakably emulates the Texas Stadium Hole in the Roof, complete with those distinguishable cross beams seen so many times from all those memorable nighttime blimp shots on the Monday Night Football telecasts. They just recreate in the minds of visitors the long-ago voices of Dandy Don and Howard and The Giffer.

The Cowboys couldn’t stop there. So many fans were agonizing over what would happen to the Cowboys Ring of Honor, the exclusivity former president Tex Schramm created and Jerry Jones continued making what amounted to their own hall of fame a national discussion.

Not a problem. The stadium designers simply recreated the Ring of Honor on the stadium façade just above the appropriately named Ring of Honor suite level. No deviations, either. There are 14 names, in their exact order they were at Texas Stadium, on the south sideline of the stadium, and the Triplets, again, just like at Texas Stadium, by themselves — Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith — on the north sideline. Same typeface, numbers next to the players’ names and the infamous hat next to Landry’s and a Cowboys star next to Schramm’s.

Detail, detail.

“When you have the great players like we have and the great tradition of the Cowboys, it’s easy to continue something like that,” said Stephen Jones, who was quite involved in the design decisions as was the entire Jones Family, “But I do think our fans appreciate that, they enjoy that and obviously it’s worked for 40 years so it was important for us to continue that.”

And the Cowboys did what they could to include those visible white stars that spotted the blue walls outlining the lower stands at field level of Texas Stadium. This time, space was created below those field-level, end-zone suites for such a blue wall. And yes, those white stars, that fans were paying a couple of hundred dollars for when Texas Stadium memorabilia was sold at closing, were once again aligned.

“Whenever we could do it and do it the right way, we wanted to keep the tradition,” Stephen Jones said. “It’s part of our brand, it’s just like the star on the helmet. And we wanted to continue a lot of those things. But at the same time we wanted to represent new, cutting-edge technology and give our fans something new as well.

“But I think it’s a great mix and it’s something our fans enjoy.”

Then, the Cowboys had one last move to make to complete the package of tradition transition to the new stadium:

Move Tom Landry — the nine-foot tall statue of their former legendary coach that had been standing out front of Texas Stadium at Gate 1 since 2001, a little bit more than a year after his Feb. 12, 2000 death. That was the least the Cowboys could do for a guy who had coached the franchise to unprecedented success their first 29 years of existence (1960-88).

And that’s exactly what the Cowboys did, propping up the statue on a pedestal on the north side of the stadium, just to the east of what’s known as the “360 entrance,” since the Cowboys figure that entrance will be open 360 days a year. There, Landry stands guard.

The statue has certainly become a more easily accessed destination for fans and visitors, who don’t miss the chance to click a picture of the statue that once stood out front of Texas Stadium.

No way were the Cowboys going to leave Landry behind.

As Stephen Jones said, “We obviously couldn’t do that, he’s made a tremendous impact on this franchise and continues to do so. The statue is a small way of continuing that tradition.”

And what do you have, if you don’t respect your traditions?