There are two NFL franchises that have deliberately set out to create simplistic images of themselves that everyone can identify with, the Dallas Cowboys and the Oakland Raiders.
Oakland wears black uniforms and it is alleged that they play “dirty” football at times. Cheering for them is like cheering for the “bad guy” in professional wrestling, or an antihero like Richard III, Barabbas, or Tamberlaine.
The Dallas Cowboys usually wear white uniforms, and their fans like to view them as the heroes who wear white hats and ride off into the sunset after defeating evil.
But in real life, the Cowboys can be viewed as villains because it could be argued that they initiated, or at least was a major contributor to, the trend of increasing prices for sports in general and taking North American professional sports away from the “common fan”.
In America, the country that likes to boast of being the land of the free and equal, the Cowboys introduced an alien concept into American sports, one that Americans like to pretend is only associated with Europe or with countries that have social caste cultures like India, the class system.
That started with the opening of Texas Stadium in 1971. It fit in perfectly with the way Texans like to do things larger than life, the king-size way, the 10 gallon hat.
Texas Stadium was the first to have “luxury boxes,” usually priced around $50,000, then a much more expensive sum than than it is today. The Cowboys built the first sports facility that deliberately catered to the rich.
When it first opened most fans viewed it as just another outrageous, wondrous Texas novelty, on the level of the Houston Astrodome where traditional outdoor sports like baseball and football were actually played inside. Few people envisioned the lasting and damaging consequences that Texas Stadium would have.
It became apparent that catering to those with higher annual incomes produced greater revenues. It increased social snobbery. It was a sign that somebody was really making it if they could own or rent their own box and turn up at games to hobnob with the rich and famous.
The idea soon spread to other cities and other sports. Hockey/basketball arenas and baseball/football stadiums now had to be built with enough luxury seating to make them feasible. The cost of constructing them sky rocketed and in many cases private interests could no longer afford to build them. Instead the bill was passed on to the hard-pressed taxpayers, many of whom were now too poor to ever see a game in a facility they would build with their own tax dollars.
It has been estimated that the cost of building a new stadium in Los Angeles so that it can get an NFL franchise will be over $1 billion. Quebec’s new hockey arena is costing its taxpayers $400 million.
It also became a way for rich and greedy sports franchise owners to blackmail cities. “Build us a proper stadium or arena or we will pull out and leave for some place that will,” and many sports franchises have been moved for that reason. So much for loyalty to a community that supported them.
Ticket prices and player salaries soared. For many fans, the opportunity for seeing their local team at an actual game was gone forever.
Elitism also spread to sports media. Soon expensive cable and pay-per-view television networks were created that many fans could not afford. In Canada, the CFL is now exclusively on TSN. It is quite possible that a Canadian football fan can be born and die without ever seeing or knowing anything about Canadian football because he/she cannot afford a cable television package.
There are other negative consequences. For example, NFL football has not been played in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years. The NFL thought Los Angeles would come crawling on its knees within a few years after the Rams and Raiders left in 1995.
But Los Angeles taxpayers have refused to pay for the construction of even one (the NFL would prefer two franchises in Los Angeles) 75,000 seat luxury stadium and so the NFL has not played in its second largest American market for nearly two decades.
A second consequence is that until the Los Angeles situation is suitably rectified in the NFL’s eyes, there will be no expansion elsewhere. 1995 was also the last year the league expanded.
In Toronto, once considered a hotbed for NFL expansion, there was widespread criticism and resentment at the price of tickets for their one token Buffalo Bills game.
There is a scene at the beginning of the movie “Eight Men Out”, about the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal in which two young boys go to see the Chicago White Sox after one of them distributes a few newspapers so that they can have “two bits”, the price of a ticket. What average fan of North American major league sports can do that now?
Meanwhile the creators of Texas Stadium and all that followed have moved on to an even greater sports palace, one that seats over 100,000 fans.
They do things big in Texas. Big facilities, big salaries, larger than life events. But there are now over 44 million people in the United States, unofficially labeled “poor” who may find that the “big” legacy in North American professional sports that the “good guys” the Dallas Cowboys have significantly helped to create will always be beyond their grasp.
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