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.