Jerry Jones was one of the nearly 70,000 people who packed the New Orleans Superdome to watch the 1978 heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks.
The energy of the massive crowd, the roars cascading down from the upper deck and the sense of being part of something so big and grand has never left him. The Dallas Cowboys owner has seen fights everywhere from the Las Vegas Strip to small halls in his native Arkansas. Each is unique, he says.
Yet, as you might expect with Jones, now the prototypical Texan, bigger just always felt better.
“The larger the crowd, the more impact every punch, every tackle, is,” he said Monday. “It magnifies every act in sports.”
Jones is bringing “big” back to boxing Saturday when his new Cowboys Stadium hosts the Manny Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey welterweight title fight. In doing so, he is making a move to reconnect the sport with its mostly blue-collar base, 45,000 fans at a time.
It’s not often you build a palatial, $1 billion-plus facility and are hailed as a man of the people. But that’s what’s happening.
There’s nothing quite like the electricity of a big fight in Vegas. There, however, the high costs of tickets and travel have made it something only the well-heeled can experience. Fight weekend is mostly geared to the wealthy.
This is different.
The fight is in suburban Arlington, Texas, smack dab in the middle of the nearly seven-million-population Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and centrally located to millions more in the nation’s second largest state.
Jones has set up the seating configuration for 45,000. Tickets are as low as $50, and with 40,000 sold, according to Top Rank, some are still available. If they sell out, officials can add more seats to keep the secondary market from soaring.
While fifty bucks is nothing to brush off, it’s fairly reasonable considering it’s a chance to see the world’s best pound-for-pound fighter live. If this fight was taking place in, say, the 12,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center in Vegas, the cheapest tickets would have gone for about $150 – and those would’ve been snapped up quickly.
“It doesn’t take a mathematician to realize the more numbers you put into the building, the less you have to charge,” Jones said.
“We’re excited about the makeup of our fan base,” he added, noting the region’s large Hispanic community.
Jones built his stadium to bring any number of events to Texas. He’s already hosted an NFL season, major college football games and a six-figure crowd to watch the NBA All-Star game. Boxing is just one of them, but it’s special to him. In 1984, his pre-Cowboys days, he even promoted a fight in Little Rock.
“One of the early renditions of the interior [of the stadium] had the seats around a boxing ring,” he said.
It was one of the reasons he installed the signature 11,520-square-foot high-definition television screen above the field of play. It can be raised and lowered based on the event. Saturday, it’ll hang 40 feet above the ring and assure that anyone inside the building will see every bit of the action.
“Every time a bead of sweat pops up on the shoulder of Manny Pacquiao or Joshua Clottey,” Jones said, “everyone is going to see it as clear – or clearer – than someone sitting in the first row of seats.”
Jerry Jones (center) wants to make Cowboys Stadium an alternative to Vegas for the superfights. (Mike Fuentes/AP Photo)
Jones is doing this for the money, of course. Cowboys Stadium is a testament to wealth and opulence; it’s not construction workers filling all those luxury boxes to watch Tony Romo and company. Jones is staging this fight because he has a world-class facility and he needs a lot of world-class events to make it financially viable. Cowboys games alone won’t pay the bills.
While there’s no need to grant him sainthood, the move allows a different set of fans to take in the fight or at least get swept up in the excitement. It’s a byproduct worth applauding.
It’s not just the ticket prices which make the fight family-friendly. You don’t need to spend money on a hotel room. You can tailgate outside the stadium to save meal costs. You’re walking your kids into a sport arena, not through a Vegas casino on a Saturday night. And even for those not attending, the buildup for the fight should create a surge of interest in boxing locally. Both fighters have staged open workouts for the public.
Almost nothing shoots itself in the foot more often than this sport, where ego and greed routinely conspire. Boxing keeps getting back up, though. Fighting is in the human DNA, and even corruption, alphabet-soup titles and matchups which never happen can’t stop the thrill of watching the likes of Manny Pacquiao.
“The events for [Cowboys Stadium] have to be big; that’s why I was so interested in Manny Pacquiao,” Jones said. “Manny Pacquiao being the superb fighter, athlete, person that he is, that’s the kind of competitor you want in the stadium.”
Jones is serious about making Cowboys Stadium an alternative to Vegas for the superfights.
When the possibility of a Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight materialized last fall, Jones sent Bob Arum of Top Rank Boxing a preliminary site-fee bid of $25 million. He promised to go higher if necessary. The highest site bid ever, according to the The Dallas Morning News, was $18 million by MGM Grand for the 2007 Mayweather-Oscar De La Hoya bout. (Jones paid $7 million to host Pacquiao-Clottey).
Jones says that he isn’t a threat but an asset to Vegas. The sport needs to spread its appeal. It can’t just hunker down on the Strip or an occasional trip to Madison Square Garden. Taking Pacquiao to the people is good for everyone.
“We can all help each other,” Jones said.
So Manny comes to Texas. And maybe, just maybe, he returns one day to fight Mayweather in front of 100,000. Either way, Jones says he’s going to appreciate the atmosphere of Saturday night and let his mind drift back to the heydays of when Ali could sell out any building of any size in the world.
Everything is bigger in Texas. Fight crowds included.
