ARLINGTON, Texas -- It's more than an NFL stadium. It's the gleaming new home of the Dallas Cowboys, a $1.2-billion palace with glass walls, a translucent retractable roof, two quarter-mile-long arches and a high-definition video screen that stretches from one 20-yard-line to the other.
The place has all the over-the-top features you might expect from Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, the modern-day P.T. Barnum of the sports world.
It's the Y'all Mahal.
"The Cowboys have never been about checkered tablecloths and boots and hats," Jones says. "They've been about glitz and glitter. Leave the other stuff to the Houston Texans."
Nobody does glitz and glitter quite like Jones, who recently spent two hours touring me around the stadium site. The place will be ready for the start of next season, and will be the site of the Super Bowl in 2011.
To envision the stadium, imagine taking a football and splitting it lengthwise. Now, pull it apart so there's a space in the middle. That's where the field is, and there are open areas at each end where Jones plans to create party plazas, each 3 1/2 acres. There typically won't be seats there, only cocktail tables. Fans will be able to buy standing-room tickets to watch from areas high above either end zone, walking in and out of glass doors big enough for an airplane hangar. Or they can picnic outside and follow the action on gigantic video screens.
You get the feeling Jones could spend all day every day at the place, marveling at the way the stadium's glass skin picks up the colors of the Texas sky like some colossal chandelier.
"Whether it's a gray sky or a blue sky, whether it's sunny or an overcast day, if you think about it, those are the colors of the Dallas Cowboys," he says. "We have the blues, the grays, the silver. So the sky does it."
And, when it comes to this stadium, at least a quarter of which is publicly funded, the sky's the limit. From the swooping design features to the forehead-slapping gewgaws that make you think: only in the world of Jerry Jones . . .
On the center-hung video screen, the players are 72 feet tall.
An entire wall of each field-level suite is a screen that, thanks to special in-house cameras, replicates the view the coach sees from the sideline.
The building has 3 million square feet of air-conditioned space -- three times as much as the soon-to-be-mothballed Texas Stadium -- and can be configured to seat 125,000 spectators, almost twice as much as a typical NFL stadium.
