The new book, co-written by the son of Cowboys founder Clint Murchison Jr., traces the team’s story from the early 1950s to 2022.
Hole in the Roof: The Dallas Cowboys, Clint Murchison Jr., and the Stadium That Changed American Sports Forever
A fisheye lens showed the stripped-down interior of Texas Stadium on March 31, 2009, the last day the Dallas Cowboys occupied the stadium. In a ceremonial transition of ownership, stadium manager Bruce Hardy gave the keys to former Irving Mayor Robert Power.Dallas Texas Stadium and its hole in the roof would not have existed had it not been for the Cowboys’ founder, Clint Murchison Jr. His father, Clint Murchison Sr., was one of the most iconic names in the history of Texas oil, the world that gave rise to J.R. Ewing.We could not tell the story of Clint Jr. without sharing our view that all good stories fall into three categories: history, comedy or tragedy. But the most compelling contain elements of all three.
The elder Murchison died in 1969, almost a decade into Clint Jr.’s Cowboys experiment, which his father only reluctantly supported, despite the fact that, by the time Clint Sr. died, the Cowboys were a sports-world juggernaut. They were arguably professional football’s most popular team, despite falling short of a championship — until they won Super Bowl VI on Jan. 16, 1972.
Clint Jr. saw a downtown stadium as a far better home for his rapidly improving team than what he called the “fully depreciated” Cotton Bowl in Fair Park. Clint Murchison Jr. and his brother John Murchison smiled after a 1961 meeting of the new board of directors of the multibillion-dollar Alleghany Corp. in New York. The brothers won control of the company after a long battle for power.
Jones even managed to land the Jan. 1, 2021, Rose Bowl game, which, because of the pandemic, could not be played in its traditional home in Pasadena, Calif. The Boss, Clinton Williams Murchison Sr., was fond of saying he liked to do business through a formula expressed through the homespun homily “financin’ by finaglin’.” Clint Sr. soon thrust himself into a pantheon of Texas wheeler-dealers that enumerated such fellow giants as Sid Richardson, H. L. Hunt and Hugh Roy Cullen, American folk heroes in the making.
Because the risk-taking pair won far more than they lost, they stayed afloat. And prospered. Boy, did they prosper. Just one story in the folklore is how one night, Clint Sr. drove to Wichita Falls, near the Oklahoma border, fueled by a rumor he’d heard about a wildcat well ready to start pumping black gold. When he got to Wichita Falls, he yanked his buddy out of a poker game. He and Richardson drove to the site, and sure enough, smelled the black gold bubblin’ up.
The death of his mother and closest brother took its toll on Clint Jr. in other ways. Robert Murchison notes that “Pop was out of town much of their childhood looking after his business interests, thus John and Dad were raised by a loving aunt, grandmother and wonderful servants.”Looking for a new chapter after the death of his wife and son, Clint Sr. moved to Dallas, where he rapidly expanded his burgeoning portfolio.
Soon after Clint Jr. left MIT to return to Dallas to stake his place in the family business, Clint Sr. received a letter from the MIT professor with whom Clint Jr. lived as an undergraduate. As Wolfe notes in her book, “The professor told Murchison that it was a great loss to science that his son Clint had gone into business.”
As Woolley wrote, “The Boss and his sons got into the construction business, for instance, with only $20,000 of their money and an $80,000 promissory note. The company they acquired was Tecon, which over the years would remove the overhanging shale that threatened to close the Panama Canal and would build the tunnel under Havana Harbor, the St. Lawrence Seaway and other multibillion-dollar projects around the world.
Clint Jr.’s risk-taking would lead him to the world of professional football and allow his team to succeed. During their first five seasons, the Cowboys lost $3 million and failed to win more than five games a season.
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