How the Sports Stadium Went Luxe
In April 1966, Roger Angell attended an indoor baseball game, his first, at the Astrodome. “It wasn’t just the prospect of watching a weather-free baseball game on the Chemstrand grass under an acrylic-painted Lucite sky that enticed me to travel to Houston last month,” Angell wrote, mischievously, of his visit to what was then the world’s only domed stadium. (It had opened a year earlier.) Angell covered baseball for this magazine for many years, in addition to editing fiction, and although he was ostensibly there to scout the Astros—the team had finished thirty-two games behind the Dodgers, winners of the National League pennant the year before—he was distracted from his scoreboard by the orange spacesuits and white helmets worn by the groundskeepers, the bleachers of seats in the colors of the rainbow and green of the pool table of the first professional sports synthetic field, made from a brand new Monsanto product called AstroTurf. (The real turf had begun to die during the previous season when the skylights were repainted to block the sun’s glare. Searching for a blade to chew on while watching batting practice, Angell discovered that AstroTurf was “tear-proof.”) Most intrusive of all was the scoreboard—four stories high and lit by more than forty thousand bulbs—the first to feature hype videos and advertisements animated. “Midway through the inning,” he wrote, “I discovered that I was only giving the game half my attention; like everyone else, I kept looking up at this immense waiting presence above the players.”
The air-conditioned digs only marginally benefited the ’66 Astros, who finished twenty-three games behind the reigning first-place Dodgers. But their construction, a project that cost more than thirty million dollars and was partly funded by Harris County taxpayers, would forever change the way stadiums were designed and the shows they hosted. Tourists flocked to see what sports journalist Joe Trimble called the “Taj Mahal of sports.” Billy Graham held a Crusade for Christ rally there in 1965. Evel Knievel jumped thirteen cars on two consecutive nights in 1971. Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs participated in the Battle of the Sexes there in 1973.
Aside from the roof, the Astrodome’s structure was conventional: a circular concrete donut, surrounded by a parking lot, that resembled other publicly funded multi-sport stadiums of the era, including Shea Stadium, in New York; Veterans Affairs, Philadelphia; and RFK, in Washington, D.C. Unlike these relatively spartan facilities, the Astrodome had padded seats for all patrons, instead of hard seats. It was also the first stadium to have a luxury “skybox”. The Astros’ first owner, Roy Hofheinz, installed about 50 of them near the top of the stadium. These were rented on an annual basis, transforming the least desirable seats into the most expensive and coveted spots in the house.
Angell was put off by the skyboxes. Perhaps he foresaw where luxury seats would lead: to the ongoing arms race between stadium and venue owners to create an ever more lavish offering for spectators, transforming what was once a public right into a privilege.
“I can only say that I found them extremely dark, sad and gentle caves for indoor sportsmen,” he wrote.
It wasn’t just the prospect of seeing Beyoncé perform under a translucent ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) canopy that drew me to SoFi Stadium in May in Inglewood, a city in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. An entire economy of luxury experiences for sports and entertainment fans has grown out of the sad, sweet caves that Angell explored in Houston, and I wanted one of those experiences, too.
SoFi Stadium, which opened in 2020, during the pandemic, is home to two NFL teams, the Rams and the Chargers. It is the league’s largest stadium by area, a seventy-thousand-seat behemoth capable of seating more than one hundred thousand people, and will co-host the opening ceremony of the 2028 Summer Olympics. It is estimated that its construction cost between five and six billion dollars and was financed by Stan Kroenke, a reclusive billionaire commercial real estate developer born in Missouri, and his investors. (Kroenke is married to Ann Walton, a niece of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, and many of his retail plans are anchored around his stores.) SoFi, a California-based financial services company, pays about thirty million dollars a year for naming rights, according to Bloomberg.
