In April, 1966, Roger Angell attended an indoor baseball game, his first, at the Astrodome. “It was not just the prospect of witnessing weatherless baseball played on Chemstrand grass under an acrylic-painted Lucite sky that induced me to travel to Houston last month,” Angell wrote, archly, of visiting 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 National League-pennant-winning Dodgers the year before—he was distracted from his scorecard by the orange spacesuits and white helmets worn by the groundskeepers, the rainbow-colored tiers of seats, and the billiard-table green of the first synthetic field in pro sports, made of a brand-new Monsanto product called AstroTurf. (The real grass had begun to die during the previous season when the skylights were painted over, to block the glare of the sun. Searching for a blade to chew while watching batting practice, Angell discovered AstroTurf to be “pluckproof.”) Most intrusive of all was the scoreboard—four stories high and lit by more than forty thousand bulbs—the first to offer hype videos and animated ads. “By the middle innings,” he wrote, “I found that I was giving the game only half my attention; along with everyone else, I kept lifting my eyes to that immense, waiting presence above the players.”
The air-conditioned digs only slightly benefitted the ’66 Astros, who finished twenty-three games behind the reigning first-place Dodgers. But their building, a project that cost north of thirty million dollars and was partly funded by the taxpayers of Harris County, would forever change both the way stadiums were conceived and the spectacles they hosted. Tourists flocked to see what the sportswriter Joe Trimble called the “Taj Mahal of sport.” 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 competed in the Battle of the Sexes there in 1973.
Apart from the roof, the Astrodome’s structure was conventional—a circular concrete doughnut, surrounded by a parking-lot playa, that resembled other publicly funded multisport stadiums of the era, including Shea Stadium, in New York; Veterans, in Philadelphia; and R.F.K., in Washington, D.C. Unlike those relatively spartan facilities, however, the Astrodome had cushioned seats for all patrons, instead of hard ones. It was also the first stadium to have luxury “skyboxes.” The Astros’ first owner, Roy Hofheinz, installed around fifty of them near the top of the stadium. These were leased on a yearly basis, turning the least desirable seats into the most expensive and coveted spots in the house.
Angell was put off by the skyboxes. Perhaps he sensed where luxury seating would lead—to the ongoing arms race among stadium and venue owners to create ever more lavish spectator offerings, transforming what was once a public right into a privilege.
“I can only say I found them immensely glum—sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen,” he wrote.
It was not just the prospect of watching Beyoncé perform under an open-sided translucent ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene (E.T.F.E.) roof canopy that drew me, in May, to SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, a city in the greater Los Angeles metro area. An entire economy of luxury fan experiences in sports and entertainment has grown out of the sad, soft caves Angell spelunked in Houston, and I wanted to have one of those experiences, too.
SoFi Stadium, which opened in 2020, during the pandemic, is the home of two N.F.L. teams, the Rams and the Chargers. It is the largest stadium in the league by square footage, a seventy-thousand-seat behemoth capable of accommodating more than a hundred thousand people, and will co-host the opening ceremony of the 2028 Summer Olympics. It is estimated to have cost between five and six billion dollars to build and was privately funded by Stan Kroenke, a reclusive, Missouri-born billionaire commercial-real-estate developer, and his investors. (Kroenke is married to Ann Walton, a niece of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, and many of his retail projects are anchored around its stores.) SoFi, a California-based financial-services company, pays around thirty million dollars a year for the naming rights, according to Bloomberg.
