Dave Dixon

Sport: Builder

Induction Year: 1999

By Marty Mule’
New Orleans Times-Picayune

Imagine autumns in south Louisiana without the Saints to passionately follow, dissect and discuss.

And imagine the New Orleans skyline without the egg-shaped protrusion of the Superdome jutting into the picture.

Those entities – both conceived in the fertile imagination of Dave Dixon, a man of whom it was once written, could see what others could not see -have become cultural signatures of Louisiana.

On Nov. 1, 1966, the day the NFL franchise was awarded to the Crescent City, Commissioner Pete Rozelle stopped in front of the podium filled with politicians trying to get some of the credit – and reflected glory – and said softly to Dixon, “There would be no New Orleans Saints without you.”

The sports landscape of New Orleans changed because of Dixon, as did the physical landscape of the city.

The Superdome, the giant, mushroom-shaped structure Dixon envisioned more than a decade before it was built, transformed Poydras Street, a grungy avenue boarded by railroad yards 30 years ago, into one of New Orleans’ main thoroughfares.

Along with Lamar Hunt, owner of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, Dixon co-founded World Championship Tennis, the linchpin of the open tennis format, which has contributed to the immense current popularity of the sport. He also founded the now-defunct United States Football League – which failed in large measure because owners eventually went against the major tenant the USFL was built on – spring football.

Acknowledging a life of involvement in a variety of sporting and civic ventures, Dixon once said: “I know I’ll always be remembered for the Saints and Superdome, and I am proud of that. But I also hope to be remembered as a person who worked for the brotherhood of man in his autumn years. Nothing, I sincerely believe, is more important than that.

Almost certainly Rickey Jackson’s career would have been in a different jersey and different city without Dixon’s vision and labors. And almost certainly the five Super Bowls, the five largest crowds in the history of college basketball, including some from the three Final Fours, and a Republican National Convention, all held in the Superdome, would never have taken place in south Louisiana with the world’s most versatile building.

Dave’s concept

“It was Dave’s concept,” said former Gov. John McKeithen, whose political muscle got the Superdome off the ground after a decade-long legislative battle. “I did what I could because Dave got me to believe in it.”

The fuse to Dixon’s creative afterburners was a note in, of all things, The Sporting News. Buckminster Fuller, the internationally renowned architect who envisioned a future of encased cities, was commissioned in the early 1950s to design a domed stadium for Walter O’Malley’s Brooklyn Dodgers.

This, of course, was long before McKeithen had ever heard or thought of such a project, and more than a decade before the granddaddy of covered stadiums, the Astrodome, was built.

Fuller’s design never got off the boards, and the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958. But Dixon, then a young New Orleans businessman, never forgot Fuller’s proposed design or the belief that it was a glimpse of urban architecture to come – a vision only partially fulfilled in 1965 by the construction of the Astrodome, which Dixon saw merely as a “covered baseball field.” He visualized a multi-dimensional, multi-purpose facility.

Dixon, a native Orleanian, Tulane alumnus and World War II Marine, always thought big while others, especially in New Orleans, thought small.

He traces his involvement with sports back to 1958, when Mayor Chep Morrison was trying to save the Pelicans, the city’s minor league baseball team, and, at the same time, attract a major league franchise.

“I had been talking to Chep about some very informal plans he had been talking about to build a stadium on the lakefront to catch the eye of the major leagues,” Dixon said. “I told him I thought the best and most likely avenue for our entry into major league sports was professional football. The NFL wasn’t that big deal then.

“He said, `Why don’t you do it?’ I was shocked. Surprised.”

Other’s endorsed idea

Others endorsed the idea, all with the suggestion Dixon do it himself.

“That’s how it all got started,” he said, “and then I had a tiger by the tail and couldn’t let go. Always, at the point where any sane, sensible man would have given up, some little spark of encouragement – or what I would perceive as encouragement – would occur.

Dixon began helping promote professional football games in New Orleans which was a football hungry market waiting to be trapped, a fact manifested by eye-catching attendance figures for exhibition games.

The Saints first filled 35,000 seats at New Orleans’ expanded City Park Stadium to later crowds of 75,000-plus for a doubleheader – in a driving rainstorm – at Tulane Stadium.

Of course, securing a franchise would take a lot more than just fans.

“To show how naive I was, how foolishly optimistic,” Dixon later mused. “In 1962 we passed out season-ticket pledge forms for 1963. I still have about 50 of the pencils passed out, with the inscription `New Orleans Saints, 1963.”

Influential politicians, including House Majority Whip Hale Boggs and U.S. Senator Russell Long, helped Dixon bring professional football to New Orleans when the sport faced a serious anti-trust legislation. Boggs and Long steered an antitrust exception through Congress which, in effect, cleared the way for a merger of the NFL and the American Football League.

The reward for the legislative end run was the New Orleans franchise.

Saints come marching in

The team was to be the Saints, a name Dixon cleared with Archbishop Philip M. Hannan.

“He thought it would be a good idea,” Dixon said. “He had an idea the team was going to need all the help it could get.”

Tulane would not allow a long-term football occupant of its stadium, and without a place to play the NFL would never have put a team in the Crescent City. The futuristic arena Dixon had been advocating was the answer -along with filling a need for a myriad of other activities New Orleans previously had no place for.

An amendment to the state Constitution had to be drafted to create a governing body and secure the financing. It passed, but then McKeithen wanted to increase the seating from the original 50,000 to 75,000. Delays, inflation, and the protracted political battle over the expansion pushed the final tab to $163 million – a figure topped in tourist expenditures each and every time one Super Bowl is played in New Orleans.

“That building,” Dixon says with justifiable pride, “has changed New Orleans.”