Cowboys Open for Business

As a devoted fan of the Dallas Cowboys, Frank Cordova considered it a small sacrifice Saturday to rise at dawn, drive from Reseda to Oxnard, stake out a prime autograph-collecting spot along a sideline fence, and wait.

“I got here two hours before practice started,” said Cordova, 30, holding a miniature silver football in one hand and a miniature Cowboy helmet in the other. “It’s dedication.”

By the time the players took the field for their first practice of training camp, the crowd lining the fence was 10 people deep and the massive dirt parking lot adjacent to the complex was almost at capacity. The opening day drew an estimated 4,500 people, and reinforced the notion of Cowboy owner Jerry Jones that training camp is almost as much about widening the fan base as it is about the football.

“When I bought the team, the only committee that I lobbied to serve on was the competition committee, which was about football,” Jones said. “But yet my background and my instincts are promotion and sales.”

A glance around the fairgrounds-like atmosphere of Cowboy training camp makes that clear. There’s one semi-truck that transforms into a store full of team merchandise, an idea Jones borrowed from NASCAR, and another that serves as a rolling Cowboy hall of fame, including a giant video screen showing historic highlights and a circular glass case holding all five of the team’s Super Bowl trophies. There are the inflatable games that simulate football activities -- not to be confused with the enormous inflatable dog, water bottle and car ad that sponsors have placed on the sideline -- and the stage on which the Cowboy cheerleaders sign autographs. Fans paid $5 for parking, but admission was free.

In October, the Cowboys signed a multi-year deal to move training camp to Oxnard, marking the return of a franchise that conducted camp for 27 years at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks, before moving back to Texas in 1990, a year after Jones bought the team.

Jones, who was born in El Segundo, now shakes his head about the decision to leave Southern California. Turns out, not all his marketing decisions are inspired. Recently, on a particularly beautiful day, he and Coach Bill Parcells were visiting Oxnard-area high schools to scout potential sites for night practices.

“Tell me again why you decided to leave this place,” Parcells said with a smile.

The same might be asked of the NFL, which hasn’t had a franchise in the nation’s second-largest market since the Raiders and Rams left after the 1994 season. Jones is among the staunchest believers that the league needs to find a way to get back to L.A.

“It has been said that in spite of ownership, the NFL is the most popular and most watched and probably the most successful sport in the country today,” he said. “But in our infinite wisdom as owners, we’ve ended up 10 years without a team in the Los Angeles area. Now figure that one out.”

Parcells doesn’t even try. Marketing the Cowboys in Southern California is low on the priority list of a man who spells everything with Xs and O’s. But he prefers conducting training camp here to inside the Alamodome in San Antonio, where the Cowboys held their last two camps, chiefly for one reason: He doesn’t look up and see a roof.

“I’m not a mole,” he said. “I like to be outdoors.”

There also are practical reasons, Parcells said, why he likes to hold the early weeks of camp in a cooler climate.

“The players are not trying to survive here, they’re not just trying to get through practice,” he said. “They can pay attention.... I would rather have that early in camp than be in the blistering heat we have in Texas. Now, I know at some point in time we have to do that, but it will be a lot better to do that after all your knowledge base is in, after you know the system, you know your assignments.”

Although Jones said having a few thousand cheering fans so close to the practice field gets the adrenaline of players flowing even more (“Nobody wants to get whipped in front of all those people.”), he acknowledged things got out of hand two years ago when the Cowboys made their Alamodome debut. Then, so loud were the music and master of ceremonies -- yes, the team hired a master of ceremonies -- that no one could hear anyone else on the field. Rowdy, the team’s overstuffed Cowboy mascot, zoomed around the field on an all-terrain vehicle, at one point accidentally plowing over a photographer. The marketing department ran an endless loop of commercials on the video screens.

Most of the noise Saturday was generated by the crowd, not the loudspeakers. And these were not casual Cowboy fans. One spectator drove into the parking lot in a car sporting Green Bay Packer license-plate frames. “Wrong team, fool!” someone shouted. Another man had the temerity to walk through the crowd in a Raider jersey; he was roundly booed. Then there was the young girl who screamed so loud for quarterback Quincy Carter that people slowly moved away from her. She practically had to be pulled off the chain-link fence she was trying to scale.

Jones, sitting on a cushy training table, surveyed the scene from a shady spot nearby.

“It’s good to be back,” he said, sounding like a man who might never again leave.