Depraved Loyalties

In taking a break from the political grind, I am choosing to use today as an occasion to take a closer look at the arena of professional sports and the loyalty fans pay to their teams and vice versa. Sometimes that loyalty is well earned and well deserved, and sometimes it isn’t.

Cases in point can be made for several teams. The Houston Oilers, the Los Angeles Raiders and the Los Angeles Rams had their fan base deteriorate so badly that the team owners involved petitioned the NFL for permission to relocate and got it. The Oilers moved to Nashville, the Raiders went back to Oakland from whence they came and the Rams moved to St. Louis. After years of losing records and pathetic (or rather no) support from the fans in the community and a couple of years in new digs, the Rams and the Oilers (now called the Tennessee Titans) met in Super Bowl XXXIV early last year, which the Rams won, thus making them the first team that played their home games in a domed stadium to win a Super Bowl. Houston has since been awarded a new NFL franchise – the Texans, yet Los Angeles, the nation’s #2 television market is STILL without an NFL franchise more than five years later. Clearly, the fans told the owners to take a hike – nowhere was that more clear than in St. Louis in the 1980’s when the St. Louis (Football) Cardinals were driven out on a rail.

Arizona Cardinals

It got so bad for the football Cardinals (logo, right) that one poor shmoe went to Busch Stadium to watch a game. He got there early and was looking to sell his three extra tickets. Unable to find a buyer, he placed his extra tickets under his windshield wiper in the hopes someone would grab one and enjoy the game. Expecting to find the tickets gone when he returned to his car after the game was over, he was surprised to find not only his three extra tickets under the wiper, but also four more on top of them.

Enter owner Bill Bidwill, whose lack of ethics is exceeded only by his greed, and he courts (or rather cons) the Phoenix area into taking the team. Since the move in the spring of 1988, their lackluster ways have largely continued. For openers, the move brought with it the highest ticket prices in the NFL at the time. If these were what the San Francisco 49ers were at the time, I could understand it, but they weren’t – they weren’t even close. It wasn’t until 1998 that the Cardinals ended a 15-year playoff drought and beat the Dallas Cowboys in a first-round playoff game, their first playoff victory sine 1947. I was living in the area at the time the team moved to town. The thing Bidwill did not really understand was that the Metro Phoenix area was a Denver Bronco stronghold, and to a large extent, still is. People went to Sun Devil Stadium just to watch the Cardinals get beat up – now it’s more a case of apathy than anything else. I say this because Bidwill attempted to pick the taxpayers’ pockets a year or two ago for a brand-new stadium complex that would run in the amount of nine figures, and he wanted the locals to pay for it with a sales tax increase. They told him to jam it by a margin of more than two-to-one. Kind of cool, huh?

Toronto Maple Leafs

Another team that has a screwed up sense of loyalty is the Toronto Maple Leafs (logo, left). They last won the Stanley Cup in 1967. As a result of that, the now late and thankfully dead cheapskate owner of the team – Harold Ballard, saw fit to unload all of the talent and just put an at best mediocre team on the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens.

You have to understand something about Toronto. They may have the Blue Jays for baseball and the Raptors for the NBA, but it is still a hockey town. When the Blue Jays started their slide after their 1993 World Series-winning season, so-called fair-weathered baseball “fans” deserted the team, yet the Maple Leafs kept packing them in despite their consistently poor play. When Ballard died, the Leafs became the property of Steve Stavro, and Stavro continued the losing tradition of the Leafs for many years, and the fans kept packing in at the Gardens. For the longest time, I thought that Ballard had never died, but had just reincarnated himself as Steve Stavro. Why they kept packing them in was and is still to a large extent beyond me.

Montreal Canadiens

It wasn’t until the last few years that the team has improved to a measure that it may one day merit LASTING respect. But that day has not as yet arrived. I remember visiting with a friend of mine not too long ago, and he and I came to the same conclusion that another colleague came to a number of years ago as it pertains to the NHL, and that was that our favorite teams were the Montreal Canadiens (logo, right) and anyone on the Toronto Maple Leafs schedule.

If there is one thing in professional sports that I will never forget after the Joe Carter World Series-winning home run that ended the 1993 World Series in Game 6, it will be the depraved sense of pathetic and blind loyalty paid year after year to an unworthy team the likes of the Maple Leafs and their legions of fans as well as sponsors sucked into buying season tickets year after year during their non-competitive seasons. It’s no wonder why I was so thrilled when the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup back in 1993.

When you get right down to it, sports is like any other commodity. You have to get something in return for the investment of your time and hard earned money. I can understand a fan being one that stays true to their team through thick and thin (after all, I am a Kansas City Chiefs fan), but to remain loyal to a team where the owner is clearly not working in the best interests of either the team, the fans or the community, calls for action on the part of the fans and the community to make wrong things right and for their teams to either become and/or remain competitive.

Living in the Toronto area, I will undoubtedly draw a lot of flak for writing this piece. I would be far from honest if I said that I was a Leafs fan. I used to call them the Toronto Maple Laffs, but have stopped that since they improved. Perhaps one day, they will earn my respect…

Perhaps.

• Team logos courtesy of NFL Properties and NHL Properties

Copyright © 2001 by Timothy Rollins.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission