Bow Tie Extra: Cardinals in the Super Bowl?

"The Arizona Cardinals are going to the Super Bowl." If anyone here in the Valley of the Sun had just awoken, ala Rip van Winkle, from a ten year nap, he would not believe this statement. In 1999, the Cardinals had been in Arizona for eleven years and one thing was obvious--the Cardinals would never be the kind of team that would go to the Super Bowl as long the Bidwill family was in control. Now a short history.

The Cardinals are the oldest continuously run professional football franchise dating back to 1898 in Chicago. The name "Cardinals" comes from the faded maroon of the jerseys bought used from the University of Chicago team. The Bidwill family gained control of the Cardinals in 1932 during the Depression. As the Chicago Cardinals the team was modestly successful, fielding an exciting championship team in 1947. The Bidwill family made some St. Louis connections by marriage and moved the Cardinals to St. Louis in 1960.

The only truly successful period for the franchise in St. Louis came in the mid-1970s. This team was loaded with talent--Jim Hart, Terry Metcalf, Mel Gray, Roger Wehrli, Dan Dierdorf, Jim Otis, etc. Since I was a young football fan at the time, I am among the relative few who did not grow up thinking of the Cardinals as a doormat. Monday Night Football halftime highlights might, this was before the days over ESPN-induced supersaturation, feature Howard Cosell saying something like, "But back come the Cardiac Cards. On third and twenty Jim Hart throws deep down the sideline to the speedster, Mel Gray, and he could go all the way. Touchdown Cardinals." These Don Coryell-coached teams underacheived in the playoffs, never reaching even the NFC title game.

By the late 1980s, Owner Bill Bidwill, a fellow bow tie wearing penny pincher, had decided that St. Louis would never build a new stadium for the Cardinals. Phoenix offered a new stadium if Bidwill would move the Cardinals to Arizona. The Phoenix Cardinals played their home games in Arizona State's Sun Devil Stadium, with its hot metal bench seating, while waiting for their new stadium to be built. However the team never had the support to make politicians fund a new stadium. Wrangles over where the stadium would actually be located further complicated matters.

In the meantime, the Cardinals languished as a losing team with poor attendance whose owner refused to spend the money to make a winner. Home games often featured more fans from the visiting team than Cardinal fans and were almost always blacked-out on local TV per NFL attendance policy. Being a Cardinal fan was a seen by many locals as, if not a symptom of some mental disorder, worthy of ridicule . Die hard fans did exist and they spent much of their time griping about how the Cards could not win as long as the Bidwills owned the team. Some critics claimed that Bill Bidwill was purposely not building a winning team until he had his new stadium; he survived on revenue sharing from the NFL, not on attendance revenue. Players considered the Cardinals a team with an insurmountable losing culture and a professional dead end. The legendary fourth quarter collapse against the Chicago Bears two seasons ago was another "here we go again" moment and a monument to the futility of the Cardinal franchise.

After years of controversy, the new stadium was finally built in Glendale, in the west valley far from Tempe and Sun Devil Stadium. Arizona voters had to approve a huge bond issue to fund the stadium. The way this was done was illegal, as I understand the law. The east valley voters were led to believe that the stadium might be built in the east valley while west valley voters were given the same hope for the west valley. By law the location of the stadium should have been settled before the vote. It was not settled so as to avoid the disapproval of the voters where the stadium would not be built. As it was, the bond issue still barely passed. The Cardinals now have a truly modern stadium that gives them what cynical valley residents never believed possible for the Cardinals, a true home field advantage.

While I have not been a fan of owners' blackmailing of municipalities to get new stadiums built on the public dime, the football fan, like the investor and entrepreneur, must take the world as it is, not as it should be. I adopted the Cardinals when I moved to Arizona in 1996, warts and all. One of their newest warts is their uniforms; except for the white helmet and black shoes, they are a sartorial nightmare.

I am excited about the Cardinals' appearance in the Super Bowl. The Cardinals have possibly the smallest fan base of any team in the NFL. They will face a team with one of the largest fan bases, the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers became established in the 1970s, along with Dallas Cowboys, as one of the NFL's great bandwagon teams with a national, not just regional, following. Rooting for the Cardinals, on the other hand, has been a contrarian play even here in Arizona. It would be great if the Cardinals' improbable bull run could include running the mighty Steelers bandwagon into a ditch.