The suffering St. Louis fans finally got their hockey title.
It’s amazing that the team that beat up the Bruins in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals is the same team that was in last place this past January. But it was a comeback story from one-of-the-worse-to-first that will live in the city’s shredded sports history.
Very early on, I learned that the late and former Carolina basketball coach Bill Guthridge was a die-hard devotee of the Cardinals. He grew up on the Kansas plains and fell asleep listening to the Cards on his transistor radio on summer nights. Redbird fans remain among the most rabid and loyal in baseball and have been rewarded with 11 World Series titles, second only to the Yankees.
But for such a sports-crazed town, how come no pro football team or basketball team? St. Louis is the only city to lose two NFL franchises, the Cardinals to Arizona in 1987 and the Rams back to LA two years ago. The NBA Hawks, with Bob Pettit, were regular challengers to the great old Celtics teams, then moved in 1968 to Atlanta, which was building a new arena they wanted in St. Louis.
The Blues are not one of the original six in the modern National Hockey League. They were an expansion team in 1969, developing a fanatical fan base that hadn’t had an NHL team in more than 30 years. But unlike their predecessor and perennial champs, the Ottawa Senators that won 11 Stanley Cups, the Blues have been mostly singing since. They went to the Stanley Cup Finals their first three seasons, not one time in the nearly next 40 years.
Frenzied fans filled Enterprise Center, home of the Blues, and half of baseball’s Busch Stadium in the rain, to watch Game 7. After losing their chance to clinch the Cup at home Sunday night, they turned out in droves as the Blues stunned the Bruins with two early goals to raise their first Cup. If one trade could change all that futility, it was getting do-it-all center Ryan O’Reilly, the Cup MVP, from the Buffalo Sabres last summer.
St. Louis may get football and basketball teams back some day. The Greatest Show on Turf won Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000, but more money beckoned them back to the West Coast. Missouri is a great basketball state, so it doesn’t make much sense for hoops, either, to not have pro team since the 1970s in the old ABA, called the Spirit of St. Louis.
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