The St. Louis Cardinals are a team I root for. The St. Louis Rams are my team. There is a difference.
The Cardinals are the team that everybody roots for. They're the team that people who don't like sports watch because they're the team that wins. They aren't the team for sports fans--they're the team for fans of parades. There are few, if any, teams in professional sports in the United States for whom being a fan is easier than the St. Louis Cardinals--this is a team that has never finished back-to-back full seasons with a losing record in my mother's nearly fifty-six years on Earth. For Cardinals fans, "pain" is being eliminated in the playoffs or maybe (GASP!) occasionally having to settle for a couple mostly irrelevant weeks in September.
Pain for a Rams fan is a decade of irrelevance and constant threats of the team leaving town. It's knowing that my team, the team whose successes and failures actually alter my mood, may leave me and knowing that a substantial segment of St. Louis will be happy to see it happen.
St. Louis, at its core, isn't a good sports town. That's not even a unique indictment--few towns are. But it's a town full of people who have deluded themselves into believing that the relative lack of passion for the Rams is somehow unrelated to the lack of on-field success of the team. Note, of course, that the popular non-Rams teams in the area are uniformly teams with tremendous, successful histories (Packers, Steelers, 49ers, Cowboys--the Cowboys ones even try to defend their fandom by claiming that they "suck", since they evidently have a dramatically different definition of ineptitude than anybody who has watched the last decade of the Rams). The next fan of the Jacksonville Jaguars I meet in St. Louis will be the first. But everybody has an excuse. Everybody has family in the successful NFL city (yet I don't know hoards of Pirates or Stars fans, oddly enough); people became fans before the Rams moved to town (again, nobody ever seems to have jumped on board with the Buffalo Bills, and if they did during their early 90s heyday, they appear to be long gone). Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.
But this isn't about the Rams losing or even the Rams being non-competitive. It's about the seeming inevitability that it's going to end and that there is not a damn thing I can do about it. And all I will have is a Cardinals team with self-congratulatory, "loyal" fans (until the team sucks, at least) and a hockey team that is eight years removed from being terrible and thus having the #30 attendance in the NHL. And it's considered a joke. The fact that a region whose entire identity is (sadly) built around sports doesn't care. The times got tough and the masses got going to Lambeau. And St. Louis refuses to believe that it could happen again with a different sport, as though St. Louis in September of 1999 was still fully invested in baseball above all else.
If the Rams move, and I'm not going to say "when" they move because I refuse to speak in the vernacular of the bandwagoning shits who may cause my team to move in the first place, it would create a permanent hole in my sporting heart. It will make me root less for the Blues and especially for the Cardinals. I don't think I will be able to go to Busch Stadium, see people trash-talking what losers the Cubs are, and compartmentalize it as something other than "these people cost me my team". That these people haven't earned their success with anything beyond minor heartbreak.
Of course, if the Cardinals fall apart and start losing 100 games a season (it seems crazy, but it seemed crazy after 1999-2001 that 2007-2011 would happen for the Rams), Busch Stadium will be a ghost town, relatively speaking. Not after one season, but if the Cardinals had a decade, say, like the Kansas City Royals had from 2000-2009, an average attendance of around 20,000 would be reasonable to expect. And then maybe I'd frequently pick up cheap tickets on Stubhub and maybe it'd feel like my team for the first time in my life. But it sure seems like some kind of sick personal issue that I would need a team to play poorly to feel like I belong as a fan. It makes me think of the legendary Groucho Marx quote: "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member."
Of course, maybe if the Rams get good again in St. Louis, I wouldn't feel the same way. Maybe that's how I know they're my team, after all.
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