The genesis of Tony's spike in Twitter followers, for the uninitiated, is that he turned on Fox Sports Midwest hoping to watch a Cardinals game, but instead found Game 7 of the first round of the NHL playoffs between his hometown St. Louis Blues and the Chicago Blackhawks. According to Tony, he had never before watched a hockey game, but he nevertheless kept his TV on the channel and, as he live-tweeted, fell in love with the game. He was mesmerized by the sport's intensity and the drama of the event.
Granted, most hockey games aren't tightly-contested playoff game sevens between bitter rivals, one of which is your hometown team, and Tony probably got a bit lucky that this was his first exposure to the sport, but Hockey Twitter fell in love with his enthusiasm. He was naive to the specifics of hockey, but he had an enthusiasm which was infectious.
For as jaded as adults can get online about sports, Tony revealed a different perspective: somebody who discovers something new and just wants to tell everybody about how great it is. It doesn't have to be a sport--I discovered Oasis after they'd been selling out soccer stadiums in Europe for over a decade, but that didn't mean I didn't want to scream to everybody I know about how OH MY GAWWWWD YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO SUPERSONIC RIGHT THIS INSTANT.
I was seven when I watched my first hockey game. Tony was an adult. There is a cavalcade of people best described as "haters" who clearly resent Tony's rise to pseudo-fame, which I do not understand whatsoever--I understand not being interested in seeing some random guy learn hockey on the fly, but the sense of "What did this guy do to earn this attention?" is odd to me. He entertained people and in many cases, reminded people of themselves.
In a strange way, he reminds me of my dad.
My dad is a generation older than Tony, and unlike Tony, has watched hockey before. He used to be a somewhat big fan: the first sport I ever watched was hockey, and it was because I watched the first home game of the Wayne Gretzky in St. Louis "era" (it's a footnote in Gretzky's career, but it was a formative experience of my sports fandom) with him that I eventually started following other sports.
But not long after I took to hockey, my dad stopped caring about it. He has always cited the Blues trading his favorite player, Brendan Shanahan, as the inciting incident which dulled his hockey fandom (this predates the Gretzky trade, but I'm willing to accept that the 1995-96 season was a transition year in a vacuum). But this always seemed strange to me, especially after Shanahan netted a 20 year-old Chris Pronger, an eventual Hall of Famer whose number will rightfully be retired by the Blues.
A month and a half after the Brendan Shanahan trade, the St. Louis Rams played their first game.
My dad was always a bigger fan of the Rams than the other St. Louis sports teams, including the Cardinals. Remember a few years ago when the Cardinals played in Game 5 of the World Series while, at the same time, the 3-4 Rams played the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football? Most people I know ignored the Rams game. I didn't, but the World Series took priority, with the Rams getting my attention during commercial breaks. Dad watched the Rams exclusively. He wasn't at the game or anything--he just cared about the Rams that much more.
Tony X, it appears, was similarly passionate about the Rams. I don't know Tony's age, though it seems that, like me, he doesn't remember a world in which the Rams were not in St. Louis. For all of the national talk about the Rams' brief time in St. Louis, if you're under the age of 30, you remember the Rams in St. Louis as ubiquitously as you remember the Packers in Green Bay or the Steelers in Pittsburgh.
The Cardinals are great and wonderful. Hell, I write for a Cardinals blog. I'm not exactly ambivalent to their existence. But fans have a different relationship with the Cardinals, a ubiquitous local brand, than they do with less successful teams.Rams left me ........ @StLouisBlues saved me 🙌 https://t.co/SIlJ5heFjb— Tony X. (@soIoucity) April 26, 2016
A little over a month ago, I wrote about how the Cardinals should specifically court alienated ex-Rams fans, though in fairness to the Cardinals, this was always going to be a less intuitive courtship than one spearheaded by the Blues. Fandom of the Blues, or any hockey team for that matter, is less casual. Say what you will about attendance for the Rams or Blues during lean years (of course, owners dangling the franchises to other cities didn't help the matters, either), but the fans who did show up and who did loudly rep their teams were hardly passive fans.
It had been well over a decade since my dad watched a Blues game. The only hockey I can recall him watching beyond my elementary school years was the last two minutes of the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, and even after Marc-Andre Fleury's absurd performance stopping a flurry (pun unintended but nevertheless kept) of Detroit Red Wings shots, I could barely get him to muster more than a casual noting of impressiveness.
He usually goes to bed around 8 on weeknights, but he stayed up and watched every minute of Game 7 against the Blackhawks. He made sure before Game 1 against Dallas to know what channel NBC Sports was. During overtime of Game 2, he texted me about how nervous he was. It was the first time he had texted me about an in-progress sporting event since the final game of the St. Louis Rams.
Something is happening here. I had assumed when the Rams moved, St. Louis would collectively find another NFL team, but as it increasingly appears the entire league left us out to dry, this ceased to be an option. So in the end, our new Rams will not be the Chiefs nor the Bears nor the Colts. It's the Blues.
I was a Blues fan anyway, but it was only in 2016 that the Blues saved me.
No comments:
Post a Comment