Recognizing the Cards

High time the Valley rally behind a playoff team, red from something other than mendacity, and Will Leitch's Buzzsaw appears to be just such an outfit. After two decades of hapless football, it's easy to forget this has been a "football town" for some time, evidenced by ASU's Frank Kush dynasty - and this influential playbook published just before Kush's arrival.


Are the Cardinals for real? What's more real than being one home victory away from the Springsteen Bowl? Regardless of what happens Sunday, these Cards have already made an indelible connection with Valley fans - more than the 2007 Dbacks could muster - and there may be several reasons for this.


One, the Cards are a single game away from reaching their sport's Holy Grail; the Dbacks were an entire series away, winning not a single game of their NLCS. Two, Arizona harbors enormous pent up demand for gridiron success, given the Cardinals woeful history. It's illuminating how the Bidwills have been rightfully lampooned, for decades, as perhaps the least competitive owners in all of sports - yet our town, right now, is truly geeked for their Cardinals. The Dbacks couldnt sell out either 2007 NLCS game (they came close); the first wave of available Cardinal tickets sold out in six minutes Sunday, before the servers crashed.

Both franchises appear ascendant on the field (assuming the Dbacks gradually improved each year from 2004's nadir, which I do), but despite Derrick Hall's unusually strident promotional efforts, it's hard to shake the feeling that the upstart Cardinals enjoy the stronger following. One can hardly patronize a local McDonalds or fill up one's car without spying one or more Cardinal jerseys. They're everywhere! Sports talk radio is going crazy. I havent seen anything like it, at least not since the 2001 World Series.


Sanguine athletic jerseys now blanket the valley for the first time since Ken Kendrick's Kabal dumped 40,000 "Sedona Red" T shirts onto a confused 2007 Opening Day crowd, in an attempt to hijack an inherited championship brand for one befitting a bloody coup.



The apparent enthusiasm disparity might be partially due to branding. The Cardinals tweak their year to year look, like most everybody, but they've stayed true to red - and the littte bird on the hat - remarkably faithful, really, to the image projected two generations ago by Jim Hart, Roger Wehrli and their St Louis teammates. The Diamondbacks, by contrast, opted to obliterate the Valley's first and only championship brand, in order to visually herald their legal and cultural divorce from the Colangelo regime.



The problem is that when they boldly incorporated that estrangement into the visual brand, some fans felt estranged too. The improbable, "feel-good" Baby Backs of 2007 were not merely battling the Rockies in the NLCS, but also the ghost of Diamondbacks past, for the hearts and minds of Phoenix baseball fans. Fans trying to decide whether Josh Byrnes' latest roster of red cheeked kids are really "Diamondbacks" at all - or something foreign and conformist at the same time - tethered more to owners' hubris and cynical opportunism than to our glorious, shared franchise history.



Is it coincidence that many Cardinal jerseys around town are on the backs of adults - men in their thirties, forties and fifties, some of whom might remember Air Coryell and Terry Metcalf? This Cardinal team, despite all the front office blunders, despite the Matt Leinart fiasco, seems to resonate a continuity with the past, by simply honoring it visually. To paraphrase Dennis Green, "These Cardinals are who we thought they were." Win or lose, they always have been. Cant say the same for our Diamondbacks






Go Big Red!!




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Song of the Day - This Diamond Ring (Gary Lewis & The Playboys)