DIFFERENT CARDINALS : Team Left Many Fans in Chicago When It Moved to St. Louis

The Cardinals’ NFL franchise--which hopes to abandon St. Louis for Phoenix--blew out of this Windy City 28 years ago, leaving behind thousands of die-hard fans.

The “Big Red” played in Chicago for 61 years, beginning as a sandlot team in 1898, winning their only league title in 1947 before leaving prior to the 1960 season.

Some old Chicago Cardinal fans still can’t bring themselves to root for the Bears or find anything nice to say about “Papa Bear” George Halas.

“Deep down in my heart I’m a Cardinal fan. Once a Cardinal fan, always a Cardinal fan. I still look for the score but it’s been hard to follow them closely in St. Louis and you do lose interest,” said Roland Benda, 64, a building security man.

Bill Gleason, a sportswriter who covered the Cardinals for Chicago American, said their Chicago fans are getting scarce.

“They were World War II vets. They are dying off, and their sons and grandsons have no experience with the team other than what they’ve been told,” said Gleason, 65.

Benda agreed, saying all of his buddies who rooted for the Cardinals are gone.

Gleason also says the number of Cardinal fans here was always exaggerated.

“If the fans who talked about going to Cardinals games actually went to them, the franchise would still be here,” he said. “The attendance just wasn’t there even in their glory days.”

John David Crow, a Cardinals running back when the team moved to St. Louis, said the move to Phoenix will sever most of the ties he had with the club.

“I probably feel like the old Chicago Cardinals did when the team moved to St. Louis--they lost something,” said Crow, now associate athletic director at his alma mater, Texas A&M.; “They’ll be the Phoenix Cardinals I suppose, but it won’t be the same.”

But he said the team’s move to St. Louis was good for the players at the time.

“St. Louis would be our town, and we wouldn’t have to share it like we did with the Bears in Chicago,” said Crow, whose 83-yard run from scrimmage in a 1958 game is still a franchise record. “Mr. Halas did run Chicago as far as football was concerned.”

The Bears and Cardinals entered the American Professional Football League, forerunner of the NFL, in 1920 and had a great rivalry through the years.

“I remember the Cards beating the Bears in zero weather one winter. They had some terrific games,” Benda said.

When Benda was a kid, player-coach Ernie Nevers had a 40-point game against the Bears in 1929. He scored six touchdowns and kicked four points-after-touchdown in a 40-6 win.

Although Benda isn’t old enough to remember when legendary Jim Thorpe wore a Cardinals’ uniform, the names of his heros of 30 years ago roll off his tongue like it was only yesterday.

“Jimmy Conzelman was the greatest coach of them all. He always had the underdog and pulled off the upsets when we needed them,” said Benda of the coach whose teams were 27-10 from 1946 to 1948.

“They had the all-time great ends, Billy Dewell and Mal Kutner, and a dream backfield--Paul Christman at quarterback, Charlie Trippi and Elmer Angsman at tailbacks and Pat Harder at fullback.”

Trippi and Angsman combined for 243 yards rushing and four touchdowns in beating the Philadelphia Eagles, 28-21, for the NFL championship in 1947.

Much of the city’s Cardinals-Bears rivalry, as it is to this day with the White Sox and Cubs, was rooted in Chicago’s social and neighborhood divisions--working-class South Siders against middle-class North Siders.

“We lived on the South Side and the Bears were North Siders, playing at Wrigley Field then. The Cardinals played at Comiskey Park on the South Side,” said Benda.

Bob Glass, a Cardinals fan and another sportswriter who covered the team, said Halas did all he could to drive the Big Red to St. Louis.

“The Bears didn’t love having the Cardinals here,” said Glass, also a South Sider at the time. “The press favored the Bears something terrible.”

In the days when the Big Red played in Chicago, pro football took a backseat to baseball, boxing and even college football.

“I was making $15,000 my first year with the Cardinals,” said Crow. “The Picadilly Hotel, where the players stayed during the season, wasn’t the best place to live. That’s another reason we weren’t unhappy about leaving Chicago,”

In 28 years in St. Louis, the Cardinal never attained the success of their Chicago playoff teams of 1947--the title year--and 1948--when they lost the title game, 7-0, to the Eagles.

Gleason also remembers the lean years.

“I was away in the Army and my father wrote me the team was being called the Carpets because they were getting beat every week.”