The St. Louis Battlehawks and XFL success is important for the sports city
This is a St. Louis Cardinals blog, so I usually stick to talking about Major League Baseball. But I’d like to take a moment to tip my cap to River City sports fans for their tremendous support of the football playing St. Louis BattleHawks.
Forgive me for straying off topic. But I’m pretty certain that most of the 28,000 people who stood up for their city by buying tickets to the BattleHawks home opener are the same people who buy tickets to support the Redbirds. So I don’t feel like I am totally out of school on this subject.
Anyway, that sales total boggles my mind. We’re talking about what is essentially a minor league, upstart football program with almost no name recognition. Tickets are more reasonable than the NFL’s prices. But they’re not exactly cheap when compared to the price of going to see a movie or going out for dinner. So, despite the bad taste Missouri turncoat Stan Kroenke, his former St. Louis Rams and the NFL left in the mouths of St. Louis sports fans abusing them for years before stealing their team away in direct violation of their own relocation policy, fans have spoken with their pocketbooks about how much they deserve a professional football franchise.
It was outrageous for Kroenke to state that he didn’t believe St. Louis had the means to support professional football. Rams fans bucked up for their team far longer than they should have when it was fairly obvious the team stole the script of the film Major League, trying to drive fans away by fielding an intentionally terrible team to create justification to relocate to a bigger city. Nevermind that Los Angeles has an extensive history of ignoring its NFL teams, driving away the Rams and the Raiders and doing its best these days to chase off the former San Diego Chargers. When the Rams were competitive, the Dome was filled every Sunday the team was in town. I have no doubt if the team was as good as it suddenly became after it moved, it would be packing the house still.
St. Louis is the smallest market included in the new XFL, yet it has assembled the largest audience both in the stands and on television. I wanted to get tickets for the opener. But I couldn’t find a ticket that wasn’t heavily marked up on the secondary market. Remarkable. I hope St. Louis fans keep it up to prove that this isn’t a second-rate sports town and that we deserve a team.
It has long been my hope that the eventual resolution to the lawsuit between St. Louis, the Rams and NFL will eventually include our home town being awarded a new football franchise. When the Cleveland Browns were allowed to move to Baltimore years ago to become the Ravens, the league promised to put an expansion team -- complete with the Browns name -- back in Cleveland. Los Angeles can have the Rams name, but St. Louis fans deserve a team that doesn’t have Kroenke’s sabotage involved. As I mentioned, the Chargers are unwanted in LA. They’re trapped in a stadium deal with Kroenke and the teams’ leadership hates each other. So move the Chargers to St. Louis, kick in some money to renovate the dome and we’ll call it even.
Or, better yet, wouldn’t it be sweet to see the less pretentious XFL grow in popularity and eventually become a rival to the NFL. This isn’t the XFL that made itself a laughing stock a few years back. It’s more serious about putting a good product on the field, better financed and run by people who know how to make sports entertainment work. How incredible would it be to see the upper deck at the dome opened up with 60,000 people in the stands once again every weekend?