To really appreciate how much the seemingly normal people of St. Paul love hockey, take a look at how they continue to support the Wild as the team finishes its second season in an unnerving display of expansion-team ineptitude. Take one recent loss to the New York Rangers, a 3-2 overtime gaffe that should have broken the hearts of 18,568 paying customers. Despite winning only twice in the preceding 14 games, and sinking in the Western Conference faster than a snowmobile on Lake Superior, they keep showing up for more.
What the hell is this? Why don’t these people behave like all the other sports fans around here and slink away to the ice shack once it’s obvious there’ll be no victory parades at the end of the rainbow? Here’s the answer, friends: There’s something about St. Paulites that breeds in them a near-insane loyalty to anyone or anything that works hard. Win or lose. Inept or exceptional. It doesn’t matter as long as they see you sweat.
Keep in mind that St. Paul has done this before: with the Minnesota Fighting Saints of the World Hockey Association in the freewheelin’ 1970s. Especially in 1974, the Saints united the city behind a sports team like never before. Crowds of 16,000 and more were common then, despite the fact that the Saints’ brand of hockey was an only sporadically successful combination of outrageous goon tactics and exciting offense. In fact, the Hanson Brothers of Slap Shot fame were Saints (though two of them were Carlsons in real life). It helped that league rules eliminated the red line and thus opened the game up to many long passes and spectacular breakaways.
But most of all, the Saints were a tough bunch of characters who worked extremely hard for very little money. And the St. Paul locals loved them like crazy.
“We had a real following of people that truly enjoyed us and everything we did,” says Glen Sonmor, the general manager and architect of the Saints. “I think it was the fact that we had a very entertaining team. We had some real super talents like Mike Walton, Dave Keon, and Jack McCarten. You start with great players. But then you add in a lot of fun and hard work and soon you had something you could build on.” And those loyal St. Paul fans?
“When we got near the end and it was obvious we were going to fold, they actually took up collections to try to keep us going. They organized drives to collect money for future season tickets. They did everything they could, but it wasn’t enough. Escalating salaries and shaky ownership did us in.”
Sonmor now figures it was all for the best. He looks at the Wild and marvels at how its marketing machine can do in one day what it took the Saints weeks to accomplish. But he agrees that the Wild are benefitting not so much from what the North Stars did (because not that many St. Paul folks actually supported the Bloomington-based Stars anyway), but from what the Saints did. They showed the hockey nuts of St. Paul that they could be big time.
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