Becoming an Arizona Cardinals Football Fan

What turned you into a fan of the team you’d like to cover?

It happened when the team first moved here from St. Louis. I had always liked the Philadelphia Eagles because of their colors and I also liked the way their helmets looked, with the feathers on both sides kind of like the ancient Greek mythical creature Hermes that had the wings on his shoes and could run really fast, I felt like the wings on their helmets also made them fly.

But my emotions toward the team changed when the Cardinals moved here because I always loved football but the only games I could watch in person were the Arizona State Sun Devil games and high school football games.

I think I have to give credit to my older brother Frank who was and still is a Dallas Cowboy fan but has always supported the Cardinals, and he would take me and my other two brothers to the games when Dallas would come to play the Cardinals every year since they were in the same division and had to play each other twice a year.

However, I like most Cardinal fans I have always hated the Dallas Cowboys and would always cheer against them no matter who they played.

So when he would take us to the game I would always cheer for the Cardinals and I feel that that’s what made me a real fan, watching my team get beat and still cheering for them in a sea of blue and silver, somehow all that pain and anger hearing all the Dallas fans cheering the team anchored itself to my heart and has remained their for all these years.

Those were fond memories of football games from long ago. We live a couple of miles away from Sun Devil Stadium and I remember parking a couple blocks away and walking through A.S.U. and seeing all the fine looking women walking and biking around campus in their small shorts and tank tops, their tan bodies covered in sweat from the hundred and ten degree weather, I was young but I still enjoyed the scene.

We would sometimes park on the North side of the stadium where the dried up Salt River passed and people would park at the bottom and everywhere around there and walk across the street to the stadium, but you needed some type of truck to get in and out of there.

There was always bad blood between the Cardinal fans and Dallasfans so when they would play there were plenty of fights to watch.

The river bottom had river rocks scattered all over the place and I remember one particular Dallas game where three Dallas fans were beating up on a Cardinal fan and one of the Dallas fans struck the Cardinal fan with a river rock and the blood from the wound splashed on my older brother and he was pretty disgusted with that poor display of emotions and that was the last Cowboys vs. Cardinals game at Sun Devil Stadium.

I was disappointed that my brother no longer wanted to attend the games but I don’t blame him because that is no way to act to prove your loyalty to a team. But those times were fun while they lasted, even though my brother was a Cowboy fan and I opposed the Cowboys he would enjoy watching me cheer for my team in front of all the other Cowboy fans and when we got home he would tell his wife and she would ask him “ya no lo lleves” which is Spanish for “don’t take him anymore”.

By this time I was old enough to go to the games on my own, and I would go with one of my best friends, Chris. For awhile we were unemployed and all we would do was just watch football and play video games during the season, but we would need some funding for the games, so we would go and sell plasma and earn about fifty dollars a week and this would be enough to get us in the game and for a couple of beers.

During this time we would be sitting roasting our behinds on hot aluminum bleachers that had no backs in the middle of September while it is still hot here in Arizona, with no shade and drinking overpriced hot beer.

We would often wait until the game started and buy already discounted tickets from scalpers and then sneak down to better seats. Back then you could sit almost anywhere you wanted in the stadium since nobody in their right mind would pay so much to go and sit and get scorched by the heat to watch the same thing happen to your team and take all the ridicule that went along with it.

But still there are those few exceptions, we all know who we were. I have no idea what motivated me to keep going and sitting out there with the scarce amount of Cardinal fans but maybe it’s the same type of addiction that keeps gamblers spending their paychecks at the casinos, they keep hoping the next one will be the big one.

You invest so much of yourself and it makes you feel like you deserve some type of payoff or that you should be rewarded somehow. Whatever it was it kept me out there in the sun drinking in one hundred degree weather and many times I have no idea how I didn’t pass out during the game, I would wait until I got home.

All of these factors come to play in the way I became a Cardinals fan to be able to love a team like the Cardinals doesn’t come overnight with the exception of this year, but you had to witness a lot of the bad times as well as all the good times that come with being a fan of a losing team.