Even before today, the sports histories of Tampa Bay and Philly often have intertwined.
By DAVE SCHEIBER
Published May 8, 2004
[Times photo: Dan McDuffie] Jan. 3: Vinny Lecavalier and Marcus Ragnarsson tangle during the Lightning's 6-1 victory.
This may look like a hockey series to you.
But scratch one layer beneath the icy surface of today's Lightning-Flyers series opener at the St. Pete Times Forum. You'll find an even icier rivalry in the making that reaches far beyond the rink.
What we have here is an evolving civic drama, entwining two regions a thousand miles apart, two different sports and one traumatized psyche of Philadelphia fans everywhere.
Philly vs. Tampa Bay. Ben Franklin vs. Howard Frankland. Independence Hall vs. Tyrone Square Mall.
There's no brotherly love lost between these sporting towns, but they have to stop meeting like this. People are starting to talk.
In Tampa Bay, it's about making history; in Philly, it's about making amends.
For the fourth time in as many years, the road to a world title for a Tampa Bay franchise leads to the intersection of Gandy Boulevard and Broad Street - with a chance for the Lightning to reach its first Stanley Cup final since its inception in 1992.
And it turns out Philly's legendarily crazed fans, forever known for pelting Santa Claus with snowballs and booing the Easter Bunny decades ago, dread the road could once again lead to despair. It did two seasons ago, when the Buccaneers stunned the Eagles 27-10 in the NFC Championship Game, shutting down Veterans Stadium in grim style.
The date was Jan. 19, 2003, and the land of the Liberty Bell has never recovered.
"Philly fans used to just look at Tampa Bay as a place where people went to retire," says Angelo Cataldi, the quintessential voice of Philly Fan and drive-time sports radio host for WIP. "Now there's no doubt about it. People are still carrying such a grudge from two years ago. They're actually asking the Flyers to fight the battle of the Eagles for them.
"There've been a lot of losses. But that's the one that hurt the most. So now all Philadelphia fans are cringing and going, "We're not going to have to relive that disappointment again, are we?"'
So what if the Lightning beats the Flyers and maybe wins the Stanley Cup, just as the Bucs bagged the Eagles to reach, and win, their first Super Bowl?
"I'm gonna tell you what," Cataldi says. "If you guys keep this up, we're coming down there to get you. We're going to come to Tampa Bay and have a regular Philly street fight. This could get ugly."
Of course, it hasn't helped that Philadelphia hasn't won a sports title since the 76ers' in 1983 and has won only 12 in nearly 300 seasons of play in the four major sports (which includes four combined crowns by the A's and Warriors, two teams not even in town anymore).
It's enough to give the town overshadowed by the Big Apple to the north and the nation's capital to the south a complex.
Still, not so long ago, Tampa Bay was just a blip on Philadelphia's sports radar screen. Sure, the Bucs surprised the Eagles 24-17 in Tampa Stadium to advance to the 1980 NFC Championship Game. But that quickly was lost amid years of Bucs misery.
Then along came the fledgling Lightning in 1996. In its first playoff appearance, it frightened the Flyers by taking a 2-1 series lead. But goalkeeper Daren Puppa's back injury contributed to Tampa Bay's demise in six games.
"If Puppa doesn't get hurt, if his back doesn't go on him, we'd have given them a run," recalls then-Lightning coach Terry Crisp, now a TV analyst in Nashville. "We would have taken them right to the wall, and who knows what would have happened?"
For Crisp, one fond memory lingers, however. Moments after the Lightning lost its final game 6-1 in the heated series, he looked up in surprise as the 27,000-plus ThunderDome (now Tropicana Field) crowd showered the team with a boisterous ovation.
"We'd lost the series, but our fans felt like we'd just won the Stanley Cup," says Crisp, who played and coached for the Flyers. "Sporting moments come and go, but you don't forget something like that."
Former Lightning president Phil Esposito won't forget something else about the Flyers: the blurry fax-Chris Gratton incident of 1997 as the roots of a budding rivalry began to spread.
The financially beleaguered Lightning had a new building, but Esposito had little money to pay his players and no way to hold onto the star center.
So in stepped Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke. He took advantage of Esposito's plight, submitting a lucrative offer sheet for Gratton via fax. There was no way Esposito could match the Flyers' offer, but he stalled, claiming the fax was too hard to read. Ultimately, the move didn't keep Gratton from going to Philly, but it did leave a lingering bad taste in Esposito's mouth toward Clarke.
"I still think it was terrible what he did," Esposito says. "I'll never understand that one. And what justifies it is that, a year later, he traded him back. But he put $9-million in (Gratton's) pocket. He's a pretty good hockey player, and I like Chris a lot. But he gave him almost a $20-million deal (including $2-million a year for five years). That was over the limit.
"I tried everything to keep him. I thought the fax would give me time to convince everyone to pay him. But it didn't. I know what happened was part of the business. But we were struggling and trying to make something happen here, and (Clarke) took away a player I wanted to make something happen with."
Exit the Lightning from center stage, enter Tony Dungy's Bucs and the Era of Inevitability - a playoff berth, a first-round playoff loss in Philadelphia.
In truth, if Martin Gramatica makes a 40-yard field goal in Green Bay in the 2000 regular-season finale, Tampa Bay wins, earns a first-round bye, a second-round home game they have a good chance of winning and plays a not-so-menacing Giants team in New York for a shot at the Super Bowl. Instead, Gramatica misses and the Bucs go to freezing Veterans Stadium as a wild card. They get iced 21-3. Offensive coordinator Les Steckel gets axed.
A year later, with Dungy and his staff's jobs in the balance, the Bucs return to Philadelphia as a wild-card entry. Four turnovers in the cold lead to a 31-9 loss and, in short order, an end to Dungy's tenure.
So much for a rivalry. But then came 2003 with new coach (and ex-Eagle assistant) Jon Gruden. Spurred by a 71-yard reception by Joe Jurevicius, the Bucs weathered the frigid conditions and numbed the raucous Philly crowd, which had planned a proper send-off to much-maligned Veterans Stadium and circled a Super Bowl date in San Diego.
"City officials and Eagle officials had taken all sorts of security precautions ahead of time because this was the last game at the Vet and people would be uprooting things for souvenirs," says Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist Bill Lyon. "When the two-minute warning came, the cops came out to circle the field, but there wasn't anybody there. People were so shell-shocked that they couldn't even muster a boo. A Philly sports fan not being able to muster a good boo, that tells you how demoralizing that defeat was."
Consider that Philly fans booed their own sports heroes from Mike Schmidt to Ron Jaworski.
They booed a bride getting married in a stadium ceremony.
They booed a brave soul who had one-hopped a ceremonial pregame pitch - even though the man had the world's first hand transplant.
They booed the children of Phillies players who couldn't find any eggs during a staged Easter egg hunt at the stadium.
They booed - and pelted - Santa in 1968, though one observer offers a defense: The guy was doing a lousy job trying to throw mini-souvenir footballs into the stands.
"A, he was drunk. B, he weighed about 140 pounds. He was the most raggedy-a-- Santa you ever saw," says Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin. "This guy's arm was so weak, he couldn't get the footballs that each had two tickets to a next-year's game to the fans in the upper deck. So they weren't throwing snowballs at the symbol of Santa. They were throwing them at the choice of Santa."
The incidents blur. In 1989, Eagles fans threw ice balls from the stands at first-year Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson. Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, before his run for mayor of Philadelphia, bet a fan next to him $20 he couldn't reach the field with one of the ice balls. The fan obliged. Rendell acknowledged this while serving as mayor. Word is, his approval rating went up.
So to silence Philly fans is noteworthy.
"People are still wearing emotional black armbands over that title game," Conlin says. "Partying in San Diego was a foregone conclusion. They just didn't bargain on Gruden's ability to game plan. And (Eagles coach) Andy Reid tried to play them the exact same way he'd played them before."
"That, and the collapse of the 1964 Phillies, are "Remember Pearl Harbor' to the fans here."
Naturally, when the Bucs ruined the inaugural game at the Eagles' new stadium last season, beating them 17-0 on Monday Night Football, Philadelphia's disdain for all things Tampa Bay intensified.
"I don't think we'll ever live that one down 'cause that was the biggest gala night in Philadelphia in 30 years," Cataldi says. "Everyone was convinced we'd get some redemption.
"But it wasn't as bad as 2003. That ranks with the greatest disappointments in the history of the city. People call up our show every once in a while and claim that Joe Jurevicius still hasn't stopped running yet. And we go, "Jeez, he's got to get tired sometime. He's still running, and we still can't catch him."'
How does Cataldi define an extreme Philly fan? He thinks of the guy who once fired a flare over the field at Veterans Stadium on Monday Night Football, amid an Eagles collapse, then left in handcuffs to an ovation.
"We're absolutely nuts, absolutely insane," Cataldi says. "What I see is that we live our sports. It's part of the fabric of the community. And in Tampa Bay, maybe because they don't have the same psychological problems we have, they see sports more as a diversion, as entertainment."
Okay, entertaining doesn't quite fit the pitiful Bucs from 1983-95 or the ongoing baseball struggles of the Devil Rays (who, by the way, have their own connection to the Philadelphia story: trading outfielder Bobby Abreu to the Phillies in 1997 for shortstop Kevin Stocker. Abreu is a star; Stocker a so-so distant memory).
"We literally have people carrying around anger from 1964 and all the late '70s Phillies teams that couldn't make it and all the other disappointment from other teams," Cataldi adds.
"It keeps adding up. And if you guys take this away now, it's "Here we go again."'
- Times staff writers Gary Shelton and Tom Zucco contributed to this story.
