The Pittsburgh Steelers had to go through a Baltimore team to reach the Super Bowl. To become world champions, they'll have to beat a team that almost came to Baltimore.
Many have forgotten after 13 years of the Ravens, but in one of the strangest chapters in Baltimore football history, city and state leaders spent the fall of 1987 and the winter of 1988 wooing the St. Louis Cardinals.
It might seem odd to have yearned for one of the NFL's least successful franchises and one of its least respected owners, William V. Bidwill.
"But you have to look at in the context of the times," says Mark Hyman, a freelance writer who reported on the possible relocation for The Sun at the time. "The Colts had just left, and there was this kind of desperation. This was the first real chance Baltimore had at bringing football back."
Rumors of a Cardinals move had percolated for years. Upon being introduced to a Baltimore reporter in 1985, veteran running back Ottis Anderson asked, "Are we going to Baltimore now?"
Bidwill was tired of playing at Busch Stadium, which seated only about 55,000, and of sharing the park and the attention of the town with the more successful baseball Cardinals.
The football Cardinals, owned by the Bidwill family since 1932, had moved to St. Louis from Chicago in 1960 and had failed to win even one playoff game in 28 seasons there.
Despite the so-so records and poor drafts, Bidwill remained loyal to longtime front office employees. The franchise occasionally landed a good coach, such as Don Coryell or Gene Stallings, but those men chafed at their lack of input.
The franchise seemed amateurish in so many ways, remembers Bob Rose, the Cardinals' spokesman during Bidwill's search for a new city. A visitor to Busch Stadium could turn right and walk on plush, brilliantly red carpet to the office of the baseball Cardinals. But a left took the poor soul to the football offices, with their faded red carpet, stretched "thin as a dime."
Bidwill received much of the blame for the culture of ineptitude, and Baltimoreans later wondered whether he would be just as bad as Colts owner Bob Irsay. But Bidwill was never known as a crude or cruel man.
"With him, the issue was competence," Hyman says. "There was the sense that he ran his franchise like a mom-and-pop store, that winning and losing didn't matter much."
