Why Do We Care So Much?

So, yes, a certain family-inspired lure of the Eagles goes way back. But consider the shifting level of passion. In the late ’50s, if you bought an Eagles ticket, you’d get one free — they were called father-son tickets, and they cost $15.50 per season for the pair. Old-timers — those who actually remember the Eagles championship in 1960, that is — righteously claim that Eagles fervor hit the big time that year. By 1961, season ticket sales had doubled to 34,000. Yet that left some 26,000 seats still available at Franklin Field, at a price of $5 and $3 — it wasn’t like the city was desperate over the team. These days, 60,000 people are on the waiting list for season tickets. Hell, up to 20,000 fans showed up daily for training camp this summer.

Somewhere in there, everything changed.


VAI SIKAHEMA, THE EX-EAGLE and current local sports anchor, played for the Cardinals during the Eagles’ Buddy Ryan years. One Sunday, the Cardinals took three buses, with a police escort, to the Vet from their hotel at the airport, over the Platt Bridge. Small problem: At Broad and Pattison, the first two buses went through, but the third got hung up at the light. The cops went ahead, with the other buses. Fans were flowing by, toward the stadium, and realized who was on that third bus: about 20 Cardinals. They started yelling, cursing, and rocking the bus. Sikahema would later sign with the Eagles, would settle into his broadcasting career here. But that day, the fans, screaming, going crazy, rocked the bus so violently, 20 Cardinals had one thought: We’re about to be killed. Sikahema laughs about it now. But he has something in common with superfan Tina (who was careful to marry an Eagles fan the second time around): He isn’t kidding, either.

Sikahema says that this city has the most intense fans of any city in the NFL. So does Ron Jaworski, who was quarterback during the first great leap in Philadelphia fandom, in the late 1970s.

Which brings us to Dick Vermeil. It’s now a given what a swell guy Vermeil is, the guy who drove a so-so team to the Super Bowl, the guy who burned out and had to quit, the guy who’s pitched Blue Cross on a thousand local billboards. But it wasn’t a given when he arrived in 1976, the year of our Bicentennial embarrassment. If you want to remember what the city looked like back then, rent Rocky — Philadelphia, once so important, was the dumpy middle kid between New York and Washington. The race wars still boiled. The city was leaking people, jobs, money. We did have a collective identity, one the Eagles were particularly consistent at reinforcing: We suck.

Vermeil says it himself, that a lot of fans wondered, Who is this Boy Scout? A California guy who looked like Redford, had won the Rose Bowl, Mr. Rah-Rah.

It took him, by his estimation, two years to win us over. The first year, when he was driving in from Bryn Mawr, stuck on the Expressway, and fans recognized him, he got flipped off a lot. Vermeil, being Vermeil, didn’t respond in kind — he ignored it, or looked over at a bonkers driver and smiled. Winning Dick. But by the middle of that second season, the team improving, his boundless let’s-get-’em energy and working around the clock and public displays of emotion — my God, the guy means all that shit — those crawlers on the Expressway flashed a different hello: thumbs up. You go get ’em, Dick.

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