- ABOUT THIS PACKAGE
- Rich Hofmann: Sufferable Scoundrels: Brotherly love for Buddy Ryan, Broad Street Bullies
- Heroes & Phillains: Rod Martin
- Heroes & Phillains: Birdstone
- Heroes & Phillains: Rick Dempsey
- Heroes & Phillains: Cedric Maxwell
- Heroes & Villains: Matthew Barnaby
- The bad guys
RELATED STORIES
Rich Hofmann: Sufferable Scoundrels: Brotherly love for Buddy Ryan, Broad Street Bullies
THE SUBJECT today is villains. One would think it would be easy to compile a great and good list of Philadelphia sporting villains, and it really is.
Just close your eyes and think about the pain.
Joe Carter ended one dream for the Phillies. Scott Stevens ended another dream for the Flyers. Ronde Barber ended still another dream for the Eagles. And on it goes.
Dave Meggett used to annoy the hell out of the Eagles when he played for the Giants. Tie Domi and Matthew Barnaby were hardy perennials for a while there in the Flyers' springtimes, as Sidney Crosby is now. J.D. Drew will forever be booed by Phillies fans at the mere mention of his name. And on it goes.
But here is a harder question: Whom do people on the outside consider to be Philadelphia's villains? When you mull it over, it really is a much shorter list. Because to be a villain, a real villain, you have to be good and you also have to be bad. And, well, there just aren't that many. It really has been decades since Philadelphia has produced true villainy, years and years since this city has been able to nurture people with such a despicable persona.
Really, there are only two:
The Broad Street Bullies.
And Buddy Ryan.
Thirty-five years later, those Flyers teams remain beloved around here. It is all understandable enough, seeing as how they won the only two Stanley Cups in franchise history. But it is more than that, and everybody who was around back then will tell you the same thing.
It was not only that they won, but that they won by scaring people, by beating up people, by playing a physical style and then pushing the envelope with that style - no, tearing the envelope with that style. It has not happened since and it will never happen again - but in those years, the Flyers turned a sport on its head, thrown fist after thrown fist. If ever a team and a town could share a soul, they would be the team and this would be the town.
The rest of the teams in the league hated the Flyers - in part because of how they made their players wilt. When teams came to play in the Spectrum, star players occasionally developed these minor injuries that kept them out of the lineup. The "Philly flu" was a known phenomenon back then, and you can look it up.
The other teams hated them, the league office despised them, the town embraced them. You thought it could never be matched.
Until Buddy Ryan, that is.
Perhaps "matched" is the wrong word. There is no interest here in playing off the popularity of the teams or the sports or the era. And there
really is no way to argue that a football team that never won a playoff game could be matched against a two-time Stanley Cup champion whose victory parades drew fans estimated in the millions.
Except for this: Two decades later, those Buddy Ryan teams are remembered much more fondly than any of the current Eagles teams that accomplished so much more.
The reason is the coach, bless his villainous heart, and the atmosphere that he worked to create.
Ryan was all about the team and all about the people. If that meant he would call vacationing owner Norman Braman "the guy in France" and later support his players over management during the players' strike of 1987, so be it. If that meant learning very quickly that the Dallas Cowboys were the fans' great rival and working to stoke the rivalry beyond all reason, so be it.
Ryan took on the sainted Tom Landry, the Cowboys' Hall of Fame coach, and Landry never knew what hit him to his dying day. The all-timer was having Randall Cunningham pretend to kneel down to kill the clock at the end of an already-won game and then stand up and throw the ball in the end zone.
Then Ryan took on Landry's successor, Jimmy Johnson. That was a much fairer fight. Ryan denied it, but he put out a bounty on former Eagles kicker Luis Zendejas, then with the Cowboys. Johnson tried to chase Ryan after the game to confront him about it but claimed that Ryan got his "big fat rear end" off the field before he could get to him. Ryan feigned indignity afterward, saying he wasn't fat.
Later, they played in Philadelphia and the city witnessed the infamous snowball game, when the seats at the Vet weren't shoveled following a storm and the Cowboys - Johnson especially - were pelted. Later on came the "Pork Chop Bowl," a game billed as such in the days after Ryan was hospitalized after choking on a pork chop at dinner. Rarely have you seen such delight in a near-death experience.
That the city of Philadelphia ate this stuff up goes without saying. That Ryan had wormed himself into the Cowboys' helmets was also pretty plain. People outside of Philadelphia (and some inside of it) despised Ryan, and he could not have cared less. He delighted in outraging people.
He was the perfect villain. *
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