az1965
Love Games!
Cards optimism is back; dare we hop on bandwagon?
Paola Boivin
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 30, 2007 12:00 AM
It's a rare form of Valley fever, defined by dementia, myopia and palpitations. Glands aren't swollen, but expectations are.
It's the return of Cardinals optimism, an affliction that strikes in the late summer. The team plays its final preseason game tonight in Denver and opens the regular season Sept. 10 in San Francisco.
"God told me this year that the prayers are going to work," Sister Martha Carpenter of St. Peter Indian Mission School in Bapchule told fans at the Cardinals Kickoff Luncheon on Wednesday.
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Sigh. Dare we dream?
Despite the football organization's reputation for futility - the club holds the NFL record for the longest championship drought - optimism is high this year.
Saturday's Cardinals-Chargers preseason game went head to head with the Diamondbacks-Cubs baseball game and drew a larger audience (a 7.9 rating vs. 6.4) than its National League West-leading counterpart.
The exhibition game against San Diego also was the Cardinals' 12th sellout since moving into the stadium last year.
It took 18 seasons to reach that amount when housed in Sun Devil Stadium, and seven of those games were against the Dallas Cowboys.
Excitement is building, despite eight straight losing seasons, including last year's 5-11 effort.
"I tried to change my allegiance for about five minutes once in the '70s," said Donovan Moore, a Cardinals fan for 39 of his 44 years. "I can't help myself. I keep coming back."
"There's actually a name for it that dates all the way back to Freud in 1920," said Bettina Lehnert Schulte, a Scottsdale-based psychologist. "He called it repetition compulsion."
Lehnert Schulte said that what's happening with Cardinals fans "suggests that when people get their heart broken by a team and then come back for more season after season, it is often in an effort to do the experience over and get a different result."
Ha! That would explain comments posted Wednesday on a popular Cardinals fan Web site, arizonasportsfans.com, which followed the thread heading "You know you're a hopeless Cardinal fan . . . " Said poster "freebyrd"
: "When you watch the replay of the Chargers-Cards game and somehow expect a different ending."Uh-huh.
Not all reasons for optimism are Freudian. New coach Ken Whisenhunt generates excitement simply because of his Pittsburgh Steelers roots.
"He brings a winning attitude," said center Al Johnson, a recent free-agent addition. "You can just feel it."
Quarterback Matt Leinart returns with a year of experience, and the defense will be improved, safety Adrian Wilson insists, despite the unit yielding an average of 31 points in the team's three exhibition losses.
"Defensively, we're holding a lot of things back," Wilson told the luncheon audience at University of Phoenix Stadium. "You guys don't need to worry about the preseason."
They're not. It's the regular season that has them in a tizzy. Not everyone is optimistic. Bodog.com, an online sports gambling site, has the Cardinals' odds of winning the Super Bowl at 40-1.
Last year, when the team won just five games, its odds were 35-1 entering the season.
"Thirty-five-to-1, 100-to-1, I don't care," said Andy Charles, 46, of Tucson. "I've had my heart broken too many times to spend another cent on them."
It's hard to fault the skepticism. The club has posted only one winning season in 22 years. Just when you're ready to walk the Cardinals red carpet, the organization pulls the rug out from under you.
That doesn't discourage everybody.
"This is probably the most optimistic I've been since the (Don) Coryell days (from 1973-77)," said Moore, who runs a software consulting and development company in Parker, Colo.
"Hope springs eternal, I guess," Lehnert Schulte said. "Just ask Red Sox fans."
The Red Sox broke through in 2004. Maybe it's the Cardinals' turn.
to bad its for my insanity
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