{"id":1675,"date":"2016-01-27T00:45:09","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T06:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/?p=1675"},"modified":"2024-02-05T19:50:45","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T01:50:45","slug":"st-louis-football-cardinals-my-team-of-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/?p=1675","title":{"rendered":"St. Louis Football Cardinals, my team of the past"},"content":{"rendered":"

You love your memories, especially sports memories that gave you a\u00a0love of sport<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Football at Busch Stadium\u2026circa 1962 – Portable stands along the right field baseball line and gravel in front of the bleachers ten yards behind the end zone \u2026.but hey, the players had a ball\u2026.fans did too!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Growing up in the\u00a0early 1960\u2019s\u00a0I was treated on Sunday afternoons with only a couple of NFL games on the TV. Oklahoma City was in the St. Louis Football Cardinals market before there was a Dallas Cowboys, and viewing those early time-slot games\u00a0out of St. Louis on the CBS network were never missed. Those games were played in a baseball stadium in St. Louis and I was always intrigued that the corners of the end zones banked right up to the wall of the stadium seating.\u00a0Those pointy corners were always causing players smash themselves into oblivion.\u00a0\u00a0I cannot even remember if they were padded.\u00a0\u00a0The injuries say no.\u00a0\u00a0Those were the days for this really young kid to brainwash himself into a true sports fanatic.<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

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Jack Drees was the TV announcer on those\u00a0Cardinal broadcasts. Drees became my all-time favorite voice for NFL football, a couple of degrees\u00a0hotter than the great and more famous Lindsay Nelson. Don\u2019t get me wrong. Nelson was a historic voice, every bit the best NFL announcer of the day; but Drees was my favorite, only if by the number of times I heard his voice on any given Sunday.\u00a0 I can still remember that voice, that wonderful sports voice.<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

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Jack Dress, NFL announcer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The Football Cardinals also wore my favorite uniforms, with respect to the Chicago Bears. Their all-white roadies, with the Bird head on that white helmet, was total classic. Since I watched those games in black and white, the contrast of those whites against a usually brown dirt field stood out with distinction. The Football Cardinals were always a step or two behind the better teams in the league, but not on star power on defense. Larry Wilson, good old number eight,<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>the hardest hitter this side of anything the New York Giants could put on the field, was a safety blitz master. Hearing Mr. Drees calling out the great Cardinal defensive back crushing an opposing quarterback with a safety blitz was the best it could get. He did it often, most always effective, many times knocking himself out of the game as much as the quarterback he would throw his body against.\u00a0 A Hall-of-Fame member,\u00a0Larry Wilson\u00a0was the best safety in the League when he played, with respect to the others in the league.<\/span><\/h3>\n

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St. Louis, up until a few weeks ago, had\u00a0the Rams and Arizona has the Cardinals. But for me, the Cards will always be the St. Louis Football Cardinals and the Rams will always be the Los Angeles Rams. Sure, some twenty, thirty years later after the franchise moves, the Rams and Cards are now elsewhere. But when I see those unique helmets, the Rams horn and the Cards bird head, I always think back to what was. And that will never change. Not ever. (Well, with the Rams heading back to Los Angeles, the league has got the real Rams back where they belong. Now with the Arizona Cardinals……………..<\/span><\/h3>\n

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Feature Photo:\u00a0 Larry Wilson, circa 1963<\/span><\/h3>\n
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You love your memories, especially sports memories that gave you a\u00a0love of sport.\u00a0 Growing up…<\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[157,113],"tags":[272,481,483,482,479,484,478,480],"class_list":["post-1675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-past","category-nfl","tag-arizona-cardinals","tag-jack-drees","tag-larry-wilson","tag-lindsay-nelson","tag-los-angeles-rams","tag-new-york-football-giants","tag-st-louis-football-cardinals","tag-st-louis-rams"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":378,"today_views":0},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1675"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10816,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions\/10816"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredsportsextra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}