A writer was a great reason why Philadelphia Eagles did not move to Arizona

Brevan Branscum
| Cronkite news

A recent offer from a Tempe technology company to acquire a minority participation of the Águilas Philadelphia It was approved by the NFL, but more than four decades ago, the NFL had to intervene to prevent the eagles from moving to Phoenix completely.

Last December, the executives of the semiconductor company based in Tempo Amkor Technology won the approval of the NFL to acquire a 3.25% participation in the Philadelphia Eagles.

The owner of Eagles, Jeffrey Lurie, sold the minority participation to Susan Kim, president of the Amkor Board. While the Eagles prepare to play at the Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans, 3.25% of the team’s property now resides in Arizona.

However, 41 years ago, the entire Eagles franchise was about to call the valley of its home.

In a forgotten moment in the history of the NFL, the former owner of the Eagles, Leonard cough, agreed to sell 25% of the team for $ 40 million to the Canadian real estate developer James Monahan. The agreement occurred in the promise that the franchise would move to Phoenix, where the Eagles would play at the Sun Devil Stadium from the 1985 season.

The reason why this story is forgotten? The former columnist of the Republic of Arizona, Bob Hurt, broke history and involuntarily saved the franchise of moving to Phoenix.

“The Hurt column, all the details about what was going to happen, put in its column,” said Ed Winski, director of communications of the Eagles at that time. “That was when people in Philadelphia, the mayor and everyone else found out for the first time.”

Wisneski, who also learned the news the day after the story broke out, added that cough and Monahan flew directly to Phoenix after the final game of the 1984 season in Atlanta.

“It is difficult to speculate if something would have broken if the pain had not written,” Wisneski said. “Arrangements had been made, at least for what I read, that the owners were going to fly to Phoenix instead of returning to Philadelphia.”

The agreement ended practically, and the Eagles followed in the footsteps of the Baltimore Colts, who moved to Indianapolis the previous year in 1983. The Regent Board of the Arizona State University was already holding meetings to discuss an Eagles lease contract At Sun Devil. Stadium. However, the city of Philadelphia was not going to see the team leave without fighting.

After Hurt received news about the sale of the Eagles and gave the news, the city “became upside Philadelphia, Ray Dandinger.

The city also received help from the NFL, which worked with cough and its daughter, Susan Fletcher, to maintain the franchise in one of the largest markets in the nation.

“The City Council mobilized. The NFL mobilized. Fans literally surrounded the stadium, ”Dandinger said. “There was no way that the Eagles left the city and it was just a matter of solving how they were going to work.”

The city made financial concessions to persuade cough to keep the team in Philadelphia, including the construction of luxury boxes in the stadium and a new interior practice installation. Tame agreed and the agreement failed, leaving Phoenix without a NFL team.

The former colleague of the Republic of Arizona de Hurt, Kent Somers, said that Hurt, who died in 2009, seemed to meet everyone and probably had multiple sources that gave him information about the agreement and details.

“I remember gone to a Four Four with him, and ran into the North Carolina dean Smith coach in the street and stopped to greet,” said Somers, who covered the Cardinal and the NFL for years. “The writers in Philadelphia, when they discovered that it was Bob Hurt who broke the story, say: ‘Oh, well, then it’s true.'”

The team had already faced several significant financial struggles in the years prior to the 1984 season, according to the sports columnist of Philadelphia, Rich Hofmann. Former coach Dick Vermeil retired, a player’s blow in 1982 shortened the season and cost the team money, and the games at home stopped being exhausted due to the lack of team’s success.

In addition to everything, cough was “betting on the franchise”, creating a debt that finally led to his agreement to move the team.

“(Cough) was a guy who spent first and asked questions later in everything he did in his life, including the execution of a franchise, but also clearly had a game problem,” said Hofmann, who was with the Daily Philadelphia News in time. “He had an Eagles employee as part of his entourage who was walking with a gymnastics bag full of $ 25,000 in cash in case he ran into the Blackjack table.”

Tame sold the franchise for $ 65 million in 1985 to car merchants Norman Braman and Ed Leibowitz, who later sold the current owner, Lurie, in 1994.

Thirty -one years later, Lurie has sold a small portion of the franchise back to the Valley.

While the former owner Tame is infamous for almost moving one of the main franchises of the nation, wounded, ironically, he has appreciated among the fans of the Philadelphia sports for a long time.

The pain joked saying that he wanted a statue of himself built next to the “rocky” statue outside the Museum of Art of Philadelphia, according to Somers. His news did not cost Arizona’s opportunity in a NFL team for a long time, since the cardinal franchise moved from St. Louis in 1988.

As both cities and franchises separated, “Phoenix Eagles” are simply a forgotten “what would happen if” ‘is lost in the history of NFL.

“It’s hard to imagine a NFL where eagles are not in Philadelphia,” said Somers. “The Phoenix Eagles? The Arizona eagles? It doesn’t come out exactly from the tongue. “

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