A few words about Michelle Smallmon sticking up for St. Louis sports fans
The radio can be a great way to tell the whole story.
Knowing the whole story has its benefits, but life can be so much fun when you only have a piece of it-at least for Gus from Illinois. When Illinois-born and St. Louis proud Michelle Smallmon, morning radio host for ESPN, said she was seeking a new NFL team to cheer for eight years after the Rams left town, Gus needed to know why. He called into her show, Unsportsmanlike, to get an answer. He got one.
Fun fact for LA Rams fans: Stan Kroenke didn’t spend in St. Louis like they currently do in Los Angeles, and they drafted poorly. That’s how you bleed an animal down to make them more appealing for a move to another city. You don’t fatten that team up with talent, but deprive them and the fans. Gus missed that email, but Smallmon cleared up the tale, because she knows how to represent.
Kroenke had wanted to pull the Rams out of town for years, and I get it. The west coast is a dream-like matrix that inspires spending and excitement over anything new. But it’s what he did in the legal process and immediate aftermath that torched feelings for him around St. Louis. In short, he took a shit on the city, and its sports pride. Despising a greedy rich guy with no emotions comes naturally to 95% of civilization, but Stan is a special kind of shithead.
In breaking it down for caller Gus, Smallmon excellently compared the breakup to a person in a relationship or marriage not only deciding to leave their spouse, but crapping all over them to anyone who would listen. It’s not the action of taking football away that left the awful taste in St. Louisan minds; after all, no good thing lasts as long as you want it to in the world of business, especially around here with the Rams being the second NFL team to be pried away. No, this was about defiantly declaring St. Louis “a baseball town,” one that had no real passion for other sports teams. Bullshit.
Look at all the brand new soccer fans in town who are crazy about the Major League Soccer team in town, even if they couldn’t name more than three players on the team. Granted, St. Louis had a passionate, loyal following in town beforehand, but the MLS large-sized serving brought in the rest of the casuals to the yard. It was St. Louis Blues fans who turned downtown blue after winning their first Stanley Cup in 2019, and still draw crowds without a star player. Tell St. Louis Hawks fans that basketball wasn’t a thing here in the 60s and 70s. Arizona Cardinals fans named Gus better know that St. Louis had football and baseball Cardinals way back.
Any sport that comes to St. Louis becomes a thing, something that brings different people together when they otherwise may never meet, just as good or better than Los Angeles. It’s not like the SoCal Rams team stuffed their stands after leaving STL. You left the passion back in the Midwest.
Smallmon delivered the message in full, using the still vibrant power of radio to inform thousands of football fans like Gus, who just didn’t have the whole story. The full story can travel down the biggest body of water, and still miss plenty of people. All they got were the cliff notes from news outlets whose best intentions were forgetting about the nastiness done to St. Louis. As Michelle pointed out, Stan Kroenke and the NFL paid a fine sum for their deeds. The billionaire had to hand over three quarters of a billion dollars to help the dust settle after civil court found Roger Goodell and his cronies to be liable for corrupt extraction methods. As Smallmon bluntly put it, the NFL doesn’t lose often and would kindly request anyone alive to never know about or mention it. Too bad.
Smallmon is a great sports talk radio host, someone who can make NFL and NBA discussion, two sports that I don’t follow, rather riveting. I knew she was a real one back when she produced shows for Bernie Miklasz and Randy Karraker. She didn’t just keep up with radio veterans; Smallmon dished the commentary and ignited a conversation.
She’s also right to take one’s time choosing a new team to root for. I’ve been in the same boat. The Chiefs can be highly desirable around playoff time, but it’s hard to walk into a mansion stuffed with true diehards and act like you belong. If you pulled Patrick Mahomes off that team, I’d lose a lot of interest. That’s not fanhood, more like infatuation. No other team looks desirable enough to follow, and the league still carries a stench from the St. Louis neglect.
Seeing her stand up for my town shows that you can take a person out of St. Louis, but you can’t take the pride of being a St. Louisan away from a person. It’s there for good.