Woe, Be Gone

The franchise can lay claim to two NFL championships, but the first, in 1925, was tainted: It came only after the league stripped the Pottsville Maroons of the title for playing an unsanctioned out-of-league game. What really angered the Maroons, who beat the Cardinals head-to-head, was that the Cards padded their record by playing the Milwaukee Badgers, a team with four high school kids. "One of them was 15 years old," says 94-year-old Nick Barbetta, who was a guard on that Pottsville team. "They needed one more win, and they used that dirty trick to get it."

FROM APRIL 1947 to October '48, Cardinals owner Charles Bidwill died of pneumonia, punter Jeff Burkett was killed in a plane crash and tackle Stan Mauldin suffered a fatal heart attack in the locker room as his teammates looked on. And that was during the greatest run on the field in franchise history.

In 1947 the Cardinals beat the Eagles at Comiskey Park for the NFL championship, and they were poised to repeat in '48. But a blizzard struck on the day of the title game at Philadelphia's Shibe Park. Players from both teams voted on whether to postpone for a week. "It was the end of the season and everybody wanted to go home," says Jimmy Conzelman Jr., son of the Cardinals' coach. "So they said, 'To hell with it, let's play.'" Snow was up to the players' calves. When Eagles running back Steve Van Buren plowed into the end zone for the game's only score, Cardinals tackle Chet Bulger asked the ref, "How do you know?" That 7--0 loss set the stage for five decades of futility. The Cardinals' 61-year title drought is the second-longest in major American sports; only the Chicago Cubs, at 100 years, have gone longer without a championship.

Cardinals history is not easy to track, mainly because the team's headquarters in Chicago twice caught fire. If some anecdotes sound apocryphal, maybe they are. The one about the Cardinals getting their name from the hand-me-down University of Chicago jerseys that had faded to a shade of red? "Not true," says Joe Ziemba, a football historian and author of the 1999 book When Football Was Football: The Chicago Cardinals and the Birth of the NFL . The one about the Cardinals playing the Chicago Tigers in 1920 with the stipulation that the loser would disband? "Not true either," Ziemba says. The mob links? "Oh, that's true."

The Cardinals left Chicago in 1960 and St. Louis in 1988, but conditions in Arizona were only slightly better than at Comiskey. "You might as well have been sitting in a kiln," Cunningham, the former center, says. "One preseason game against the Bears it was 142� on the field. I lost 22 pounds." One night a year, though, the Cards' home, Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, was the place to be: When the Cowboys came to town, so many Dallas fans filled the seats that the Cardinals had to use silent counts on their own field. Asked for his favorite memory of those games, current Cards guard and Phoenix native Deuce Lutui says, "Throwing a can of soda at Deion Sanders."

Bill Bidwill, who began as a ball boy for his dad's team and became sole owner in 1972, was generous with charities but not always with players. Former safety Robert Griffith claimed the team charged him a shipping fee when it sent him his contract in 2005 (an assertion the Cardinals denied). Eric Hill, a linebacker in the '90s, says he was charged for catered lunches in the locker room. Sikahema says he was charged for socks. "You would go to the equipment man at the beginning of the season, and he'd give you two pairs of socks, two pairs of shoes and, oddly, an ashtray and a carton of smokes," Sikahema says. "If you asked for a third pair of socks or shoes, they'd dock it from your check. It wasn't unusual to walk through the mall and see teammates at Foot Locker buying cleats."

Other NFL clubs also docked players for extra socks and shoes, but with the Cardinals the slapstick stories reinforced the team's image. Consider one of the Cardinals' most memorable games. "It's Christmas Day 1995, Monday Night Football , we're 4--11, we're playing Dallas on their way to the Super Bowl, and they're filming Jerry Maguire ," says Cunningham, now an award-winning documentary producer. "That morning we had meetings in the hotel, and [defensive end] Chad Brown and Eric Hill get into an all-out fistfight watching film. Before the game we're in the locker room, and Brown decides to come back and finish the fight. He wasn't even active. Eric was partially dressed. Our running backs coach somehow gets punched in the face and winds up with a knot on his head. And in the doorway is Dan Dierdorf—the alltime Cardinal [and MNF analyst]—shaking his head. That was the culmination of my experience with the Arizona Cardinals."

Today's players don't believe the stories. "You're making stuff up," says defensive end Bryan Robinson. The Cardinals now play at University of Phoenix Stadium, one of the NFL's plushest facilities, and get all the socks they want. Credit Michael Bidwill, Bill's son, a former federal prosecutor who joined the organization in 1996 to work on the stadium deal and by extension rescue the family business. "This team was not as bad as people think," Michael says. "But the losses were frustrating, and we had to get this new stadium built to put together a business plan that would succeed." After decades spent wasting draft picks and hiring coaches past their prime, the Cardinals chose receivers Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald in successive drafts in 2003 and '04 and hired the 44-year-old Whisenhunt in 2007. The Bidwills finally gave their team time to grow.

"If these players don't appreciate what they have," Hill says, "tell them to call me."

RESENTMENT HAS given way to nostalgia. After the Cardinals beat the Eagles in the NFC title game to advance to Super Bowl XLIII, Hill rose from his seat in the stadium and fixed his eyes on a sign that read I GUESS IT'S A COLD DAY IN HELL. Hanifan, once locked out of his office, cried tears of joy and then picked up the phone to call Dierdorf. The younger Conzelman, who had a Cards logo tattooed on his right buttock 11 years ago, promised to get another for the left cheek. And Gooding, monitoring the action from the Sundance Film Festival, said he screamed when he saw the final score. "Rod Tidwell will ride again!" he shouted. Then he made Super Bowl plans.