ST. PETERSBURG - It wasn't so long ago where Tampa was considered the city of champions with the Storm wearing literally a handful of rings, the Buccaneers with a Super Bowl championship and the Lightning holding bottles of SP-50 for Lord Stanley's tan. Even with the Devil Rays lagging far behind there was this sense that area sports fans were thumping their chests in unison.

 

And now an eerie silence is in the air as if some sports god was made angry and cursed the beautiful Gulf Coast of the Sunshine State.

 

Charles Dickens said in the first sentence of his A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." And now it seems appropriate considering the state of our professional teams and the two cities, Tampa and St. Petersburg, vying for the almighty entertainment dollar.

 

Only the Bucs are assured of putting fannies in their seats. After all, this is football country and they have arguably the best stadium in the NFL. But that schedule. Oh that schedule.

 

There could be a lot of empty seats by halftime at Raymond James Stadium in 2006 simply because there seems to be more questions than answers with this team.

 

Say what you want about the Glazer family, they appear to put their money where their mouths are putting together a first class organization that turned around a joke of a franchise leading to a new stadium and now a new training facility.

 

However, since running Tony Dungy and Rich McKay out of town as if they were lepers then selling their collective soul (pound that rock, not the dinner rolls) to the devil (not the Rays either) to get Jon Gruden and Bruce Allen, things haven't been quite the same around these parts.

 

The "Boy Genius" held the Lombardi Trophy on the back of Dungy and even though he gave him all due props, Gruden guided the Pewter Pirates to two straight losing seasons thereafter, a league first for a super team.

 

Meanwhile bits and pieces of the heart and soul of the team put together by McKay were unceremoniously dumped and you have to ask whether the Oakland Raiders East was worth the time, effort, draft picks and money.

 

There was a glimmer of hope last season only when the schedule came out for '06 it was like telling Glazer to forego the firing of Gruden and Allen, just dig up Lombardi and sign him.

 

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The Lightning? Great strides toward putting a Cup caliber team on the ice but after last year's flopperoo as defending champs, the string of consecutive sellouts could come to an end this October faster than you can say Kokusai Green or Art Williams, the two owners who almost made the team vanish, as in bankrupt or outright extinction.

 

Current owner Bill Davidson put the right people in the right places and together finally put hockey on the Tampa Bay sports map.

 

When GM Jay Feaster was named there were a lot of "Jay Who?" jokes only to vanish after the team's first playoff series win and then going all the way on their own home ice.

 

The flopperoo had more to do with a year off from the lockout and a salary cap that restricted Feaster just when the team finally had some money to spend.

 

Bye-bye Nikolai Khabibulin dreams of a repeat.

 

What remains to be seen is if players have already started to tune out head coach John Tortorella's intense act or was it the players who simply laid down once they were fitted for their rings.

 

My guess is that Tortorella has more to prove than anyone within the Bolts' organization, not those wearing the sweaters.

 

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There are any number of reasons why the Storm have become Public Enemy #1 with the Arena Football League although it might start right in Tim Marcum's office.

 

Put aside his off-field transgressions, the AFL took dead aim at the GM-slash-head coach because of salary cap violations and sitting him down longer than anyone in recent memory, other than a player.

 

There were also conflicts with Marcum and players, especially Bobby Sippio who, despite outstanding numbers, was released and wound up with the Chicago Rush reeling in 17 TDs in just five games and more than doubling the yards-per-game average of anyone on the team.

 

Chicago won ArenaBowl XX and the Storm missed the playoffs for the first time in team history.

 

The roster could look very different in 2007 including who is under center as record-setting quarterback Shane Stafford is a free agent and could land elsewhere.

 

Some players sense there is a bulls-eye on their back with the league and that could cause a mass exodus of key players.

 

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The Rays, sans Devil, are another story.

 

Best known for bad teams, empty seats, horrific ownership and worse management, a white knight rode into town and grabbed the reins of a team that also had a bulls-eye on their back but unlike the Storm, the league took aim at contracting the team with Vince Naimoli making a tidy little sum in the process.

 

Vince got his pound of flesh but it was Stu Sternberg who cut the check.

 

Fans rejoiced, Tropicana Field got a desperately needed facelift and there were many new faces in all the right places.

 

In less than a year the won-loss record will likely be what it has since 1998, give or take a few wins or losses. Fans don't want to hear it. They want everything yesterday.

 

Sorry, things don't work that way.

 

You hear some ask why put the $10 million into the Trop when a couple of starters would have done us much better. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't but be sure of this, beating out Baltimore for fourth is not my gauge of success.

 

Would that have translated into more fannies in those empty blues? Not likely either and even had the money gone into arms instead of renovations, I don't know of too many people who would have ventured into a sewer of a stadium to see them.

 

While still ranked last in average attendance in the American League, overall attendance is up 23% and the numbers you see in the box score more accurately depicts actual people as opposed to what we heard over recent years when it was obvious that the number was inflated by as much as 200-300%.

 

It's called rebuilding bridges that were burned by the previous administration and some fans are starting to believe that good things are close at hand.

 

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I know it doesn't carry much weight but if I had to vote for Tampa Bay coach/manager of the year for the teams that had their season come to an end in 2006, it has to go to Joe Maddon of the Rays.

 

I'll pause for a moment until you stop laughing.

 

.............

 

.............

 

A local columnist recently wrote Hey, Joe, give us a $%&...or a *@#.

 

Had it been done before the first meeting of the Rays and Angels I might have agreed but since then he has acted more like former skipper Lou Piniella than Piniella himself, especially after his final year in Tampa Bay where he looked like someone slipped him 50mg of valium before each game.

 

Either the Tampa native had just given up or maybe Curt Schilling was right that the game had indeed passed him by.

 

Maddon had the toughest job in Tampa Bay, maybe in the entire sports world - following an alleged legend and changing an attitude.

 

Smilin' Joe refuses to publicly say anything negative about his players, as it should be. Piniella wasn't embarrassed to cut loose on a player in public like he did in front of the cameras with Ben Grieve one night at the Trop.

 

Joe knows his team has been screwed over more times than most of us could count but he reserves his tirades for the men in blue and doesn't air his team's dirty laundry for media consumption, even after a horrible loss.

 

Wins and losses in 2006 do not adequately describe what Maddon has done. If you are a bad team and are constantly reminded of it, one has a tendency to believe it.

 

That was then, this is now.

 

Positive reinforcement of one's talent has made a huge dent in how the Rays operate now and Maddon may be looking down the barrel of the real Manager of the Year in the not too distant future.

 

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They say that death is part of life but you can never be adequately prepared for it.

 

Not long after I was ready to get back into the swing of things after some surgery, there was a death in my family that hit home a lot harder than I was willing to admit. And it happened to a human being way before his time.

 

While it is not the same, I can relate to parents losing a child because I used to baby-sit him and change his diapers. We both came from the same dysfunctional family and eventually went down the same path into depression and alcoholism.

 

Mark had 15-years of sobriety under his belt but things began to change in his life and he relapsed. In very short order he went from healthy in recovery to a hospice and then death.

 

This was just a few weeks before I was to celebrate my 11th anniversary and suddenly I was no longer comfortable with my own sobriety. It was almost as if I forgot that I live by the credo One Day at a Time.

 

The longer one is clean the more damage one does in relapse. While your body has been cleansed, the mind continues to drink which is very dangerous as you tend to go back to where you ended, not when you started. The body will shut down in short order.

 

One drink is too many, one-hundred is never enough.

 

I will miss him but most of all, in death, he reminded me of who and what I am, an alcoholic in recovery. I am blessed to be doing what I do because not many people get a second chance at life and to do it in a profession they love? Well, that's a bonus.

 

Sometimes I ask why even though I should not. Gift horses and all that.

 

Next month I will be honored by the Kiwanis of Gulf Beaches for something I do in the normal course of my new line of work. I am humbled. (See the press release here).

 

When you see the Josh Hamiltons of the world or just the anonymous among us, say a prayer for them and think: There but for the grace of God go I.