There used to be a time when someone would tell you something and if it didn't happen you would be screaming to the top of your lungs that you have been misled, ripped off even.

 

The Buccaneers climbed to the top of Mt. Lombardi on the backs of Tony Dungy and Rich McKay only to be run out of town as if lepers but since the commitment to excellence moved east and pulled on the pewter and red the only whiff of the postseason was last year and it was a one-and out.

 

(Insert deafening silence here)

 

No team in the history of the NFL has someone won the "big game" and fallen flatter than a soufflé at a local day care center at four in the afternoon the next two seasons.

 

The man who brought celebrations to Dale Mabry Highway, Brad Johnson, must have caught the same thing Dungy and McKay had because he was dispatched and swapped pewter for purple. Forget his birth certificate, all the guy ever did before, during and after his tenure in Tampa was win.

 

At last count he is 9-2 in the frozen North and character also stood for something because owner Zygi Wilf sunk the love boat and let Dante "The Inferno" Culpepper romp in South Beach instead of some obscure lake that thaws for about two weeks a year.

 

Yet the Tampa Bay football fan will listen to a hoarse Jon Gruden vilify his quarterback-du-jour, scream at everyone in sight and then barely utter words into microphones after the game. Why? Because they don't care about truth, lies and videotape, they are football fans.

 

It's more like Helen Reddy singing I am Woman with the line "....hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore." It's a pigskin town now with a brand new stadium with sellout after sellout.

 

"We'll be good this year," we hear.

 

"We're going to the playoffs," they kept saying.

 

"We're a Super Bowl caliber team," is another one of those famous lines.

 

No no, mon ami.

 

(Insert more deafening silence here)

 

On the other side of Tampa, the Lightning were going through owners like a caretaker at the aforementioned daycare were going through diapers but no one cared. It was football country.

 

(Insert years of plain nothing here)

 

Not until they made the playoffs and won a series did people begin to take notice then when Lord Stanley came-a-callin' did the area fan notice there was another major sport.

 

There were no promises just actions and it all turned into this magnificent night at the St. Pete Times Forum when people learned how to spell p-u-c-k and c-u-p.

 

Along came a salary cap just when the Bolts has the money to spend and lost the guy who carried them to the promised land, Nikolai Khabibulin, and general manager Jay Feaster told us John Grahame was a suitable replacement.

 

He wasn't, Tampa Bay was one and out on the playoffs and guess what?

 

The crickets were drowning out the cars passing by the building in Tampa named after a St. Petersburg newspaper.

 

As we move west to the city of that paper, there is a baseball team that had a tradition of losing, an owner who was the anti-Robin Hood and a stadium that was never treated as good as a landfill.

 

In case you didn't know, the Devil Rays were the responsible party for the condition of the fruit dome.

 

Major League Baseball invaded "Tampa/St. Petersburg" in 1995, played their first game for real in 1998 and for eight years fans revolted to get rid of the penny-pinching moocher who should have been sainted but will be remembered for almost losing the team he brought here.

 

A man on the white horse rode into town, checkbook in hand, and did something the sport couldn't - get rid of Vince Naimoli.

 

Even Mr. Bow Tie himself, John McHale, was exiled from his palatial offices on Park Avenue in New York, within walking distance from the Great White Way of Broadway and the best restaurants this side of Paris and a short cab ride to any sport of choice year round, to a sleepy little town known as St. Petersburg.

 

The farce that was Vinny in Hawaiian garb and promise of a new day lasted all of one day when he woke up and realized what he did, agree to give up his gravy train.

 

You have probably heard the story where the owners of the Red Sox and Yankees got together at a local gin-mill and got so sloshed that they swapped two future Hall of Famers, Joe DiMaggio for Ted Williams. Had it gone through it would have changed the face of the sport itself with Joe D. using the Green Monster as his personal batting eye and the Splendid Splinter pumping home run after home run into that short right field porch at the old Stadium.

 

Like Naimoli, the bubbly wore off, the eyes opened reluctantly and the first words that were probably uttered were: "Oh my God, what have I done?"

 

The trade went the way of beer cans that needed a church key to open them and all was right in baseball land. That is, until Naimoli wound up wearing a shirt similar to the ones he dressed his ushers in.

 

All bets were off, McHale went back to the Big Apple, happily, after realizing he couldn't bust the ironclad contract that made Naimoli the Pope of St. Pete, a job for life.

 

As strange as the Rays legacy has been, there was yet another strange twist to this story.

 

George Steinbrenner, a Tampa guy with a football roots and language, buys a team in New York. Baseball in Florida, other than spring training, wasn't even a twinkle in the eye of Lords of Hardball because had it been you can bet he would have wrote a check for whatever it was worth to have a team in his backyard.

 

No such thing and "The Boss" went from getting a team from CBS, the network, for $8.7 million in 1973. Forbes Magazine has put a price tag on them now at $950 million.

 

Oh, and that's just for the team. The city owns the stadium. The YES Network is a separate corporation and if you pile that on the value could jump to maybe $1.5 billion. That's with a "B" folks. But show up with a check for $950 mil and maybe, just maybe, George will let you buy that little NY.

 

But we are not here to crown George as the King of New York but to talk about the Devil Rays.

 

Going back to that strange twist thing I mentioned, there was this young guy who was piling up millions upon millions as a New York investor who desperately wanted to own a baseball team.

 

As Steinbrenner wasn't about to sell and Fred Wilpon of equal mind with the Mets, the New Yorker did a reverse George and bought the team in Tampa Bay.

 

Stuart Sternberg wrote enough checks that he could replace the Yankees' owner in those old check card commercials because his hand and wrist sure had to hurt. However, the one he wrote to send Vince Naimoli away for good.

 

At the glorious press conference where he officially took over, Sternberg told everyone that there was no genie, no magic lantern, nothing up his sleeve that would transform a decade of madness and ineptness into the 1927 Yankees.

 

He was firm in his commitment to the team, the fans, the sponsors, the community but equally firm that the first season was going to one to feel out the organization.

 

Roughly a year later he is being compared to Naimoli.

 

There is a good chance we'll lose 100 games. There were no promises otherwise but all you hear is the trading of Huff, Hendrickson, Hall and Lugo to save money.

 

Forget that those trades brought us back more talent in one month and one Chuck LaMar did in all the time he was the second longest tenured GM when he was told to take a hike.

 

It took $10 million of Stu's money to clean up the swamp known as Tropicana Field but of course you hear that the money should have been invested in a front line pitcher.

 

Forget that you have to get someone interested in coming here first, then the market exploding on cost second and lastly, how much of a difference would he have made? 90 losses instead of 100?

 

Of course these are the same idiots that would scream and holler that the Trop looks like Fred Sanford's house. It didn't matter that there were things that I personally left hidden in section 142 back in 1999 that were still there in 2005.

 

Will winning change the way folks look at the Rays in the future? Of course because bandwagon jumping plays in every city that has a pro franchise. But I get nauseated when those people are flatly told to not expect much and when it happens it is like they expected more.

 

To those fans I say SHUT UP AND GO AWAY. If you were the person who had to sign the checks you would get a better perspective. As long as you don't, stop whining and go watch the games with Vince Naimoli. You all deserve each other.