Remembering Ed Snider
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — When you're a little kid living in the Philadelphia area first being introduced to sports in the 1970s, all you knew was losing. Ed Snider changed all of that. He was the miracle man. He introduced a winner-starved city to what a victory parade was. He was hockey, he made hockey in Philadelphia. Snider's fortitude carried him from bank, to bank, to bank, until he and his group finally found one that was willing to give them a loan for the NHL entry fee for what eventually became the Philadelphia Flyers.
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Snider was a visionary, whose unbending work ethic and diligence led to success. On Monday, at the age of 83, Snider passed away, the Flyers announced.
He'll go down as the greatest sports owner the city of Philadelphia has ever had. The Flyers of the 1974 and '75 were back-to-back Stanley Cup champions—becoming the first NHL expansion team to do so. The consecutive championships in the mid-1970s was a rare Philadelphia feat matched only in Philadelphia pro sports franchise history by the 1929 and '30 Philadelphia A's and 1948 and '49 NFL Champion Eagles.
In 1988, Snider was enshrined into the hockey Hall of Fame. He knew what he wanted and let nothing get in his way to get it. He made hockey relevant in a city that didn't even know what hockey was in 1967, when the Flyers began. And when his beloved Broad Street Bullies aged, he rebuilt the team in the 1980s to become Stanley Cup contenders again.
Losing simply wasn't in his vocabulary.
It wasn't unusual for Snider to pop into the Flyers' dressing room after a loss or a victory. His omnipresent personality was a stable of the team, and when the culture of the Flyers had to be changed, Snider, though reluctantly, made the switch.
Probably more importantly than everything he did for the Flyers, and for the NHL, Snider made Philadelphia sports fans know what it was like to win. In the early-1970s, the Philadelphia sports landscape was dreck. The Sixers, Phillies and Eagles were perennial losers. It was Snider's Flyers that changed the course of that spin and forced the other pro teams to take notice.
His Ed Snider Youth Foundation brought hockey to area children, and he'll be forever remembered by his Broad Street Bullies, his extended family.
He could be brash, but he was always honest.
"I thought our training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps that I've ever seen," Snider said candidly before one season. "Nobody looked good. I couldn't point to one thing that was a positive coming out of training camp."
That was Snider. Honest. Demanding. Passionate.
His successful business ventures included SpectaCore and WIP, Philadelphia's first all-sports radio station. He cursed the day he started it, especially during times the station criticized the Flyers, but he never got in the way of it, either. He began Prism, the region's first premium cable network, and led to Comcast SportsNet.
He was always hands-on. And he was always loyal—even to a fault. He stuck with players, coaches and general managers probably longer than he should have. But that didn't matter to Snider.
In the end, his passion and dream turned into far more than he anticipated. In the end, his legacy is cast by a long, warm shadow over a sports franchise and a city that should be forever indebted to him.