December 14 (1979)

The St. Louis Steamers play their first-ever Major Indoor Soccer League home game and sell out the Checkerdome. A crowd of 18,005 sees the Steamers lose, 5-4, to the Hartford Hellions. The overflow crowd for opening night takes almost everyone by surprise. Only 900 season tickets were purchased, only $2,800 of program advertising would be sold for the season, and the Steamers receive no money from parking and concessions. Before the season began, “they were trying to figure out how they were going to make payroll,” Steamers player and captain Steve Pecher will tell Dave Lange in a 2010 interview. To the astonishment of players and staff, people mob the entrances on opening night and the game is delayed to get people to their seats. “There are rumors that we sold out the first game because we gave away tickets,” Joe Westhus, the Steamers’ acting general manager, will tell Lange some 30 years later. “That’s not exactly true.” The Steamers gave 8,000 tickets to Anheuser-Busch in payment for marketing and television services, according to Westhus. “They distributed the tickets,” Westhus says of Anheuser-Busch. “But we also had a great walk-up.” As for the game itself, Emilio Romero scores the Steamers’ first-ever goal at home at 6:39 of the first quarter, which ends with the visitors ahead, 2-1. After a scoreless second quarter, the Steamers vault into a 4-2 lead on third-period goals by Pecher, Dan Counce and Romero. Hartford gets a goal back later in the third period. Just 1:03 into the fourth quarter, future Steamer Yilmaz Orhan scores his third goal of the night. The winner comes with just 11 seconds left when Jose Neto heads the ball into the net. The Steamers’ record falls to 1-3, and they will finish their inaugural season with a 12-20 mark. But the crowds will keep coming, and the Steamers will average 14,060 for 16 home games. Their average attendance will climb to 17,107 in the 1981-82 season, and the team will average more than 10,000 fans in each of the first seven of the Steamers’ nine seasons of existence.