The Kanas City Monarchs are perhaps the best known Negro Leagues baseball team of all time. They played from the inception of the first Negro league in 1920 until finishing up as a barnstorming team in 1965.
What happened to the Oakland Seals National Hockey League team that played at the Oakland Arena from 1966 to 1976? It’s fascinating tale of hockey from the Bay Area to Cleveland to Minnesota and back to Oakland.
The Tams were the middle entry of three Memphis entries in the American Basketball Associations during the early 1970’s, taking the floor at the Mid-South Coliseum from 1972 through 1974. The team’s odd name was an acronym for Tennessee-Arkansas-Mississippi and the club used a tam o’ shanter cap as its logo. Charles O. Finley, the outspoken owner of the Oakland A’s of Major League Baseball and the NHL’s California Golden Seals, owned the club but seemingly took little interest in it. Like the A’s and the Golden Seals, the Tams wore Finley’s preferred colors of green, gold and white.
Minor League Baseball returned to Mobile, Alabama in 1966 after a four-year absence. Kansas City Athletics owner Charles O. Finley transferred his team’s Class AA Birmingham farm club to the Azalea City after failing to come to an agreement for a new lease on Birmingham’s Rickwood Field. During the A’s lone summer in Mobile, the ball club ran away with the 1966 Southern League pennant, thanks to a club packed with future Major League stars such as Sal Bando, Rick Monday and Blue Moon Odom. Following the 1966 season, Finley moved the team back to Birmingham.
The Salt Lake Golden Eagles hockey team was a popular mainstay on the Utah pro sports scene for a quarter century. That Eagles endured despite the shocking and untimely deaths of two team owners, the collapse of two hockey leagues of which they were members, and several 11th hour rescues from financial calamity.
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