1960 championship ignited Eagles fervor

As they swept away discarded hot-dog wrappers and hot-chocolate-smeared Dixie cups and dismantled the portable bleachers that had swelled the old stadium's capacity by 7,000 that Monday afternoon, the Franklin Field workmen couldn't have known they were tidying up after the first shot in a green revolution.

If you weren't tuned in closely to Philadelphia sports in the days that followed, you could have missed the early signs of the coming transformation: the caffeine-fueled football chatter at Center City coffee shops, the unusual lines outside the Philadelphia Eagles' tiny offices at 15th and Locust Streets.

It all began on Monday, Dec. 26, 1960, when the Eagles - 2-9-1 in 1958, when they averaged 28,000 a game - defeated Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, 17-13, capturing both the NFL championship and, as soon became clear, the hearts and minds of this city's sports fans.

Philadelphia's 27-year-old football franchise had won titles before, its most recent 11 years earlier. But, as soon became clear, something was different about this one. Suddenly, baseball, which had dominated sporting attention here for nearly a century, had a serious competitor.

"When I went back to work after that game, I remember going into the little coffee shops around our office," said Jim Gallagher, the former Eagles public-relations director who joined the team in 1948. "The only sports talk you used to hear was about the A's [who had left for Kansas City in 1954] and the Phillies. Now, all of a sudden, they were talking about us."

In the 50 years since, that buzz has grown into a cacophony.

Sunday, as they again meet Green Bay, this time in their Lincoln Financial Field opener to the 2010 season, the Eagles are arguably kings of the Philly hill and, by most any measure, one of the NFL's most successful teams.

Purchased for $250,000 in 1949, the Eagles, all these decades later, according to Forbes magazine are the league's seventh most valuable franchise, with an estimated worth of $1.1 billion.

Their rabid fans, simultaneously feared, loathed, and admired for their passion, fill the South Philadelphia stadium week after week. Thousands more wallow on season-ticket waiting lists. And, even as the Phillies shoot for a third straight World Series appearance, local chat rooms, sports sections, radio talk shows, and barrooms are inflamed with Eagles fever.