Chicago loves Da Bears and Cubs. But what about Tony Amonte & Co.?

It is one hour before the Chicago Blackhawks are to play the New York Rangers at the United Center, and the corner of Madison Street and Racine Avenue is quiet. Traffic is light, and the carnival barkers offering $10 parking more than a mile from the arena have been rendered mute by a lack of interest. Even one of Chicago's Finest, patrolling the corner of a tough neighborhood that is becoming the center of the city's new yuppification, shakes her head. "Used to be traffic down here," she says. "Makes my job easier, I guess."

Up the street, on the south side of Madison, Sue Chelios is behind the bar of Cheli's Chili. She is the mother of former Hawks star Chris Chelios, a Chicago-born kid with a meatpacker's face who forced a trade out of his hometown two seasons ago to chase Stanley Cups with the Red Wings. Cheli's Chili is a sad and lonely remnant of a more vibrant time, back when Blackhawks hockey mattered, back when Hawks tickets were the toughest tickets in town, back when it was Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull, Tony Esposito and, later, Jeremy Roenick, Eddie Belfour and Chelios. Sue Chelios works behind the bar with her daughter, Penny, but it's quiet here, too. She retrieves the occasional Amstel Light, the infrequent Heineken. There is time to talk this early evening, time to talk about how things used to be, back before misfires, mismanagement and missed opportunities transformed the Hawks from one of the NHL's most storied franchises into a laughingstock.

"I'd say our business has fallen off at least 40% the last two, three years," Sue Chelios says. "After the trades, everything changed. Eddie shouldn't have left. JR shouldn't have left. And Chris leaving, you have to know how much it broke his heart to leave his hometown. But it was something he felt he had to do, and that's a shame."

As Sue speaks, she looks around the bar and notes the number of fans wearing New York Rangers sweaters. Mike Metz, a printer from suburban Arlington Heights, is one of the offenders. He turns to his wife, Karen, who is wearing the Hawks' colors. "Years ago, you know what would have happened if I wore this sweater?" Mike asks. Karen answers: "He'd have gotten a beating."

They used to come here after games, those old Hawks, to sit in a corner, kick back a couple of cold ones, mix with the adoring public. Chelios brought Roenick, brought Eddie the Eagle and others, and it was just this one huge, happy family. Now look around. The current Hawks don't come in here anymore. And even if they did, except for Tony Amonte, nobody would recognize them. Alexander Karpovtsev? Valeri Zelepukin? Boris Mironov? Even the walls of Cheli's tell the story. Almost every photo is of an old Blackhawk: Glenn Hall. Hull. Mikita. Keith Magnuson. The only prominently placed photo of a current player is one of Amonte. In this, the 75th year of the franchise -- when Chelios refused to wear the Hawks jersey at an anniversary celebration and Hull declined to attend it -- it seems as if most of the Hawks' glorious moments are in black and white.

The Blackhawks are not disparaged in their hometown these days. They're simply ignored. This is a town that will embrace losers (see: Cubs), but today's Hawks can't even get a chirp out of the radio talk-show gabbers. No Hawk talk. Not even on WSCR, the club's flagship station. The hosts and callers want to grouse about Cade McNown's lack of development as the Bears' quarterback. They want to complain about how Chicago will never have an El Series. The Hawks, once a landmark on the city's sports landscape, are off the radar. It's bad enough the Hawks don't show their home games on free local television -- the club is in the Paleolithic Age when it comes to marketing -- but now, nobody feels compelled to show up in person.

Consider these numbers: On Oct. 15, the Hawks drew an announced (emphasis on announced) crowd of 11,780 for a game against the Columbus Blue Jackets, an all-time low for the United Center. Three nights later, the storied Rangers, another Original Six team featuring Mark Messier, drew an announced crowd of just 12,806. "It's frustrating," says Amonte, when asked about the diminishing crowds. Denis Savard, the former Hawks great who is now one of the team's assistant coaches, calls it "depressing."

Says Sue Chelios, "It's sad. Especially when I think about the first time I went to a game at the old Stadium. It was 1957. Wall-to-wall people, an almost ferocious cheering -- the sound you heard in that building with the yelling and the organ and everything else. Now it's all gone." Outside, the Cheli's Chili marquee reads, "Have a nice summer. Open Sept. 7." The proprietors have not seen fit to change the marquee yet. It's not hard to see why. This was a team that went to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1992, the Western Conference finals in 1995, the conference semifinals in 1996 and took Colorado to six games in the conference quarterfinals in 1997. Since then? Three seasons without a playoff appearance. And if the Hawks' early start this season is an indication, a fourth is under way.

The owner of the Blackhawks is Bill Wirtz, 71, and only "Old Billfold" Wirtz could make you say nice things about Mike Keenan. Back when the Hawks still had a team worth talking about, Keenan was the coach and general manager. He got Roenick and Chelios and Belfour and Steve Larmer and Brent Sutter to the Stanley Cup Finals. They lost to Pittsburgh in June 1992, and, later that month, Keenan wanted more. He wanted Eric Lindros, who'd been drafted by Quebec and was refusing to sign with the Nordiques. Keenan put together a package of players -- Larmer, Steve Smith, Belfour and two draft picks -- for the rights to sign Lindros. Quebec wanted millions in cash, too. Keenan said fine. But Old Billfold said no. Lindros went to Philadelphia, Keenan was fired in November and the Hawks began their descent into what their fans call the death spiral.

What happened? "Maybe they thought the attitudes they traded away were detrimental to the team," Roenick says. "Or maybe they thought that the money they would have to put up to keep everyone was too much. I don't know their exact reasoning."

Roenick was traded in August 1996; Belfour the following January. Chelios forced his trade in March 1999. Back in '92, they had let a second-string goalie named Dominik Hasek leave. They said goodbye to Joe Murphy and Bernie Nicholls in the summer of '96, and Gary Suter in July '98. All of them were character guys who fit the personality of a team that liked to start fights and finish them, a team that beat opponents physically and on the scoreboard. A team perfect for the city in which it played.

Hawks fans blamed Wirtz and former GM (now senior VP) Bob Pulford, two men who are fiercely loyal to one another but are viewed as fossilized and hidebound in their thinking. "They tore the heart out of that team," says Murphy, now with the Capitals.

Equally damaging to the Hawks were moves that were not made. After the Lindros fiasco came the Great One. Pulford did not believe Wayne Gretzky, a free agent in 1996, fit into the Blackhawks' plans. Gretzky managed just 249 points in three years for the Rangers. Then Brett Hull, the goal-scoring son of the Blackhawks' greatest player ever, became a free agent in 1998. He wanted to play in Chicago. The Hawks declined. Hull signed in Dallas and scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal for the Stars. (After that nondeal, the Hawks gave $6 million per to an aging Doug Gilmour, who bombed and was traded last March to Buffalo for Michal Grosek.)

The elder Wirtz declined to be interviewed for this article, but his son Peter, 40, the team's vice president, admits that the franchise has made some costly mistakes. "We hold players accountable, coaches accountable and ourselves accountable," he says. But Peter Wirtz takes umbrage at the long-held notion that his father is more interested in turning a profit than winning a Cup. "Our payroll is regularly among the top one-third in the league," he says. "It really bothers me when people say my father doesn't care about winning or that he isn't willing to spend the money. The last Cup we won [in 1961] was under his father [Arthur], so he wants one very badly. I don't think you can argue that we haven't spent the money. If anything, maybe you can argue we haven't spent the money wisely."

Hawks fans do. They're just not as loud as they used to be.

It was a shrine to sensory overload, the old place. Chicago Stadium was redolent with enough history to fill volumes. The gnarly old joint always left an echo in your memory: the way the shoes squeaked as you walked up sticky, beer-stained stairs, the way the pipe organ played "Here Come the Hawks," the way the building shook when 18,000 strong would drown out the anthem. "I can still remember before a playoff game, I was about a foot from Steve Larmer during the anthem," Savard says. "How do I describe that sound? It was beyond noise. I just turned to him and said, 'Is this unbelievable?' But he couldn't hear me."

No one knows why it started, but everyone knows when it started: May 9, 1985. The Hawks had lost two games in Edmonton in the conference finals, and the series returned to Chicago. Wayne Messmer, who regularly sang the national anthem at Hawks games, began to sing and the fans stood up and started cheering from the song's first word. Chicago Stadium was not like the new arenas. Seats didn't fan out from the ice. They rose nearly straight up, with balconies. The outside walls of the building were less than 200 feet from the glass surrounding the rink. When the cheering started, the sound hit the roof and bounced back down. During a playoff game in 1989, the decibel level was measured at 130 -- louder than a jet taking off at O'Hare. General Norman Schwarzkopf showed tapes of the Stadium at anthem time to his troops in the Persian Gulf.

To take advantage of the smaller ice surface at Chicago Stadium (188'x85' instead of the normal 200'x85'), the Hawks were built for toughness. Jocelyn Lemieux became a folk hero with his glass-rattling checks. Roenick, Chelios and Suter ruled the ice like a gang of toughs running wild through the streets.

And now? You could land a helicopter at center ice of the United Center, with its 960,000 square feet of space. The noise of the crowd rises and dissipates before it can ever bounce back. The seats are big and comfy and include cup holders. "Hawk fans should not be that comfortable," says Steve Rosenbloom of the Chicago Tribune, who has covered Blackhawks hockey for decades. "Hawk fans should be standing in urine." Since the United Center opened for the 1994-95 season, the Blackhawks were 100-105-30 at home through Oct. 29. Attendance is brutal, 5,000 less than what's announced some nights, according to beat writers. No-shows were unheard of just five years ago. This is a town where people willed their Blackhawks season tickets to family members. "The hockey community is still passionate here," Rosenbloom says. "They've just stopped accepting bad hockey. They're speaking with their wallets."

For now, the front office has been stabilized with Mike Smith, the former Winnipeg Jets executive who is known for his preference for European players, and a new coach, Alpo Suhonen, who is just the second European put behind an NHL bench. Both men are on record saying this year's team will make the playoffs. Did they think they had an 82-game schedule against Columbus? The goaltending is suspect. The defense is porous. The offense has just one true sniper, Amonte. And the special teams have been atrocious.

The bigger question, though, is this: Will Chicago, a blue-collar city that loves Da Bears, ever embrace a team that, if Smith has his way, will someday be dominated by foreigners? Amonte has the answer: "Yes. If we win." Maybe he's right. Red Wings fans fell in love with a team dominated by former Russian army players (but they won two Cups). And Bulls fans loved their No.3 option, Toni Kukoc, a Croatian (as long as Nos.1 and 2 were Jordan and Pippen). And the Bulls managed to create their own death spiral, so maybe the Hawks get a free pass until they can right the ship. They'll never bring back the old days, though. No more Chicago Stadium. No more Chris Chelios.

But if they start winning again, one thing is certain: Better not wear those Rangers jerseys into Cheli's Chili.

This article appears in the November 13 issue of ESPN The Magazine.