Winnipeg Gets Its Hockey Team Back

After Winnipeg won the World Hockey Assn.'s Avco Cup in the spring of 1979, things went pretty much downhill—for the Jets in general and Winnipeg in particular. Once the center of western Canada's economy, the prairie capital stalled through the '80s and '90s as grain prices fell, the loonie plunged, and manufacturing declined. Fed up with lost opportunities, brutally cold winters, and summers plagued by giant mosquitoes, workers fled to Calgary and Toronto. Historic buildings were abandoned, and Portage Avenue—considered by some the coldest stretch of pavement on Earth—became Canada's largest skid row. "Nobody built a damn thing in Winnipeg in the 1990s," says Martin Cash, a Jets fan and business writer for the . "I mean, it was grim."

Meanwhile, in the fall of '79, the Jets joined the National Hockey League. Then the league expanded and Winnipeg contracted. In 1996, after no one wanted to buy the struggling franchise from a local investor, the Jets relocated to Phoenix as part of a larger trend in which teams in places where people like hockey (Minnesota, Québec, Hartford) moved to places where people had never heard of hockey (Dallas, Tampa, North Carolina). Former concert promoter Sam Katz remains haunted by images of children emptying their piggy banks at "Save the Jets" rallies: "It felt like someone put their fist through your rib cage and pulled out your heart."