Philadelphia lost its most influential sports figure in history with Monday's passing of Flyers co-founder and Comcast Spectacor creator Ed Snider at 83 after a long battle with bladder cancer.
The icon was a sports "futurist" who played some kind of role in virtually every major sporting occurrence in Philadelphia over the past five decades.
From his bringing the NHL to Philadelphia in 1967 with the expansion Flyers to the birth of the sports television and entertainment entity known as Spectacor in 1974 that grew into Comcast Spectacor to the opening of the state-of-the-art CoreStates Center (now Wells Fargo Center) in 1996, it is fair to say that the entire sports climate and culture of Philadelphia today is connected to the innovative visionary most commonly and respectfully referred to as "Mr.