Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
"Tony X" became the St. Louis Blues' most famous new fan overnight.
Last April, Anthony “Tony X” Holmes’s Twitter account, @soloucity, had fewer than 2,000 followers. Then he stumbled onto Game 7 of the Blues’ first-round playoff series against the Chicago Blackhawks.
“Yo deadass this the first time I’ve ever watched hockey and this s#!t has been LIT for these first 45 seconds,” he tweeted. Ten minutes later: “White people been hiding hockey from us for years bruh. This s#!t lit.”
That second tweet received nearly 100,000 combined likes and retweets. An Internet celebrity was born. Holmes appeared on Good Morning America and sat front row at a Blues game, with Vladimir Tarasenko urging Holmes to wear his No. 91 jersey. Six months later, the 26-year-old Holmes has more than 80,000 Twitter followers.
When did you realize you’d gone viral? Midway through watching the game. I was tweeting random stuff about the game, and I got, like, 1,000 retweets in 15 minutes—but I was still focused on the game.
Do you know who gave you the first push? That’s the thing—I don’t know! I have no clue, because not that many people that I follow deal with hockey, but it got to somebody big, I’m thinking. Somebody blew it up.
I seem to remember that you had to stop reading your @s the next day because there were so many. Yeah, I couldn’t even get to my mentions. With all the comments, retweets, mentions, my Twitter was basically unusable. I could use it from my computer, but from my phone, it wouldn’t even load.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about hockey that first night? The most surprising thing was pulling the goalie.
As one of your tweets that you’ve turned into a T-shirt put it, “The goalie just said f—k it and left.” It was surprising that they actually did do that, but I can see why they would.
Now that you’ve got a few games under your belt, can you explain it? Basically, at the end of the game, when a team is down and they need to score, they take off the goalie, who is defending the goal, and add another player to get a bigger scoring threat, to score as quick as possible.
The Blues then invited you to a second-round playoff game, with prime seats on the glass. What was the experience like compared to watching it on TV? Amazing. It was exciting at home, but when you’re there, it’s just nonstop action. It moves 20 times faster than you think it would.
Has the team spoiled you forever with those seats? Yeah, uhhhh… [Laughs.] I don’t think I’m gonna be sitting there again. Those were nice. It was a great night. I don’t know what’s in the books for this season, but I’m gonna go to a lot of games. I don’t know if I’m gonna get season tickets yet. I’ve been talking to [the Blues] about some things.
The plus side to the cheap seats is you get more of a feel for how the plays develop. Yeah, I’d like to get it from a different angle, so I could see the entire ice. You can’t really see the goal on the other side when you’re that close. I didn’t even know if we’d scored or not. Everybody jumped up, so I jumped up, too.
What was your Twitter feed before? Was it mostly just friends and Cardinals fans? See, the thing is, I’m a baseball fan, but I guess I’m labeled as, like, ‘the baseball guy’ now [because he was looking for the Cardinals game that night]. But I’m a hardcore football guy. It’s basically my friends, baseball people, football people, people I’ve met online. Sports and video games—and music.
Does having the Blues in your life compensate in any way for losing the Rams? I’m gonna be honest: Football is my thing. It’s my favorite sport. I’m just pissed at the Rams. Hockey makes up for it a little bit, but not all the way.
You joked that you would have thought the “under” on black players in the NHL was 0.5. There’s some good players! People told me about P.K. [Subban, then of Montreal] and [the Blues’] Ryan Reaves. Those were two of the guys everybody told me to look out for. I knew there were a few, but I didn’t know there was that many, to be honest.
Post-Dispatch columnist Benjamin Hochman asked you define “lit.” Did that happen to you a lot? Not many people asked. I think they either Googled it or figured it out themselves. But now, any type of sport, anything that is on, I always have people in my mentions going, ‘Oh man, Tony, you gotta watch this. It’s LIT. It could be anything. Everybody’s saying, ‘It’s lit.’
Some of your new followers would squawk at you for tweeting about things other than hockey, right? Oh, yeah. It’s not bad now, but it used to be, almost every tweet, if I tweeted about something else, it’d be like, “Talk about hockey!” They were wanting me to tweet about every game. It was kind of crazy. Like, c’mon, y’all: I started watching hockey two days ago. Do you really expect me to watch every hockey game and tweet about it every time it comes on?
Have you tried to skate? No. [Laughs.] Maybe one day. I don’t know. I think I’ve got good balance. I think I’d be all right after the first couple of falls.
A couple of missed flights kept you from getting to Vegas for the NHL Awards. What were you supposed to do there? Basically I was gonna have a little skit with the guy who was doing the entire thing [host Will Arnett]. They were gonna poke some fun at [the Blackhawks’] Patrick Kane, and I was gonna be live-tweeting it during the show.
No sooner did you become a Blues fan than they lost their captain, David Backes, who signed with Boston. It’s hard for me to judge the move, because honestly, I watched maybe 10 Blues games! Everybody’s telling me he’s an older guy, he’s good, but the contract wasn’t worth it. He was great when I saw him play. I wish we would have kept him. And our goalie [Brian Elliott]. But there’s nothing I can do.
The Blues’ season home opener is October 12. Do you think there will still be baseball then as well? I’m thinking the Cardinals can get the wild card. I hope they can. If they clean up on defense, all the mistakes, we should be able to get a division series.
After the Blues won that first game you watched, you wrote, “WE DID ITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.” Then your next tweet was “‘We’ being used very loosely.” Yeah, I had to throw that out there. I refer to all my teams as ‘we.’ If my team wins, it’s ‘we.’ But since it was my first time watching…
Do you feel entitled to it now? Yeah, I do. It’s only been a few months, but yeah. I definitely feel I can use ‘we’ for the Blues now.
