The Los Angeles Rams are back. The league voted almost unanimously to return the NFL to the second largest market in the country in immediate fashion. The Rams will be back in southern California for the 2016 season thanks to the painstaking efforts of owner Stan Kroenke.
To many, this is a correction that was two decades in the making. What you might know is that this move has been in the works for a long time. What you might not know is that the league never wanted the Rams to leave Los Angeles in the first place.
In order to understand the whole picture of this sordid tale of quibbling billionaires, you have to take a little trip through history.
Kroenke, a sports business entrepreneur, has been a major stakeholder in the team since their move to St. Louis in 1995. Back then, he had a 40-percent hold in the company. The rest of it belonged to a woman named Georgia Frontiere.
It’s important to remember that Frontiere was the major instigator in moving the Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis in the first place. The Rams were atrocious during their final five years, winning just 33 percent of their games (27-53 SU) between 1990-1994. That lack of success made it nearly impossible for the team to draw fans in to the building, and Frontiere was at odds with the city of Los Angeles over a new stadium deal.
The Los Angeles Rams weren’t making money, and while Los Angeles is booming these days, the economic climate at the time was far from ideal. Fans could’ve cared less about the Rams. Networks blacked out most of their games anyways. No matter which way you looked at it, Frontiere’s team was a sinking ship in a bleeding market.
But the NFL ownership group was vehement about their desire to keep the team in Los Angeles.
Some of the most well known owners in the NFL at the time led a charge to prevent Frontiere from abandoning Los Angeles despite the local problems regarding a new stadium and overall support from the area. Ralph Wilson of the Bills, Leon Hess of the Jets, Wellington Mara of the Giants and Bill Bidwill of the Cardinals, were among the owners who convinced their peers to vote down the move from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995. Even then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue was against it.
This is where memories about Frontiere’s confrontation with the NFL gets sticky because…well…she was a woman. Owning major sports teams was pretty much an old boy’s club and the only way women have become owners of NFL teams was through inheritance, which was how Georgia Frontiere became the owner of the Los Angeles Rams upon her husband’s untimely death in 1979. Frontiere was the only female owner at that time.
Her ownership of the team was often criticized by other owners, and she met these detractors head on. At her first press conference, she definitely stated that, “There are some who feel there are two different kinds of people – human beings and women.”
The move of the team sparked even more controversy when her fellow owners pointed the finger at her for running the team in to the ground. Her management choices were questioned as were her acquisitions and business decisions. To say that Frontiere was fighting a war on all fronts to move the team to a more viable financial situation was an understatement.
Those criticisms were fair to a certain degree. The Rams lost millions every year prior to their move. But everything that Frontiere dealt with was laced with sexism. She was a woman trying to do what she thought was best for her business in a man’s world.
Moving to St. Louis offered a $280 million stadium along with a $20 million profit projection in annual season ticket sales. Kroenke entered as an owner at the time, basically getting his foot in the door with a 40-percent stake, but the team still belonged outright to Frontiere. When the fiery Frontiere’s request was voted down by her fellow owners, she did what any hot blooded American would’ve done and decided to sue the league for antitrust law violations. The vote was very quickly recast based on the threat, and won 23-6 allowing Frontiere to take her team to her hometown of St. Louis.
She was there when the Greatest Show on Turf took the league by storm. She was there when Marshall Faulk became a league MVP, when Kurt Warner evolved into the most unexpected Hall of Famer of all time and when the team beat Tennessee to win a their only Super Bowl championship.
Make no mistake: the league hated that the team moved to St. Louis, but Georgia got the last laugh when she stumbled into one of the greatest offenses of all time.
In 2010, Frontiere succumbed to breast cancer and passed away, leaving the team to the rest of her family. Those shares were eventually dispersed directly to Kroenke through an estate sale that cost him a reported $750 million, giving him complete ownership of the St. Louis Rams.
Not so surprisingly, the transaction was heavily pushed by the NFL owners who had confronted Frontiere back in 1995. Kroenke was voted in as an NFL owner unanimously. You’d ben an idiot to think that this wasn’t a slow cooked plan by the NFL owners and Kroenke to simply wait out Georgia’s time on this earth so they could get the team back to Los Angeles.
It certainly seemed that way on Tuesday night, when the NFL owners ratified Kroenke’s request to move the Rams back to Los Angeles. Thirty of the 32 NFL owners voted to approve the move, ending what has been a two-decade long presence in the heart of Missouri.
St. Louis and the city are not without fault here. The Rams have ranked in the bottom five of league attendance for the past six seasons, and ended the 2015 campaign with the worst in-house numbers of any team in the league. Fans and sportswriters in the area pointed to their 87.5-percent attendance rate as a positive back in 2014 when word about relocation started seriously percolating. I don’t see how this was an argument for St. Louis as a serious NFL city. It was the third-worst attendance rate for that season.
As is usually the case, stadiums are the crux of any team moving from one city to another. There’s been mild controversy regarding how Kroenke has dealt with this, as most outlets report that he stymied any discussions with the city because of his hope to relocate back to Los Angeles. There are very little details about any new stadium being built in Missouri, and it’s almost ridiculous to believe that a magnate like Kroenke couldn’t get a deal done if he really wanted to stay.
Instead, the Rams will get a brand new, 70,000+ NFL stadium in Inglewood. It has already been given the green light and will open its gates to the public for the 2019 season. The project is a combined effort by Kroenke and Stockbridge Capital. Kroenke purchased the land two years ago in January 2014, literally sowing seeds for the demise of the team’s time in St. Louis. Even a billionaire like Kroenke wouldn’t take a risk that large if he didn’t know that the NFL would allow him to move the team.
This is a crushing blow to St. Louis…probably? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell if the backlash from this is going to fall in to the angry territory surrounding the tragic upheaval of the Seattle Sonics to Oklahoma City in the NBA, or pass like a fart in the night like the departure of the Atlanta Thrashers did.
What we do know is that this the first domino to fall. The sort-of-sudden arrival of the Los Angeles Rams is about to send shockwaves up the and down the coast to San Diego and Oakland. As of right now, Chargers are basically being given a year to get their shit together. The Oakland Raiders are fighting tooth and nail to stay put despite a harrowing economic situation in the city. One or both of them could join the Rams in Los Angeles, and there are already plans in place to accommodate those moves should they come to pass.
Those are stories for another time. Instead, let’s rejoice that the NFL is back in Los Angeles and the Rams are where they belong.
At the very least, Georgia Frontiere got to live a dream by gifting a Super Bowl winning team to her hometown. It’s the dream of any owner, especially one that’s home grown.
Now Silent Stan Kroenke gets to live his dreams in a city that’s said to make them come true.
