[Elvis]

How St. Louis lost the Rams

by David Hunn, Jim Thomas

ST. LOUIS • There was still hope for St. Louis football on the day the region lost the Rams.

The plan to build a new stadium here had strident support. Michael Bidwill, owner of the Arizona Cardinals, had worked for weeks to round up votes among his National Football League colleagues. Jerry Richardson, owner of the Carolina Panthers, lobbied so ardently he had even flown to visit some owners.

At midday on Jan. 12, the influential NFL Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities recommended 5-1 that the league’s 32 owners approve a stadium project in Carson, Calif. That would move the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers to Los Angeles. Rams owner Stan Kroenke would be stuck in St. Louis.

But as the hours passed in Houston, optimism disappeared.

The committee’s Carson pick was expected. And most thought it would take several ballots for one side to gather the 24 votes necessary for league approval.

It didn’t. The first vote killed the Carson project. Owners voted 21-11 in favor of Kroenke’s sparkling Inglewood stadium. It was just a matter of time to reach 24.

By day’s end, the vote was 30-2.

St. Louis stadium officials were left wondering what went wrong.

“I thought we had a good shot,” Dave Peacock, co-chairman of Gov. Jay Nixon’s stadium task force, said late that night. “Obviously, tonight, we learned otherwise.”

No one moment killed the effort to keep the Rams in St. Louis. But task force members, league and team executives — past and present — as well as multiple owners agreed that three factors, above all others, sunk the St. Louis effort:

• A secret ballot.

• A resistance to a vote of residents or state legislators.

• And one clause in the Rams’ 21-year-old lease.

A tipping point might have come the week before the Houston meeting. Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff presented Kroenke’s stadium plan — round after round of dazzling full-color renderings — to 17 owners on three committees in New York City. Owners say now that the display went exceedingly well.

“We’re sitting there in New York, and I’m watching this presentation on Inglewood, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Holy (expletive),’” said one owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I said, ‘There is no way that the owners in that room are not going to approve this project. This is pretty spectacular.’”

Even committed Carson-backers left New York City worried.

THE FINAL HOURS:

THREE SECRET BALLOTS

Walking into the Houston meetings, Chargers owner Dean Spanos and his supporters thought they had lined up about 20 votes. Spanos was well-liked by owners, who also sympathized with his long fight for a new stadium in San Diego. Richardson had been “aggressively” lobbying for Carson, one owner said — so aggressively, in fact, that league executives got calls from owners who said they felt “bullied.”

Several asked Commissioner Roger Goodell about a secret ballot. Goodell put the issue on the day’s agenda. The owners took it up and voted. It passed 19-13.

In the NFL, secret ballots occur about as often as Rams playoff berths.

In this case, it opened the door for Kroenke.

“In the almost 30 years I was behind those doors at those meetings, the only instances in which I recall the use of the secret ballot were the selection of the commissioner and the selection of Super Bowl sites,” said former Raiders CEO Amy Trask, now a CBS Sports analyst.

“It was tremendously significant,” she said. “And also somewhat surprising.”

It’s one thing to tell an owner he’s got your vote. It’s another to look him in the eye and say he doesn’t. Former Rams President John Shaw has said on more than one occasion that when he walked into owners meetings in 1995 in Phoenix, he felt he had 18 votes in favor of moving the Rams to St. Louis. Turned out he had three.

In Houston, the impact of the secret ballot was immediate. Owners voted 21-11 in favor of Inglewood. Someone flipped for Carson in the next vote, and it went 20-12.

Just like that, eight or nine Spanos votes had disappeared. Owners took a break. It was time to broker a deal. By day’s end, Kroenke’s Inglewood palace won, 30-2. The league gave Spanos a one-year option to move in with Kroenke; Raiders owner Mark Davis could move if Spanos didn’t.

The secret ballot didn’t carry the day alone. Some owners and executives now say Demoff’s New York presentation got even better in Houston. Some say the rare appearance of Seattle Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — who urged owners to pick the best stadium project — swayed the room.

“Paul was vocal,” one owner said. “And more so than I’ve ever seen him at a league meeting.”

Over six hours, the league had done something it almost never does: Overruled a committee vote.

“Again, in all my years in that meeting room,” said Trask, the former Raiders executive, “I can count on one hand, with fingers to spare, the numbers of times the membership as a whole did not endorse the recommendation of a committee.”

“It is extraordinarily rare.”

THE LAST MONTHS: A CASCADE OF FAILED PLANS

Two years ago, Goodell and NFL Executive Vice President Eric Grubman urged Nixon to go public with his support for a new stadium.

But Nixon waited at least 10 months to announce his task force, until the day after the November 2014 election. The day before, a new county executive was elected.

The county would prove to be more opponent than ally.

In January 2015, Nixon’s task force revealed plans for a $1 billion riverfront stadium. A key tenet: no new tax dollars. St. Louis, St. Louis County and the state could all instead extend annual payments — $24 million in total — that cover debt and upkeep on the Edward Jones Dome, where the Rams played.

Nixon was worried that there wasn’t time for a public vote, especially since the NFL decision was proving to be a moving target — once projected for the fall, then December, then January. In addition, leaders weren’t sure a vote would pass. Polling in the city showed roughly a 50-50 split among voters. If Kroenke funded opposition, results could be worse.

So Nixon — who was already ignoring calls for a vote of the state Legislature — sought to sidestep St. Louis and St. Louis County laws requiring elections.

That March, Nixon met with County Executive Steve Stenger to talk about his role. Stenger told Nixon that the county charter would, in his eyes, require a public vote for any direct support of a new stadium.

Nixon’s team shifted gears, Stenger said. Could the county instead cover Jones Dome upkeep, or the remaining $115 million in debt?

The county’s role, however, “was never formalized,” Stenger said Friday. The task force suggested the county could support the stadium “in some other way, other than through public financing,” he said.

At the end of March, Nixon cut the county out of the stadium financing plan.

Nixon and Peacock shrugged off the loss. But the county represented one-fourth of the stadium’s anticipated public financing. It was money the task force would never recoup.

With every revision, every plan released publicly, the NFL protested.

The task force secured $158 million in stadium naming rights, and proposed using that to fund construction. The NFL argued naming rights were club dollars.

The task force suggested using game-day tax revenue — on tickets, parking, hot dogs, etc. The NFL cried foul again: The city had waived ticket taxes for the Cardinals and the Blues. Why not the Rams, too?

Finally, the day before a key vote by the city’s Board of Aldermen, the plan changed one more time. The task force proposed sending ticket taxes, too, back to the NFL, in exchange for higher stadium rent and $100 million more from the league.

Two days later, Goodell wrote to Peacock saying the $100 million was “fundamentally inconsistent with the NFL’s program of stadium financing.” The league had no plans to pay it, he said.

But the letter was misleading to the general public. League owners and executives had multiple conversations with the task force about such an offer, both sides acknowledged. And the league did have plans to pay that money — a fact which became clear after the owners vote in Houston. There, the league offered Spanos and Davis $100 million extra toward new stadiums in their hometowns.

Kroenke would have gotten the same deal, executives said after the Houston meeting, had he lost the vote and stayed in St. Louis.

Another blow came just days before the Houston meeting.

In a report sent to owners Jan. 9, Goodell said there are “significant concerns about the certainty and long-term viability of the Task Force’s stadium proposal to retain the Rams,” according to an excerpt obtained by the Post-Dispatch. Moreover, he said, the Rams have the right to relocate.

Nixon told the Post-Dispatch that, in the end, few of those criticisms mattered.

“Even if we stopped and did those things, we’d still be here, and the team in LA,” Nixon said on Friday. “I do not believe a few million dollars on either side would have changed the outcome.”

Still, an airtight stadium plan was the last hope for the task force. It had to be perfect in the league’s eyes.

And it wasn’t.

20 YEARS AGO:

A DESPERATE CITY

None of this would have mattered were it not for a few paragraphs among hundreds of pages in the Rams lease.

At the end of 1994, St. Louis had just lost its bid for an expansion franchise. James Orthwein, a Busch heir, had sold the New England Patriots — the region’s backup plan — to business magnate Robert Kraft. And a downtown football stadium was one-third built.

The Rams were months into negotiations with regional leaders hoping to lure the team east.

In November, attorneys for all sides met in secret in La Jolla, Calif., a tony beachside neighborhood north of San Diego.

Rams President Shaw was worried about stadium upkeep. It was a problem in Anaheim, where the team had played since 1980. He knew St. Louis hadn’t funded a new stadium for the football Cardinals, who had fled to Phoenix seven years earlier. He didn’t want such issues to become a problem if the Rams moved to St. Louis.

In Shaw’s mind it wasn’t as much physical obsolescence as economic: A team’s ability to make money was rapidly changing. Club seats, luxury suites and other extras were cutting edge, as were in-house advertising and stadium naming rights.

Shaw told his attorneys before they met in La Jolla to make sure the St. Louis stadium could adapt to changing revenue streams.

Three main parties were negotiating the lease. Greg Smith represented the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission, which would run the dome. Attorney Richard Riezman and his firm, then called Riezman & Blitz, spoke for FANS Inc., the group of civic leaders trying to lure the team. The Rams were represented primarily by L.A. attorneys Milt Hyman and Marty Gelfand, as well as sports consultant Marc Ganis.

It’s unclear who introduced the now-infamous “first-tier” clause, which required the stadium to be among the top eight facilities in the league after each 10-year increment. Shaw and Ganis have both said the Rams brought it up. Most say they now forget. Some think it was actually a St. Louis attorney.

“It might surprise you, but I favored it,” said former convention center director Bruce Sommer. “I had been managing the Kiel and St. Louis arena. I learned that if the public owns it, likely they’ll never put another dime into it. And in a number of years, it won’t be a very good facility.”

But regional leaders refused to guarantee a dollar figure on the upgrades — they didn’t want to commit future tax dollars.

The parties went back and forth on the subject.

At one point in negotiations, Hyman pushed away from the table. “‘Guys, do I need to remind you? There’s only one NFL corporation that wants to move,’” Sommer recalls him saying. Then Hyman pulled his chair back to the table. “‘Now let’s get reasonable.’”

The St. Louisans had little choice, Sommer said. “What are we going to do, sit here with an empty $300 million stadium, and be the laughingstock of the country?”

Neither Hyman nor Gelfand returned calls seeking comment.

In the end, they worked out a deal that allowed the Rams to leave the dome if the parties couldn’t agree on top-tier upgrades and arbitrators ruled in their favor.

“Believe me, I tried to convince the St. Louis parties not to do it even though I was representing the Rams,” Ganis said. “I knew then, and I explained to them then, that this was going to be a major mistake they were making. I told them.”

“We weren’t looking to be pigs,” he continued. “We just wanted the building updated on a regular basis over 30 years. That’s all we were looking for. We knew that St. Louis was a challenging market compared to many of the other markets in the NFL. So we had to have a first-class building.”

Smith, the convention center attorney, chuckled some last week when asked about the clause. It didn’t, then, really seem like something they had to worry about.

“My recollection,” he said, “was we thought we had plenty of time to figure that out.”

[Stranger]

A tipping point might have come the week before the Houston meeting. Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff presented Kroenke’s stadium plan — round after round of dazzling full-color renderings — to 17 owners on three committees in New York City. Owners say now that the display went exceedingly well.

“We’re sitting there in New York, and I’m watching this presentation on Inglewood, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Holy (expletive),’” said one owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I said, ‘There is no way that the owners in that room are not going to approve this project. This is pretty spectacular.’”

Even committed Carson-backers left New York City worried.

Now we know why the owners didn't stick around a 2nd day in NYC, after seeing the Inglewood proposal in detail, there was nothing left to talk about

[LA RamsFan JSJ]

Really fascinating read. Thanks for posting!

I thought this excerpt was particularly telling:

Richardson had been “aggressively” lobbying for Carson, one owner said — so aggressively, in fact, that league executives got calls from owners who said they felt “bullied.”

Richardson & Spanos badly overplayed their hand. If you have the best case/plan for relocation to LA, at some point, your plan has to speak for itself. Too much lobbying gets to be a nuisance and can be counterproductive. They learned that the hard way in this case. Sorry, Deano!

[ramsfan1977]

I don't like Arians, but Richardson is such a jerk I will root for my NFC West Brothers...

[Hacksaw]

I don't like Arians, but Richardson is such a jerk I will root for my NFC West Brothers...

This. And there's possibly going to be a blizzard in Carolina. Poetic justice if Dickardsons team gets whack at the hands of the weather (similar to LA Rams playoff games in the past). A bit ironic it would be the former StL team to do it to them too.

Go AZ

[Elvis]

In the end Kroenke had the best plan, the most legitimate claim to L.A. and the best ability to get it done.

I guess it's a credit to Spanos that this was even close...

[Ramfan46]

It's just nice to know that many of us can read the tea leaves and sort through the BS to find out what's real and what's not. Always follow the money! There are exceptions of course, but that's generally how it goes.

[snackdaddy]

“We weren’t looking to be pigs,” he continued. “We just wanted the building updated on a regular basis over 30 years. That’s all we were looking for. We knew that St. Louis was a challenging market compared to many of the other markets in the NFL. So we had to have a first-class building.”

That is what the Rams have been trying to tell St. Louis and the league all along. And most of their fans won't accept that. Reality sucks sometimes. I don't think they'l ever get another team unless the league expands to 40 teams in the next 20 years.

[Stranger]

In the end Kroenke had the best plan, the most legitimate claim to L.A. and the best ability to get it done.

I guess it's a credit to Spanos that this was even close...

In the end, Kroenke had the invisible hand of thousands of Rams fans working for them behind the scenes.... doing research, reconnaissance, and serving as the inspiration for journalistic stories that unveiled the true narratives.

We are the LA Rams Invisible Army! Hey, I like that for a tagline

[LoyalRam]

The part that gets me still, is that the St Louis argument as been "if the NFL is being ethical, they will choose to force the Rams to stay..any other decision is proof of how horrible the NFL has became"

wah