[Elvis]

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football ... ba69c.html

Thomas: Here we go again, St. Louis

St. Louisan James Busch Orthwein had just sold the New England Patriots to Robert Kraft, who was committed to keeping the team in the Boston area.

Months earlier, the St. Louis expansion bid had crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. Carolina and Jacksonville were awarded the two franchises.

So even with construction of a $300 million domed stadium well underway, St. Louis’ hopes for an NFL franchise appeared doomed.

With that in mind, I met with Post-Dispatch deputy sports editor Mike Smith to plan the future. My future, actually. Smith, now the P-D’s assistant sports editor/online, suggested I help with our Cardinals baseball coverage.

You know, it looks like the Rams are serious about moving from Los Angeles, I replied. Why don’t we let this calendar year play out, monitor that, and see what happens? He agreed to that course of action.

That was 22 years ago this month.

So there was a time during which if I showed up in another town, that town’s NFL team was in jeopardy of moving elsewhere. In Foxborough, Mass., when Orthwein still owned the Pats, I did a pregame radio interview on the team’s flagship station.

There was a possibility that Orthwein could move the Patriots to the Midwest. Gil Santos, the team’s esteemed broadcaster at the time, was professional and courteous as could be asking questions. As soon as the interview ended and the station went to commercial break, Santos turned to me with a stern look and a sharp tongue:

“Why are you trying to take our team? Why don’t you go get the Rams? I hear they might be leaving.”

I explained to Santos that I wasn’t trying to take anyone’s team; I was just doing my job.

Turned out he was right about the Rams leaving. Although you’d never know it from the first time I met Rams president John Shaw — in the visiting team owner’s box at Arrowhead Stadium in 1994. The Rams were playing the Kansas City Chiefs that day.

“I don’t know why you guys are here,” was how Shaw greeted me and a former P-D columnist. “We’re not moving to St. Louis; we’re moving to Baltimore.”

Shaw was always a kidder, in a devious sort of way. He also had a reputation as one of the NFL’s brightest minds, helping to create the free agency and salary cap systems that are a staple of the league today.

He also loved the art of the deal, negotiating the stadium lease and the terms of the Rams’ departure from Southern California to St. Louis. Those negotiations included a “first-tier” clause which stipulated that the St. Louis stadium must be maintained at a level among the top eight stadiums in the league, to be measured every 10 years.

If the stadium didn’t meet “first-tier” provisions, the Rams could break the lease. Well, we know what’s happened from there. St. Louis again is in jeopardy of losing an NFL team.

This has been a recurring theme over the past 30 years. Bill Bidwill’s Cardinals left for the Arizona desert in 1988. The ill-fated expansion effort of the early ’90s was followed by the pursuit of the Rams, and now, the effort to keep the Rams. Here we go again, St. Louis.

St. Louis always seems to be scrambling to prove its NFL worth; the NFL always seems lukewarm about St. Louis as a league market. Strangely, some of the same characters are still around from 1991, the year I began covering the NFL for the Post-Dispatch during the height of the expansion process.

• In 1993, as St. Louis’ expansion effort was imploding, local civic leaders contacted a Houston businessman about possibly stepping in as the money man on their proposed ownership team.

His name was Bob McNair. Things didn’t work out with St. Louis, but he went on to own the expansion Houston Texans. Now a member of the league’s Los Angeles Opportunities committee, McNair raised St. Louis’ hopes of keeping the Rams last month when he told the Houston Chronicle: “St. Louis, they have come up with a proposal that’s getting pretty close in my opinion to being an attractive proposal.”

• In the early ’90s, a young, midlevel NFL executive was entrusted with overseeing the expansion process. A small group of reporters from the five cities seeking expansion teams kidded him on more than one occasion that he would some day be NFL commissioner. He didn’t like the joke.

His name was Roger Goodell. He is now NFL commissioner, and on Saturday he issued a report to club owners stating that St. Louis’ stadium proposal to keep the Rams was inadequate and that the Rams have met relocation guidelines.

• In the 11th hour of the area’s expansion effort in the fall of ’93, civic and business leaders hastily recruited a wealthy, media-shy Missourian to add financial punch to the project. His name was Stan Kroenke.

Although the expansion effort failed, Kroenke later purchased 40 percent of the Rams, paving the way for the team’s move from Los Angeles to St. Louis. In 2010, he became majority owner and talked about how he was a Missouri man and would do everything in his power to keep the team in St. Louis.

Last week, in the Rams’ application for relocation, Kroenke issued a scathing rebuke of St. Louis, portraying the Gateway to the West as a dying town and saying the proposed stadium plan would mean “financial ruin” to anyone who owned a team playing in it. Now, after taking advantage of the first-tier clause negotiated by Shaw, he needs 24 votes this week in Houston from club owners to move the Rams back to Los Angeles.

431 GAMES

As for Shaw, he’s semi-retired and living in Los Angeles, oddly enough serving as an unofficial consultant to San Diego owner and good friend Dean Spanos, who’s trying to move the Chargers to L.A. and as such is a Kroenke rival.

If Kroenke gets his way, it will be over for the Rams in St. Louis after 431 games. That total includes preseason, regular season and postseason contests. I’m the only media member to have seen all 431 in person.

From colorful-yet-flawed quarterback “Pretty Tony” Banks and his dog Felony to running back Todd Gurley. From the talented but troubled Lawrence Phillips to the offensive pyrotechnics of the Greatest Show on Turf.

Strolling the sidelines were the likes of “Big Daddy” Rich Brooks; “Mad” Mike Martz; the hard-driving, yet ultra-positive Dick Vermeil; and Jeff Fisher.

I can recall only two times when I thought I might be in jeopardy of missing a Rams game. There was the Buffalo game in 2012, and a flight cancellation. I managed to arrive in time on a snowy day to see Martz in the press box, working the game for network television. He told me that Danny Amendola, then the Rams’ top wide receiver, would have had trouble making any of his Greatest Show teams.

The other near miss: I was sick all week in Atlanta for Super Bowl 34 — of all games — capping the 1999 season. But with the help of Rams coverage teammate Elizabethe Holland, I made it to the press box that Sunday to cover the spine-tingling 23-16 victory over Tennessee (along with about 20 other P-D writers, photographers and editors).

The team owner at the time, the late Georgia Frontiere, looked NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue right in the eye as she accepted the Lombardi Trophy after that game, saying: “This proves we did the right thing, coming to St. Louis.”

Kroenke now thinks otherwise. Lots of lousy Rams football, punctuated by the spectacular Greatest Show, now could be coming to an end. As I packed my laptop after the Rams’ final home game of this season — a 31-23 win over Tampa Bay on Dec. 17 — I paused to look out on the field at the Edward Jones Dome. Just in case it was the last time I was in the building.

If Kroenke’s planned relocation bid is approved, St. Louis’ second NFL marriage will be over. There probably won’t be a third.

[aeneas1]

Lots of lousy Rams football, punctuated by the spectacular Greatest Show, now could be coming to an end. As I packed my laptop after the Rams’ final home game of this season — a 31-23 win over Tampa Bay on Dec. 17 — I paused to look out on the field at the Edward Jones Dome. Just in case it was the last time I was in the building.

time sure has a way of changing a person's tune, eh? a 2006 jt article:

LA move is unlikely for Rams, Lack of stadium, lack of taxpayer support and apathy are among the reasons.
June 07, 2009 12:00 am • BY JIM THOMAS [email protected]

Eli Broad, Michael Ovitz, Ron Burkle, Ed Roski and more. The names mean little or nothing to St. Louisans. But they were among the big money men, the movers and shakers, who came and went in Southern California - all determined to bring pro football back to the Los Angeles area. Eventually, they were toppled like so many tin soldiers.

Along the way, there have been proposed stadiums and stadium sites with glamorous pasts and glitzy names - from the Rose Bowl to the Coliseum, to Hollywood Park, to Chavez Ravine. And some not so glitzy - from the gravel pits in Irwindale to the former toxic waste dump in Carson, to the city of Industry.

Amazingly, 14 years have passed since the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles in 1995.

Amazingly, the nation's second-largest market has gone twice as long without a National Football League franchise as St. Louis - which went seven seasons without a team from 1988 to 1995 between Bill Bidwill's Cardinals and Georgia Frontiere's Rams.

Despite Roski's current effort to build a stadium in tiny Industry (pop. 800), the prospect of getting an NFL team back in the LA area seems as remote as ever. The reasons remain unchanged, with lack of unified political leadership and absolutely zero appetite for any public taxpayer support heading the list.

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/la-move- ... e9d0c.html

[snackdaddy]

Wow, that most recent article sounds like a eulogy.

[BuiltRamTough]

I've been glued to Twitter since 5am. This shit is exiting! One year of waiting and it comes down to today. It's a surreal feeling.

[Hacksaw]

I've been glued to Twitter since 5am. This shit is exiting! One year of waiting and it comes down to today. It's a surreal.

I hear ya bro. I can't believe the day(s) is here. Let's all have a climactic finish ... think yes vote for Rams, yes vote for Rams, yes...

[Elvis]

As Chick would say, it's nervous time...