reporters on the Rams move (1/14 & 1/15)

Just thinking this through. I know New York has the same arrangement. But, I wonder if having two teams in L.A. is really a good idea. I know that there are a lot of people living there, but it also seems like it’s a different type of clientele with a lot of competition for their attention. Can two teams be successful drawing fans to games?

They will struggle to support one team–much less two.

Really, Spanos had kind of locked himself into LA. He had no choice but to put his head down and go crawling to SK.

Spanos and Davis got shafted big time, too. imo

Agamemnon wrote:

Spanos and Davis got shafted big time, too.

I don’t see how they got shafted. They lost.

Kroenke is the one who made LA happen. For 35 years, various factions have tried to build a stadium in LA and have undermined each other politically, and failed to get it done. Kroenke did it. Without public money. Just went in with his billions, bought the land, and did it himself. It was the fact that Kroenke had the first REAL plan to build a stadium in LA that made Spanos get off his ass and desperately do something. That dude had as much time as Kroenke had to get his shit together, and he didn’t do it. Those guys didn’t get screwed. They just failed in their business maneuver.

Agamemnon wrote:

We have different view points and opinions on this

Is that allowed? I dont think thats allowed.

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Agamemnon wrote:

Spanos and Davis got shafted big time, too. imo

I don’t see how they got shafted. They lost.

Kroenke is the one who made LA happen. For 35 years, various factions have tried to build a stadium in LA and have undermined each other politically, and failed to get it done. Kroenke did it. Without public money. Just went in with his billions, bought the land, and did it himself. It was the fact that Kroenke had the first REAL plan to build a stadium in LA that made Spanos get off his ass and desperately do something. That dude had as much time as Kroenke had to get his shit together, and he didn’t do it. Those guys didn’t get screwed. They just failed in their business maneuver.

We have different view points and opinions on this.

Yeah, I don’t see how Spanos and Davis were screwed by Kroenke. They just didn’t execute their plans to screw their fans as quickly as Kroenke did.

If they were screwed it’s hard to shed a tear for them. It would be like Darth Vader and Sauron getting screwed by Nurse Ratchet.

zn wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Yeah, I don’t see how Spanos and Davis were screwed by Kroenke. They just didn’t execute their plans to screw their fans as quickly as Kroenke did.

They weren’t screwed by Kroenke they were screwed by the league.

In terms of the details of the plans, no one knows those. Not even the owners. The owners never saw the Carson plan or the St. Louis plan. They just know they Goodell rejected them. That’s all they know.

So here you have 2 teams that have bad situations with local facilities and need to either upgrade those facilities or move.

And you have a town (St. Louis) that made an honest effort to actually put in place a viable plan.

So of the 3 teams, the one that the league favors is the one that doesn’t NEED to move. The 2 it shuts down are the 2 that DO need to move.

From that point of view, it hardly matters who was first, who was reactive, who was bigger and shinier. None of that’s relevant.

It IS possible to imagine a world in which the league says, okay LA is a good market and we want a team there, and here are 2 teams that actually need to address issues with their venue. Their plans could use work SO WE WILL HELP THEM WITH THAT because it’s the better thing to do all around. Plus we can help the St. Louis effort too.

So it is not automatically the case that the only choice here is to back the spiffier plan offered by the wealthier owner. In fact, it’s a conscious choice to employ those values and not other values in judging this.

One approach says, revenue money glitz splendor. The Jerry Jones way. The other says, we are committed to communities, and the values associated with them. The Rooney way.

It’s not inevitable that one way is “truer” than the other. They both involve conscious choices and commitment to certain values v. others.

Well put. The Relocation Committee voted 5-1 for the Carson plan. So, it wasn’t like there was no support for doing the more responsible thing.

zn wrote:

Kroenke, the ‘victim’? That’s the story he’s telling in LA

Sam Farmer and Nathan Fenno Los Angeles Times

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/kroenke-the-victim-that-s-the-story-he-s-telling/article_dac6eab5-b41d-57f2-9497-a21cd94fa4b5.html

LOS ANGELES • Stan Kroenke emerged from a white jet at Van Nuys Airport a few minutes before noon Wednesday as he returned to California for the first time as owner of the Los Angeles Rams.

Less than 24 hours earlier in Houston, NFL owners voted to allow Kroenke to move the Rams from St. Louis to L.A. for the 2016 season.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times — Kroenke’s first since his plan for a multibillion-dollar stadium in Inglewood became public more than a year ago — the owner discussed his final pitch to league owners, the emotional relocation process and his ambitious vision for the site of the former Hollywood Park racetrack.

He also he could not “sit there (in St. Louis) and be a victim.” (Scroll down for the full Q-&-A transcript.)

“If we didn’t have the perspective of 40 years of doing this, I don’t think any reasonable, rational person would ever do this,” said Kroenke, a billionaire real estate developer and sports mogul, owning NBA and NHL teams in Denver along with English soccer team Arsenal plus other sports-related businesses. “But because we look at it a certain way, we’ve been through so many of these projects, and we’re long-term investors. That’s why we did what we did and stuck our neck out that far.”

He added: “You don’t get too many shots like this in life.”

•’Silent Stan’ speaks – a profile from 2010

• Jaguars owner not interested in move to St. Louis

• Hochman: Time for St. Louis to rise and shine

• BenFred: After Rams ripoff, STL should rethink importance of NFL

• Consensus among regional leaders: St. Louis is done with professional football

Kroenke, 68, told jokes, slapped his knees in excitement and teared up at one point in the interview. He appeared relieved to put the drawn-out relocation process behind him and focus on the return of the Rams to the city they left after the 1994 season.

He seemed relaxed and confident and looked as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

Kroenke believed that detailed renderings of the sleek, low-slung stadium project and surrounding mixed-use development helped sway owners to overwhelmingly support his vision over a rival stadium project in Carson.

“One of the most important things that nailed it (Tuesday) is that we just kept showing them pictures,” Kroenke said. “People love pictures. And what those pictures showed was the thought and the development and the plan, and the depth of the thought.”

Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ top executive who helped make the presentation at the meeting, kept his event credential and room key as mementos of the historic occasion.

Kroenke said he had no badge and he left his room key in the hotel.

“But we got something much more important,” Kroenke said. “We got L.A.”

Question: What has this experience been like so far?

Kroenke: This thing, it is a process, and it’s arduous — the NFL makes it arduous, and they should. Relocating a team should be hard. And now we get to focus on things we like to focus on.

Q: After so many false starts and pretty pictures over the last 21 years, can you blame people who might doubt this will actually get built?

Kroenke: Oh, it’s going to get built. At one point (Tuesday), I was going to tell the ownership about 4,500 pages of plans. Kevin got up there and said, ‘ 6,700 pages of plans.’ So I told the ownership, ‘Wow. We were at 4,500 and now it’s 6,700.’ In other words, this costs real money.

Q: After you won the vote, you went out with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his son Stephen, the team’s general manager. What did you talk about?

Kroenke: They just kept repeating it: ‘The Los Angeles Rams. The Los Angeles Rams.’ You could tell they loved that, they loved that history. If you look around the league, those guys are connected in a we’re-going-forward way. But they love that history of the Rams.

Q: What role did Seahawks owner Paul Allen play in Houston?

Kroenke: He goes to the big meetings. Paul told me he was coming. He called three times. He got interested in it. Paul knows L.A. He knows how important it is. Paul gets all the metrics, the Internet stuff, how you promote with the millennials. L.A. is hugely important for the league.

When I started working on this two years ago, I took Paul through the whole thing. I said, ‘This is what I think we can do here. I’m not sure we can do it all, but here’s what we’re working on.’ He was always interested. Then once we got to a certain point, he definitely got it. He got how good it was.

Q: Owners have heard these stadium pitches before. What was your theme in Houston?

Demoff: We started our presentation by saying this is the project you’ve waited 21 years for. This was the NFL’s greatest asset that they could give someone and they gave it to our group. That’s an awesome responsibility.

Q: How did owners react?

Kroenke: At the end of the day they gave it to us for the right reasons. That’s the right project. It’s that simple. I heard a lot of owners say, ‘That’s the right project. That’s what we need.’

Q: Did you get many texts or emails after the final vote?

Demoff: I’m obsessive about cleaning out my inbox. If I have five or six in there I feel overwhelmed. I had 122 emails and over 300 text messages. We beat Seattle in overtime in the opener and I got 40 texts. You hear from people who are so excited and you never knew they were Rams fans.

Q: Who reached out to you, Stan?

Kroenke: One of the first guys that texted me last night was Terry Fancher (Stockbridge Capital’s executive managing director and a development partner with the Inglewood stadium site). He was just so excited. He said, ‘ Stan, I just landed in L.A. You should see this town.’

He said, ‘You have changed this city.’ It was cool. … You know what I’m glad about? Certain people relied on us. This guy right here (motioning to Demoff with his voice cracking) … It’s emotional because a lot of good people relied on us. We came through for them. Didn’t know if we could. It’s never a sure thing.

Q: How do you feel about leaving St. Louis?

Kroenke: It truly is bittersweet. I grew up in Missouri, and there’s a lot of wonderful people in St. Louis and Missouri. I’ll always feel that way about Missouri. I never dreamed I’d be put in this position. But at the same time, you’re not going to sit there and be a victim.

Q: How did you first become interested in the Hollywood Park site?

Kroenke: In the summer of 2013, I really started looking hard. I knew the general lay of the land in Inglewood. To me, there was one obvious place, and it had been approved previously by the NFL: Hollywood Park.

I didn’t know if it would be put together or not. But I started looking. I was driving around at 5:30 a.m. That’s what real estate developers do.

Q: Why were you up so early?

Kroenke: That’s the best time because the traffic isn’t out, so you can get around quickly. I started looking at different sites to make sure I had them in my head. What do they look like? What could be done? How does the long term look for the areas? And when you drive up to Hollywood Park, it’s a great site.

Q: Kevin, do you remember getting that early-morning call from Stan?

Demoff: There are moments in your life you never forget. I was standing by the window in my office (in St. Louis) and Stan called. … I remember he said, ‘ This is an unbelievable site.’

Q: You’ve developed real estate for something like 40 years; what made the site so attractive?

Kroenke: I’ve done this countless times, literally hundreds of deals. You just look for certain things. For example, (at) Hollywood Park, there’s a Target store and development right next door. Starbucks is there. These are people we’re very familiar with. We do developments with them. For me it’s starting to click.

Q: Other owners described the stadium as “transformative.” What will be unique about it?

Demoff: This is the stadium of the future for the NFL and hopefully for other sporting venues. When you look — especially in L.A. — it’s a melting pot of NFL fans. You look at the Steelers bars and Redskins bars and Bears bars. You want to take that and put it into your campus and find ways that at every turn people can watch the other games.

L.A.’s become a fantasy-oriented, Red Zone-oriented, DirecTV-oriented culture. And I think our job is to blend that with now having a hometown team. To start to build that allegiance where you walk into the stadium and you never feel that you’re giving up everything else that’s going on Sunday but you still have the Rams right in front of you.

Q: Will the venue feature seats that show off L.A.’s celebrities like Jack Nicholson’s seats at Lakers games?

Demoff: You need Lakers seats. You need Dodgers seats behind home plate so you can see Larry King sitting right there. So we have sideline suites. Field suites. … They’re pulled out right up to the field. We’ve designed concepts throughout the stadium that allow entertainers to basically sit outside but in a way that allows them to be differentiated.

Q: So you want to include the entertainment industry in the stadium experience?

Kroenke: That’s part of L.A. You’d better be doing that. That’s how you engage the community, frankly. If we’re not doing that right, we’re not servicing the fans of L.A. You go to L.A., you better do it right or you shouldn’t be there. It’s complex, it’s complicated, it’s a big market, there’s a lot of competitive forces there.

Q: Can a team succeed in L.A. without putting a winning product on the field?

Demoff: You can’t just walk in and say, ‘The NFL is back’ and roll out the football and expect success. You’ve got to go earn it.

Q: Will you bring back the old L.A. Rams uniforms?

Demoff: I think the philosophy on the uniforms is a microcosm of the philosophy of the project. Yes, we have a rich tradition and history in Los Angeles. We have colors that people identify with. We have historic players. You want to carry some of that forward.

But, we’re also about to enter a world-class stadium that should be one of the best. … Yes, the Rams are coming back. It’s not the Rams from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. This is Stan’s vision and Stan’s stadium. We want to make sure we represent best in class in every aspect while we borrow from the Rams’ legacy. When I look at the Rams’ return to L.A., that’s what people are excited about — it’s modern NFL mixed with the team they grew up with.

Q: Have you noticed the large cardboard cutout of Stan’s head displayed by some L.A. Rams fans over the past year?

Kroenke: You want to talk about surreal? It’s kind of part of the territory, I guess. You never get comfortable with that. But they’re having fun.

Q: Does any of this feel real yet?

Demoff: My job was to make sure that we had a project that when you put it in front of the owners, all they had to do was raise their right hand and they have the project they’ve always wanted. I was looking at (Tuesday) and that’s what it was. They realized all they had to do was check a box and they got the project they wanted.

gag me.

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why would the owners never even ask to look at the carson and st louis plans? not disagreeing or anything. i find it odd that they would just take goodell’s word on that.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by InvaderRam.

InvaderRam wrote:

why would the owners never even ask to look at the carson and st louis plans? not disagreeing or anything. i find it odd that they would just take goodell’s word on that.

I saw that zn said that, and I don’t know what he is talking about. I thought that was an odd thing to say, but I was too busy at the time to write a post and question it, and I forgot about it later.

AFAIK all the plans were shown to the owners on more than one occasion. All three made presentations at the October meeting for sure. Then the meeting this week started with the Raiders, Rams, and Chargers making their pitches. So I don’t know what the hell zn is talking about there.

People have less disposable income these days so I hope StanK loses his ass.

I don’t like kroenke and I don’t think he is a good owner, but I think he will be a better owner in LA than anywhere else.

zn wrote:

Agamemnon wrote:

I heard this on the radio. kroenke was the reason St. Louis didn’t get an expansion team. He wouldn’t pay the guy who had the stadium lease what he wanted. StL stalls and the Jags are born. I am not sure who was right. But that was bad on somebody. All I remembered was StL blew it.

That’s interesting.

That could be true only if Kroenke had exclusive rights to own the expansion team, or exclusive rights to negotiate the stadium lease. And I can’t see either one of those things being factual.

So I am going to say No Sale on that one. I don’t believe it.

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

AFAIK all the plans were shown to the owners on more than one occasion. All three made presentations at the October meeting for sure. Then the meeting this week started with the Raiders, Rams, and Chargers making their pitches. So I don’t know what the hell zn is talking about there.

You could be right. I just know I was echoing something I read. This may turn out to be a semantics thing, I don’t know. I will say this. I deliberately did not keep up with the details on the move controversies. Usually when I address an issue, I really research it, or at least I look things up. On this, though, I have only picked up bits and pieces. Out there, on different boards, the relocation wars involved a lot of back and forth over minutia, the way board wars do, and I just could not read those. I am not really in a position to make detailed judgments about what is being said. So at the moment I am not able to debate it the way I can on issues where I deliberately read widely to be informed. Maybe that will change, maybe it won’t. Either way, what you say as a rejoinder to that one statement by me makes sense.

Okay, then. I thought you knew something I don’t, but it seems I followed this story more closely than you did, and I distinctly remember stadium presentations to all of the owners in October, and have a less reliable recollection that the stadium committee received updates sometime after that.