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perpetual motion machine. why does that sound familiar?
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LaramThis was sent to me by someone in my office. Sorry Admins no link.
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http://www.pe.com/articles/repeating-754888-san-diego.html
RAMS: History is repeating itself
Rams equipment manager Todd Hewitt (right) and assistant Jim Lake pack up the team’s equipment in early 1995 for the move from Anaheim to St. Louis.
Published: Nov. 23, 2014 Updated: Nov. 25, 2014 12:16 a.m.
SAN DIEGO — Small crowds. Struggles on the field. And rumors, almost daily, about the home team’s future destination.
Hey, St. Louis? We’ve been there.What that Missouri city is experiencing now, as rumors of the Rams’ relocation (re-relocation?) to Los Angeles, continue, is exactly what the team’s Southern California fan base experienced in 1993 and ’94, during the last stages of the team’s 49-year tenure in Los Angeles/Anaheim.
Really, the seeds of SoCal’s loss of the Rams began more than a decade before the deed was actually done. When Carroll Rosenbloom decided to move the team from the Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium, effective with the 1980 season, the deal included the rights to develop part of the Big A’s parking lot—a deal that drew protests from the Autrys, owners of the Angels. (Arte Moreno may appreciate the irony.)
That development never took place, and ultimately—when the city of Anaheim built what is now Honda Center and lured an NHL expansion team (now the Ducks)—the Rams leveraged it into an escape clause that would allow them to break their lease with 15 months notice and a $30 million reimbursement to the city of Anaheim, the unpaid debt involved with the expansion of the stadium for football.
By this time, Georgia Frontiere was in charge. She’d inherited the team from her late husband, Rosenbloom (and subsequently remarried). And I will forever remain convinced that Georgia and her henchman, John Shaw, intentionally degraded the product on the field to facilitate a move.
By the time This Space took over the P-E Rams beat from the esteemed Matt Jocks in 1993, the team was coming off two losing seasons, after a decade in which the Rams won or contended for division titles and drew strong crowds to the Big A (even with the Raiders carving up the market after their move to the Coliseum in 1982).
Chuck Knox was the coach, in his dotage as an NFL coach. The quarterback, Jim Everett, was on the descent. The cornerback, Darryl Henley, was about to be indicted for his part (along with a Rams cheerleader) in a cocaine distribution ring. Jerome Bettis was a rookie, future Hall of Famer Jackie Slater was injured, and most of the rest of the roster was a sea of mediocrity.
It was in this environment that, in the middle of the 1993 season, the rumors began. Before a November 1 game in San Francisco, CBS’ NFL pregame show reported that the Rams had been in contact with Baltimore, which was hedging its bets if it had lost out in expansion (which it ultimately did, with Jacksonville being picked to enter the league with Charlotte).
That brought the bizarre scene of Shaw, the team’s executive vice president, addressing beat writers on a concourse outside the locker room tunnel in Candlestick Park, denying the rumors.
“That is totally true, 100 percent untrue,” Shaw said. “There’s been so many rumors about the sale of this team, the movement of this team in the last 15 years, that really nothing surprises me … (A Baltimore writer) asked me if we had a lease we could get out of. I think we answered that, ‘Yes, for a lot of money.’ ”
Not that much, as it turned out. And a little over a month later, Shaw confirmed that, indeed, the Rams had been contacted by representatives from not only Baltimore but St. Louis and Memphis.
“We have not asked (Anaheim) for anything,” Shaw said then. ” . . . I don’t want to give the impression that we’re negotiating lease concessions or anything like that with the city, because we’re not.
“We’re just going to have to make a decision at some time as to whether this situation here, even if it was modified or changed, would be such that we could ever be competitive.”
Ominous words, reinforced later that month when Frontiere told the Los Angeles Times that a move was “something that you have to consider. It’s just a fact of life. People do look at other possibilities in life.”
(Then again, the Rams management in those days was positively chatty compared with the current version. Owner Stan Kroenke, whose purchase of 60 acres near Hollywood Park and reported negotiations for 300 additional acres have spurred the latest Rams-to-L.A. rumors, has been equally ominous in his silence.)
Going into the 1994 season, it was pretty much assumed that the moving vans were assembling. The team finished 4-12, and average attendance was 42,312, “the remnants of a fan base alienated beyond repair,” I wrote in a 2004 reminiscence of the final year.
A curious confluence: During that 1994 season, the Los Angeles Rams played (and won) a game in Kansas City Sept. 25, and members of the St. Louis media crossed the state to eyeball the city’s potential next NFL team.
Flash forward to 2014. The Rams and Chargers play in San Diego this afternoon, and a check of the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot before the game showed a lot – a LOT – of fans wearing Rams gear. And maybe 35 to 40 percent of it was in the team’s current navy blue and old gold colors. The vast majority? The royal blue and yellow colors the team wore in Los Angeles and Anaheim.
One fan behind the Rams bench during warmups held a sign: “Come Home Rams (to) L.A.” Another draped a “Los Angeles Rams” banner over the railing momentarily.
At least one Rams booster club is here in force, holding a tailgate in Lot P3 (the word having been spread by the “Bring Back The Los Angeles Rams” page on facebook.
Yes, St. Louis, we feel your pain. Sort of. Just not enough to lift a finger to stop the repossession.
ah yes. that was a cool movie.
Really?
Be careful what you wish for.
We started ballot propositions in California in the late 70s, so that we could pass bills that them damn politicians won’t or can’t. Great idea.
Now we get Safe Drinking Water initiatives that are backed by astroturf “citizens groups” that get their money from Monsanto, and propositions to reform education financing, only there will suddenly be 3 propositions on the same ballot that all claim to do great things for education reform, all with poison pills that will have to be litigated, and backed by carefully concealed interests, and to be honest, I don’t think most California voters actually read the complete text of each proposition before making their voting decisions.
And if the stadium goes to a vote in Inglewood, it will all be about traffic congestion, and crime, and drunkenness, and business revenue, and taxes in versus taxes out, with all kinds of tv commercials claiming completely different things with no way of knowing if anybody is even trying to tell the truth, and even if they are, if what they are saying is actually accurate because who the hell can figure any of this out?
So the real vote will be on “Do you want the NFL, specifically the Rams, right here in Inglewood, or not?” because that’s all most of the voters will care about, and all the other issues are just going to be market tested to find out where it is worthwhile to invest advertising dollars to bang a drum long enough to chip off a percentage of undecided voters.
If you want that kind of democracy in West Virginia, you are welcome to take California’s version of it, as far as I’m concerned.
What we’ve ended up with here is a lot of voters thinking they know more than the legislators, and that they can budget better than the state government can (cuz gov’t misappropriates all the $), and a lot of good causes got voted intractable amounts of the general budget to the point that our state government can’t actually govern anything anymore, and the voters have gone and misspent the money worse than the government ever did, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.
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Ok, well then
i changed my mind.I just want to decide
everything myself.wv ram makes all the
decisions. a wv-ram-ocracy.My decision is:
Rams go back to LA
and wear blue and white.San Diego stays in San Diego
and they wear the old Lance Allworth Uniforms.Raiders stay in Oakland.
Dallas moves to St.Louis
and become the St.Louis Stallions.Washington changes its name to
the Washington Cowboys.Dallas fans can root for Houston.
Problems solved. Give me a beer.
w
vw
v
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