Photography by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images
Rams owner Stan Kroenke fought hard to convince the NFL to let him move to LA, and St. Louis won't forget it anytime soon.
As the NFL meeting in Houston hit a boiling point Tuesday, a keen observer noted that team owners voting on relocating a team (or two) to Los Angeles were choosing between “a piece of land they like and a human being they don’t, and a human being they like and land they don’t.”
In the end, owners voted for the human they don’t like. Rams owner Stan Kroenke officially has enough votes to move the team to Inglewood, California, ten miles from downtown Los Angeles. The San Diego Chargers have the option to join them, possibly as early as next season.
Kroenke, just days after bashing St. Louis in his application to move the team to LA, called the decision "bitter sweet," saying that bringing the team to St. Louis in 1995 is "one of the proudest moments of my professional career."
"This move isn’t about whether I love St. Louis or Missouri," Kroenke said in a statement. "I do and always will. No matter what anyone says, that will never change. This decision is about what is in the best long-term interests of the Rams organization and the National Football League."
The decision follows more than a year of speculation and media frenzy. SLM senior editor William Powell followed the drama and provides a blow-by-blow account of Tuesday's meeting here: Rams Decision Days: Updates From the NFL Owners Meetings
From Powell:
The Rams are gone. Despite a valiant (and ultimately pointless) effort from the stadium task force and elected officials, St. Louis has lost its football team. After a 21-year absence, the NFL will return to Los Angeles. Here in STL, the Board of Aldermen will have to find something more productive to do with its time. Football fans can watch better out of market games instead of the Dumpster fire that has been the past decade of Rams football.
If there is a galling part, I suppose it's that St. Louis came up with a better proposal than either San Diego or Oakland, and we got screwed the worst anyway. But nothing in this process was ever supposed to be fair, unless you're naive enough to believe that the NFL will follow its relocation guidelines. This is about business. Stan Kroenke had the most money, and he had an arbitration award worth $700 million that he won in a fight with St. Louis years ago. He was never going to be denied.
But lest you feel too bitter, it is probably worth remembering that the Rams were LA's team first. They're going home.
By Tuesday afternoon, Kroenke’s plan to move his team to Inglewood alone was pulled off the ballot, leaving owners to choose between the Chargers-Raiders partnership in Carson and a Rams relocation with another team to the 60-acre tract of land Kroenke bought in early 2014 in Inglewood. When an initial tally went in Kroenke's favor by a 20–12 vote, the Carson project was essentially dead. From there, NFL executives worked behind the scenes to shepherd a deal between the Rams and Chargers in Inglewood, which team owners approved.
The Carson project lost despite having some heavy hitters on its side. After Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger presented in favor of the Carson plan, Anheuser-Busch president Carlos Brito called the NFL to tout St. Louis. Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev, agreed in November to extend its sponsorship of the NFL for another six years in a deal valued at more than $1.4 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Even before the NFL released the results of the final vote, with the writing already on the wall, St. Louis sports fans began lamenting the loss of their football team and calling for another pro sports franchise to take its place.
Some people took a few parting shots at the hapless Rams, who won a Super Bowl in St. Louis but spent most of the past decade as hapless losers, the laughingstock of the league. But mostly, Rams fans in St. Louis who'd spent months supporting an ultimately doomed plan for a riverfront stadium were mostly feeling heartbroken...
...and/or pyromanic.
To add fuel to the (metaphorical) fire, the NFL's web page for the Rams shows the team in LA.
Contact Lindsay Toler by an email at LToler@stlmag.com or on Twitter @StLouisLindsay. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
