It is now 17 years since St. Louis first came to not know Stan Kroenke.
It has been quite a stealth ride.
Kroenke, owner of the St. Louis Rams, was first introduced to us as owner of the St. Louis Stallions NFL franchise. The Stallions were to be our expansion team when the NFL owners decided to add two teams in 1993. Our team, the Big Red, had fled to the Arizona desert six years earlier.
Kroenke, then 46, was unveiled to the community as its new financial guardian sports angel—albeit an 11th-hour, strangely shy guardian sports angel—just 24 hours before the NFL owners were meeting to make their expansion decision. Kroenke was brought in by the civic leadership—such that it was—after years of dreaming, scheming, feuding, and suing had left St. Louis with its prospective NFL ownership group in tatters on the eve of the NFL’ s selection meeting.
Charitably, it was an awkward first date. At a hastily arranged meeting in a hotel banquet room, St. Louis learned that Kroenke was a wealthy Columbia businessman who had married into the family of Sam Walton of Walmart fame. He was a real-estate man. He was said to be worth roughly $500 million. He loved sports. He had an unusual mustache. He was soft-spoken. He was a very private man.
Uh, that’s interesting. Nice to meet you, Stan. Nice to meet you, St. Louis.
We did know the friends who had set us up. At his introduction, he was joined by many familiar faces in his new ownership group: Chuck Knight, Stephen Brauer, Charles Cella, Sam Fox, Fred Kummer, and Andrew Taylor, as well as the late John Connelly from Pittsburgh. No titles needed here: If you don’t recognize these names, you don’t know your civic pooh-bahs.
“This is a great group,” Kroenke said. “I can tell you the NFL’s going to like them.”
Actually, it didn’t.
A day after Kroenke’s stilted introduction, the NFL stunned presumed front-runner St. Louis by instead giving a franchise to Charlotte, N.C. NFL owners were supposed to announce a second franchise winner among the finalists—St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, or Jacksonville—but they said they needed more time.
Conspiracy theorists figured the delay was designed to give St. Louis time to get its act together. After all, our town had everything going for it: the largest market size of the finalists, a state-of-the-art new domed football stadium in place (made-to-order for the NFL), and lots of money on the table.
It was just that we had arrived at the NFL meetings looking like a college kid whose speed had worn off right before the final. Our dog had eaten our homework. We just needed to go home, sleep a little bit, shower and change clothes, and come back for another chance at the test.
Five weeks later, five agonizing, unhappy weeks later, the NFL owners shocked St. Louis again by passing it over for relatively tiny Jacksonville. It was humiliating.
Who would most directly—and unfairly—take the fall? Why, the guy we barely knew, Stan Kroenke. It was brutal.
“Meeting with reporters that Tuesday, Kroenke was so low-key as to be somnambulant,” a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist wrote. “One league insider said he was evocative of the cartoon character Droopy Dog.”
Another out-of-town columnist said Kroenke “had as much charisma as an undertaker.”
The local press was gentler, because St. Louis literally didn’t know this poor guy Kroenke—this poor, rich guy—and we did know it was the local blowhards in the corporate community who had fumbled the ball. This wasn’t Kroenke’s fault. It was hoped he might somehow help us get our NFL team, but it was presumed he would go back to Columbia, never to be seen again.
Then St. Louis woke up and decided to get an NFL team the old-fashioned way: by stealing a franchise from another city.
Led by the wonderful, late former Sen. Tom Eagleton, local politicians got involved and basically gave away the ranch to lure the Los Angeles Rams and owner Georgia Frontiere to become the St. Louis Rams. The Rams would move here in 1995.
There was plenty of credit to go around for the good work of Eagleton, the late county executive Buzz Westfall, then–Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr., the fans, the civic leaders, and so on. Everyone had chipped in for a great team victory.
Oh yes, and that fellow Kroenke had helped from the shadows. He would own 40 percent of the team. We remembered Kroenke. We had a date with him once. Quiet guy with a mustache. Didn’t say much. Nice guy, though.
Thanks, Stan. It is Stan, isn’t it?
In retrospect, Kroenke should have been the hero at the front of the parade, because without his investment, St. Louis almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten a team. But Kroenke is a private man, a very private man, and he seemed content to sit in the background and stay there, in stark contrast to the politicians and the town’s flamboyant new superstar owner, hometown-girl-made-good Georgia Frontiere.
And so it would go, through the bad years and then the glory years and then the bad years again for the Rams. The heroes were Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, Isaac Bruce, Dick Vermeil, and all the others. Frontiere took her rightful place on the victory podium. Kroenke was in the background.
As time went on, Kroenke would develop quite a sports-ownership resume on his own in Denver. He purchased the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche. He also got heavily into soccer, in Denver and abroad.
If Forbes magazine’s listings are to be believed, Kroenke’s fortune has soared to $2.7 billion. That should impress even those cynical about how he married.
Kroenke is not to be underestimated.
For all that, however, he was also not to be known in St. Louis. The success in Denver just made the guy from Columbia seem further removed from our town. Even as he developed a bit of celebrity in other sports circles, he remained nearly anonymous here.
When Frontiere passed away in early 2008, leaving her heirs a football team they neither wanted to own nor could afford to inherit, Kroenke might have been the logical hero to step up and expand his 40 percent to 100 percent ownership.
But as always, he stayed in the shadows as far as St. Louis was concerned. He remained “Silent Stan,” refusing to offer even a hint as to his interest in acquiring the remaining 60 percent of the team.
There was much suspicion about him. Even in his minority-owner role, he had been tabbed by the NFL to sit on the committee looking at returning the league to the Los Angeles market. How convenient. If this fellow from Denver via Columbia bought our team, he was certain to move them away, wasn’t he?
But he did buy the team. After a long and uneasy process that had St. Louis football fans assuming the customary position of twisting in the wind, NFL owners unanimously approved Kroenke as owner of the Rams in August. This was essentially the same NFL body that had handed him his St. Louis Stallions hat in 1993.
It had to be a great feeling for Kroenke, and it really should have been a great story in St. Louis.
But it wasn’t. There was no joyous celebration, no parade to note that the lifelong Missourian who had essentially saved NFL football for St. Louis—a proven winner now as a sports franchise owner in three other sports—was fully in charge of the Rams.
You reap what you sow. Kroenke’s stealth image had succeeded in protecting his privacy to a fault.
St. Louis still doesn’t know the guy.
But this will change. Part of the sweet deal given to the Rams was that they essentially made only a 20-year commitment to stay in St. Louis. Officially, there’s a 30-year lease to play at the Edward Jones Dome, but it expressly included an escape clause at the 20-year mark—that would be after the 2014 season—which would let the Rams leave unless the stadium was in the top 25 percent of NFL facilities, as defined in the contract.
It is widely known that with all of the new stadium construction and upgrades around the league during the past 15 years, it would be a virtual impossibility for St. Louis to meet those requirements. Oh, and we don’t have any money.
So at some point in the not-too-distant future, Stan Kroenke will be looking for a new place to play football. He has said repeatedly that he wants to keep the team in St. Louis, and there’s no reason to doubt him. He seems to be an honorable man. (And we know it would be morally wrong for another city to get a franchise—uh, the old-fashioned way—by stealing it from us.)
But Kroenke’s real-estate company, THF Realty, is known here and elsewhere for being among the best around at exploiting public-financing deals—a.k.a. corporate welfare—and it is an article of faith among NFL owners that the public owes them stadiums.
Kroenke has finally started doing an interview here and there, but he’s given no insight into his views about taxpayers building stadiums for men like him. I have a sneaking suspicion we know the answer.
In a perfect world, Kroenke would simply use his ample resources to build a new, open-air, state-of-the-art football stadium in the St. Louis area, financed by those of us who are fans, as well as advertisers and corporate-suite buyers. The Edward Jones Dome would be freed up for more convention dates.
We’d get to enjoy Rams football—or not—in the fresh air on crisp, fall days in St. Louis.
That’s not too much to ask of our close friend, Stan Kroenke, is it?
Right, Stan?
Old buddy. Old pal.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
