Jerry Jones, the NFL’s premier mover and shaker, sprinkled table salt onto the rim of his beer can in his makeshift office at Dallas Cowboys training camp in Oxnard. It was a memorable moment before he dispensed an important piece of advice.
“Keep your eyes on Stan Kroenke,” the colorful Cowboys owner said in his familiar Arkansas twang, easing back in his desk chair.
The exchange comes to mind as the Rams celebrate their 10th anniversary Monday of their return to Los Angeles, their audacious relocation closing the book on the weirdest chapter in this city’s sports history.
Kroenke is the owner who solved the Rubik’s Cube that once seemed impossible. He did more than return a beloved franchise that had been in Southern California for 49 seasons. He privately financed a $5-billion stadium in Inglewood, and committed to spending many multiples of that to develop the surrounding campus and a massive Rams village under construction in Woodland Hills.
Before all that came the advice from Jones to keep Kroenke in my line of vision.
I had been the NFL writer for The Times for more than a decade. I had returned to my hometown after five years in Seattle, and five more as a beat writer covering the Oakland Raiders.
With the Raiders, I could tell you all about the roster, down to the third-string right guard. But that depth of knowledge about a given team wasn’t important in Los Angeles. Here, I needed to establish a relationship with every NFL team owner and executive who might someday have something to do with a team moving back to the market. I had to know the politicians, the land-use attorneys, the relocation-minded heavy hitters.
It was a running joke at the commissioner’s Super Bowl news conference — first Paul Tagliabue, then Roger Goodell — that I would stand and ask a question about when the NFL would return to Los Angeles. I had to phrase it differently each year.
“Can you look ahead and tell me what a naming rights deal, which would be the largest in history, would mean to bringing football back to Los Angeles, and is this a game changer?”
“What could happen over the next year that would entice the league to pursue a stadium opportunity in Los Angeles?”
“Are you disappointed Los Angeles has not panned out?”
And in 2015, the year before the Rams moved: “This marks the 20th year without a franchise in the nation’s second-largest market and, coincidentally, the 20th consecutive year I’ve asked this question …”
“I do recognize it already, Sam,” Goodell said to laughter. “Do you want me to finish it for you?”
After the Rams came back in 2016, and the Chargers followed a year later, I playfully asked Goodell, “When will Los Angeles stop getting NFL teams?”
But what Jones said about Kroenke, owner of the St. Louis Rams, stuck with me. He said Stan was the one person with the resources and resolve to get a deal done here. Most important, Kroenke had a team to move.
That was the thing about the two-decade NFL stadium derby. Everybody had their ideal location. Everybody had their financing plan. Everybody had their beautiful venue renderings — man, I could wallpaper City Hall with those — but nobody had the complete solution.
Not even close. Supposedly “laid back” Los Angeles was rife with sharp elbows, daggers plunged in backs and a relentless quest for glory. Oh, to be the hero who reunited Los Angeles and the NFL.
Billionaires tried. Politicians tried. Studio heads and celebrities tried. Tom Cruise (talk about Mission Impossible), Magic Johnson, Garth Brooks … everyone had a plan to build a stadium or attract a franchise. It was the gold rush in reverse. People were already here, and they were determined to lure the bounty to them.
Los Angeles was very valuable to the NFL without a team. We were the boogeyman. The mere threat of a team moving here got its current city to devote public money to a new stadium. That happened over and over around the league.
But there was no public money to be had in Los Angeles, and the cost of a new stadium was no longer measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, but billions. The universe of people willing and able to bankroll that — and who had control of an NFL team — was tiny.
That’s what Jones was telling me during our annual August get-together, when I would pick his brain on an array of topics about the upcoming season. Kroenke had the cash and cajones to bring the Rams back, and this wasn’t fantasy football the way all the other stadium schemes were.
Relocations are terrible. The owners who pack up their teams and leave are forever villains in their old markets. Whether it’s Georgia Frontiere in Los Angeles, Dean Spanos in San Diego, or Stan Kroenke in St. Louis, that’s how they’re seen.
But for fans here, Kroenke is a hero of sorts. It wasn’t a relocation but a restoration.
Imagine the Los Angeles sports landscape in a shoebox, with most of it focused in the downtown area with the Lakers and the Dodgers. Kroenke tilted that box and tapped its side, relocating the center of gravity to Inglewood, where the NFL would move its robust media operation and where Steve Ballmer would build Intuit Dome.
There was a deeply emotional component to the Rams returning. It cut across all demographics, but there was a common story I heard from many men between the ages of 40 and 60: “My dad and I butted heads over almost everything when I was a kid, but what we had in common was a love for the Rams.”
Although it might seem like an obvious winner, putting the nation’s No. 1 league back in the No. 2 market, it was far more complicated than that. Los Angeles is loaded with people who grew up elsewhere.
“This is the Ellis Island of NFL fans,” Howie Long told me once. “Every team is represented here.”
Also, fantasy football exploded when this city didn’t have a team, so a lot of people were more focused on individual players than teams. We didn’t even watch whole games anymore, thanks to RedZone Channel.
So building a fan base is a challenge and remains one, as both the Rams and the Chargers can attest. This town still belongs to the Lakers and the Dodgers, although the Rams — with the winning, investments and community efforts — are starting to transform it into a triumvirate.
What Kroenke has done over the past decade has far exceeded expectations. He rolled into Los Angeles with a reputation as a middling owner who would put a lukewarm product on the field. Instead, the Rams made bold moves from the start, whether making the NFL’s biggest trade up to the No. 1 spot to draft quarterback Jared Goff, or the league’s first swap of No. 1 overall quarterbacks to replace Goff with Matthew Stafford.
There was the eye-popping decision to hire Sean McVay, a coach barely old enough to shave. And a long line of big-money, high-profile free agents, coupled with the gold-nugget draft finds of general manager Les Snead.
What that led to was the Rams playing in two of the last seven Super Bowls, and winning one on their home field. During an 18-month stretch, the Rams won a Lombardi Trophy and two other Kroenke franchises — the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche — also won championships.
That’s a lot of salt on the beer can. Prescient as Jerry Jones was on that day at training camp, even he couldn’t have predicted this.
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