The area of downtown near what is now awkwardly called the Dome at America’s Center was like a ghost town on Sunday.
For the past two decades, this was the home of the St. Louis Rams and during home games, throngs of NFL fans gathered to tailgate, cheer and attend games at what was first called the Trans World Dome and then later renamed the Edward Jones Dome.
The site was the epicenter of “The World’s Greatest Show on Turf” teams, who brought a Super Bowl title to the city with Kurt Warner, one of the game’s greatest undrafted players, at the controls from 1998-2003.
But the circus had left town. The local anger at the Rams’ abandonment of the city remains while season rolls on elsewhere, even as the Oakland Raiders ponder a move to Las Vegas and San Diego votes whether to keep the Chargers.
For the second time in 29 years, St. Louis has lost its NFL team. How does this happen?
The beginning of the end of the St. Louis Rams came in 2010 at the Buckhead Ritz Carlton, when the sale of the franchise to Stan Kroenke was approved by the league owners. The savvy land developer methodically used a flimsy lease agreement to his advantage in order to leave for greener pastures in Los Angeles, the nation’s No. 2 television market which for 21 years had been without a team.
He returned the Rams to city they called home from 1946-1994.
Longtime observers in St. Louis still believe that the league was duplicitous in helping the Rams break their lease. St. Louis mayor Francis Slay, who was working to keep the team, could never meet with Kroenke but cobbled together a $355 million stadium package that Kroenke in turn mocked.
At the beginning of the Rams’ last season here, St. Louis still owed $100 million on the bonds used to build the now vacant dome. But this was just a double-blow to the city which also lost the Cardinals to Phoenix in 1987.
“I came here in 1978 and of course, that was after the Cardinals had their good years in the mid-70s, so (the team) wasn’t real good after that. But I did experience the stretch where Cardinal ownership wanted a new stadium and that was almost three years,” said Howard Balzer, a longtime national NFL writer and broadcaster.
Cardinals owner Bill Bidwell’s move to Phoenix was considered unprecedented in that there was no new flashy stadium waiting in the desert. It took the franchise 18 years to get a new facility built, while the Cardinals played at Arizona State’s Sun Devil Stadium.
“Bidwell wanted to stay and he gave the St. Louis area plenty of opportunity to do that,” Balzer said. “When the vote came down, he was actually brought to tears that he was leaving. That happened.”
St. Louis subsequently thought it would land an expansion franchise in 1993, but the lack of a solid ownership group undermined those efforts. The expansion teams went to Charlotte and Jacksonville.
But they succeeded in landing the Rams in 1995 when owner Georgia Frontiere brought them to her home state. A new publicly funded stadium was already up and running.
But once Kroenke landed the team in a $750 million transaction, the days were numbered.
“The Rams tried to say, ‘We did everything we could to stay,’ but that was just not true,” Balzer said. “It’s almost like a political lie that we hear during these campaigns. When they say it enough, people start believing it.
“Kroenke never, never truly gave St. Louis one chance to keep the team. He knew he had an out in this lease, to be able to leave and that’s what his goal was, to be able to go year-to-year so that he could leave. That’s what he did.”
Once again stuck without a football team, St. Louisians are battling through their first season without an NFL presence.
The Kansas City Chiefs and the Chicago Bears were granted permission from the league to televise their exhibition games in the St. Louis market. Once the season began, local radio station 590 KFNS broadcast the Arizona Cardinals games. From 240 miles away in K.C,, the Chiefs are aired over 1120 KMOX.
Seeking a stadium experience, some fans have taken the 310-mile trip to Nashville to see the Titans.
But perhaps, the most popular crowd is the group of fans who “hate-watch” the Rams.
“There is definitely still a lot of interest in the team,” said Jim Thomas, the Rams long-time beat writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “When they started out 3-1, people were actually bummed out. Even, like my wife, she roots hard against the team. It’s nothing against the players. It’s all directed to Kroenke and (vice president of operations) Kevin Demhoff.”
Even the anchor on KSDK Channel 5 news took great glee Sunday night in reporting that the Rams were defeated 13-10 by Carolina. The broadcast also noted that Los Angeles fans haven’t exactly embraced the team, reporting tickets could be had at Memorial Coliseum for as low as $29.
Others have turned to local high school games.
There was a packed crowd at the Hazelwood Central vs. Christian Brothers College High district championship game on Saturday. Practically no one had on any Rams’ gear.
The Rams, in fact, are dead to them.
“I’m doing fine,” said Mark Winfield, a St. Louis fireman who was attending a youth football game at the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club on Sunday. “I’m a Patriots fan.”
It still bothers some folks that the city tried to pull out all of the stops to keep the Rams, when it was clear to most that Kroenke was leaving.
“It was a bad deal,” Winfield said. “They would have had another out (in the lease) and left. We were throwing money at them and they didn’t want it.”
Winfield said he may have a new team soon. He’s retiring and plans to move to Atlanta and buy himself a Falcons flag.
De Smet Jesuit High football coach Robert Steeples Jr., a former star at De Smet who played at Missouri and was a practice squad player with the Rams, has seen the angst from both sides.
“A lot of how they feel is a reflection of how their parents feel because they weren’t around for the glory days of the Rams, a lot of the students that I have,” Steeples said. “For some of them, they feel spite. But for others, it just draws them closer to whomever their other favorite team was.”
But from his time with the Rams, Steeples knows a lot of the players and finds himself sympathetic to their plight.
“I want to see them do well,” Steeples said. “But at the same time, you do see how it all kind of went down. So people do feel a little spurned from it. …With me being a former player, I understand the business side of it.”
A dark, sad business that the people of St. Louis know all too well.
