A day that will live in infamy.....

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Will 2016 be the year LA gets a team?

  • YES

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LACHAMP46

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/sport...120.12603.707&cmpid=emc:fscom:nfl_rams&place2

20 years later, fans wait for return of Rams, Raiders
David Leon Moore and Jim Corbett, USA TODAY Sports 6:15 p.m. EST December 23, 2014
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(Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY Sports)

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LOS ANGELES -- Jerome Bettis was a battering ram of a Los Angeles Ram, a 5-11, 252-pound ball carrier, nicknamed "The Bus," who punished tacklers.

But he could hurt, too, and he had empathy.

Bettis could feel the pain of the 25,705 fans at Anaheim Stadium — 590 fewer than attended a high school sectional championship game in the same stadium two weeks earlier — who were there for the last Rams home game played in southern California.

"I can remember the feeling," Bettis, 42, says. "It was a sad feeling like, 'We couldn't believe this was happening.' We were all waiting for a reprieve. Everybody was crushed because we were leaving L.A. and going to St. Louis."

The reprieve never came. The Rams lost that Christmas Eve game to the Washington Redskins 24-21, finishing the season with a 4-12 record. Thirty miles up the freeway, in downtown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Raiders also lost a game, 19-9 to the Kansas City Chiefs, to wrap up a 9-7 season.


USA TODAY

NFL's L.A. future a high-stakes dance for 3 franchises

That was Dec. 24, 1994 — the day that, as far as NFL play was concerned, it was time to turn out the lights. The party was over.

Wednesday marks 20 years of no NFL in L.A.

"I can't believe it's been that long," says Jeff Hostetler, who quarterbacked those Raiders. "We loved playing in Los Angeles."

In some ways, the NFL has never been closer to returning to L.A.

The Rams, Raiders and San Diego Chargers are not happy with their current stadiums and each has ties to the country's second-largest metro region. However, the Chargers announced last week they will not exercise a termination clause in their lease at Qualcomm Stadium for 2015, a sign that they received assurances from the league that no team will move into their Southern California backyard next season.

"It would be an awesome place to have a team," Hostetler says.

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Rams fans bid farwell to the team after it played its final home game in Southern California on Dec. 24, 1994(Photo: Chris Martinez, AP)

A HISTORY IN L.A.

The Raiders moved from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, played 13 seasons in the Coliseum, then moved back to Oakland.

The Rams, on the other hand, established much deeper roots. They moved to L.A. from Cleveland in 1946 and played 49 years in Southern California — 34 of them in the Coliseum, the last 15 in Anaheim.

Loyalty to the Rams, as became the case also with the Dodgers and the Lakers, was passed down from generation to generation, as were season tickets.

When Christopher Grisanti graduated from high school, his parents gave him two season tickets to the Rams. He and his father loved the Rams together, starting with his father taking him to a game at the Coliseum when he was 9.

Grisanti, 54, a professional photographer in Monrovia, Calif., vividly recalls Christmas Eve 1994 at Anaheim Stadium.

"My dad hadn't been feeling well," Grisanti says. "He had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia. Actually, it turned out to be lung cancer. The irony is that he had said if the Rams ever leave L.A., he'd die."


USA TODAY

Chargers to stay at Qualcomm; L.A. no longer 2015 option

The following October, a month into the Rams' first season in St. Louis, Grisanti's father passed away.

Now Grisanti has teenage boys of his own, and he would love to take them to a Rams game in L.A.

"I hope they come back," he says. "I have visions of them coming through a tunnel in whatever stadium and having the place just rock for five minutes. It gives me chills thinking about it."

Aside from being the NFL's goodbye to L.A., the games had a few other historical notes. The game in Anaheim was the last NFL game for Rams coach Chuck Knox, who won three coach of the year awards. The game in Los Angeles was the last regular season game for Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, then with the Chiefs. Also in L.A., Chiefs 34-year-old running back Marcus Allen, who had feuded with Raiders owner Al Davis in the latter stages of his 11-year stint in L.A. got some revenge with a 132-yard day.

And, of course, there was that paltry crowd at the Rams game. As time was running out in the fourth quarter, Dan Baren remembers the crowd had dwindled down to about 8,000.

"I was there with these other hard-core Rams fans and we're chanting, 'L.A. Rams, L.A. Rams,'" says Baren, 48, an attorney in San Clemente, Calif. "I'm thinking there is no way they're really going to leave. And then they did. It was like a shot to the gut."

Chris Miller, who quarterbacked the 1994 Rams, looks back and remembers a bad situation, a bad team, just a bad year in general. "That year was pretty far from ideal, I'd say," Miller says.

Miller, who grew up in Southern California as a Rams fan and signed with the team in 1994, remembers the good years in L.A., too, winning teams and playoff games — even a Super Bowl appearance in the 1979 season — and he hopes history will repeat itself.

"Back in the day, the Rams had a great following," he says. "They had a great history, and they had a lot of appeal to the Hollywood scene. It will be interesting to see if they can recreate that. Because I'd sure like to see it."

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Quarterback Jeff Hostetler played for the Raiders for two seasons each in Los Angeles and Oakland.(Photo: Vince Bucci, AFP/Getty Images)

WAITING FOR RETURN

The Rams seem to have a much larger fan base in L.A. than the Raiders and Chargers. A Facebook page called "Bring Back the Los Angeles Rams" has 43,504 "likes." By contrast, a page called "Bring Back the Los Angeles Raiders 2015" has 2,814 "likes."

Tom Bateman, the director of the Rams page, keeps his followers updated on the various news media reports about the Rams, Raiders, Chargers and the NFL.

Bateman, 43, of Anaheim, puts stock in the theory that Rams owner Stan Kroenke's purchase of land in Inglewood, Calif., just south of downtown L.A., means the Rams will be returning. But in following the twists and turns of the past 20 years, he's learned that talk is cheap.
"There's so much bluff and innuendo and rumor," Bateman says. "I have to focus on what people do, not what they say. There's so much lawyer-speak and doubletalk. Still, I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic about a Rams return."

Rams fans are almost universally opposed to again sharing the market with the Raiders, whose fans in the Coliseum developed a reputation for creating a family-unfriendly, sometimes violent environment.

"It's a different fan base than we have with the Rams," Grisanti says. "I remember (L.A. Raiders star defensive end) Howie Long saying he wouldn't allow his wife and kids to come to a Raiders game in L.A."

Raiders fans are working to change the image. Johnny Ace Okeke, a telemarketer who is associated with the Raiders Facebook page, helped organize a rally last weekend that he says drew a crowd of several hundred Raiders fans in downtown L.A., trying to drum up support for a Raiders move back to L.A.

"People came with their families — couples, boyfriends, girlfriends," Okeke says. "The whole purpose of the rally was to let people know it's not like it was 20 years ago. It's all about love for the Raiders now."

Hostetler says he felt the love back then, too.

"The fans were awesome, one-of-a-kind fans," he says.

Hostetler grew up, went to college and played most of his NFL career on the East Coast, and he finds it unbelievable that the NFL has not done business in sunny Southern California for two decades.

"There was a joke between my wife and me," Hostetler says. "We'd wake up every morning and we'd look out and it would be beautiful, and it was like that every morning. And we'd say to each other, 'Oh wow, another day like this.' It was amazing to play in L.A. with everything around us. You had the ocean. It was the best of all worlds as far as a place to play."

Former wide receiver Flipper Anderson played college and pro football in L.A. He went from UCLA to the Rams. He played in that last game in L.A. What he remembers most, he says, is the hard-core fans.

There were the guys in the end zone, led by season-ticket holder Art Martinez, holding up a banner with themselves caricatured as the "Rambo" movie character and calling themselves "RamBros." And there were the Melonheads, the guys who wore carved out watermelons on their heads.

"Those guys were special dudes, really good fans," Anderson says. "I just remember giving them my wristbands on the way out. And I remember it being a sad time because it coincided with the end of my contract."

Anderson ended up going to Indianapolis.

The Rams went to St. Louis.

The Raiders went to Oakland.

And L.A., 20 years later, is still a free agent.
 
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