Born in 1980
The Rams have been my favorite team since I can remember. How does a kid in Southwest Missouri become a Rams fan in the 1980s without being able to watch the games?
The Horns. They looked cooler than all of the other teams. Duh.
When I was around 5 - 6 years old, I wore out a vhs copy of Heaven Can Wait. I just watched the shit out of that movie.
The blue and yellow Suzuki dirt bikes that me and my brothers grew up on were by far the coolest thing in the world to me at that age and the Rams wore those colors, so they were obviously the coolest team.
My favorite cousin and role model was 7 years older than me and he told me in 1989 that the Rams were his favorite team. He was killed in a car accident a couple years later and it had a big impact on me, but it signed my papers as Rams fan.
As the madden games became popular, my friends would always pick the Cowboys or the Chiefs to play with. I always played with the Rams. No other teams, ever.
When the Rams moved to Saint Louis, my best friend brought me their innaugural season team poster. He always joked that I was "The only Rams fan in Missouri". After '99 he called me "The first real Rams fan in Missouri." (We knew I wasn't, but in Ozark? Maybe.)
Oddly enough it wasn't during the great years of the GSOT that I became really hooked. It was during the decline and fall of that team that I started needing to watch every game, follow every transaction and to stay informed all of the time.. almost as if I subconsciously believed that if I could follow the team closely enough and support them enough, it would somehow help the team stop sliding.
It was during that time that I started reading Rams discussion boards... 16 or 17 Rams seasons later, I'm still here, still reading some of the same people's posts too I'm sure.
