St. Louis needed its own Robert Kraft to keep the Rams from moving
JANUARY 13, 2016 | 11:13 AM
BY ERIC WILBUR/BOSTON.COM COLUMNIST @GLOBEERICWILBUR
Ironically, St. Louis sure could have used a guy like Bob Kraft.
It’s impossible to imagine what the current landscape of the National Football League would look like if Brookline’s Kraft had not swooped in and rescued the New England Patriots from relocating to the Midwest more than two decades ago.
Perhaps the Patriots would be preparing to host a playoff game in St. Louis, known as the Stallions. Maybe New England would have received an expansion team down the line, like Cleveland did in the wake of the Browns hitching it to Baltimore. Of course, it’s also quite possible that the league would have looked at the Boston market, a dreadful source of NFL interest in the early-90’s, and simply concluded it wasn’t a region worth revisiting.
It’s hard to imagine the likes of Jacksonville, Fla. (ranked 50th in national Nielsen television markets) with a breathing franchise while the Boston-Providence areas (seventh and 53rd, respectively) went without a team to call their own, but Los Angeles (No. 2) will have gone 21 seasons without NFL football within its city limits during the Rams’ sojourn in St. Louis.
Now, the Rams are heading back to Los Angeles, where owner Stan Kroenke plans to build a proposed $1.8 billion stadium after a three-way battle, along with the Chargers (who could still leave San Diego to join them there) and Raiders (who previously left Los Angeles for Oakland, in 1994), to see which franchise could abandon its current digs for a new Land of Oz in Hollywood. And the Rams were only in St. Louis to begin with because Kraft put an end to former Patriots owner and steward James Orthwein’s quest to move the team to his home city after the Cardinals fled for Arizona.
Try telling a 1993 Patriots fan that he or she would one day have sympathy for a modern-day St. Louis fan and you might as well convince them they would one day have four banners hung at a sprawling sports and entertainment complex on the same site where Foxboro Stadium once resided. The very fact that the Patriots have become a pillar of the NFL, only 22 years after their seemingy imminent departure at the behest of a Budweiser baron, may be a familiar tale, but one none the less remarkable.
“The NFL ignored the facts, the loyalty of St. Louis fans, who supported the team through far more downs than ups, and the NFL ignored a strong market and viable plan for a new stadium,” St. Louis mayor Francis Slay said in a statement Tuesday. “I am proud of our effort and what St. Louis was able to accomplish in an extraordinarily short period of time. I thank everyone who worked so diligently on this project, especially the Governor’s Task Force.”
For his part, Kroenke did everything but label the city of St. Louis the Den of Lucifer in his team’s 29-page relocation application, citing a lagging economy and a laissez-faire fan base more devoted to Major League Baseball’s Cardinals than it ever will be to the Rams. In terms of breakup letters, this was essentially telling St. Louis, “I Don’t Love You Anymore, But May Have to Stay in the House a Little Longer if My New Lover Doesn’t Want Me Yet. Cool?”
“This has been the most difficult process of my professional career,” Kroenke said. “While we are excited about the prospect of building a new stadium in Inglewood, California, this is bitter sweet. St. Louis is a city known for its incredibly hard-working, passionate and proud people. Being part of the group that brought the NFL back to St. Louis in 1995 is one of the proudest moments of my professional career. Reaching two Super Bowls and winning one are things all St. Louisans should always treasure.”
Neat. Maybe the Rams will leave season-ticket holders with a scrapbook as a parting gift.
Kroenke sure seemed to have had a change of heart about St. Louis over the past two decades. It was he who led the group of investors interested in bringing the Patriots to play under the Arch in 1993. The trouble, of course, was the lease on Foxboro Stadium ran through 2002. Kraft had purchased the dump in 1988 from the Sullivan family in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in 1988, which turned out to be a pivotal moment in New England football and NFL history.
Kroenke reportedly offered Kraft some $102 million to break the lease, but the future owner of the team wouldn’t budge. Instead, he gave Orthwein a then-record $172 million for the other half of the equation in Foxborough, crushing the hopes of St. Louis, for another year, by which time they would have dragged the Rams off the West Coast.
The team, stadium, and ancillary development along Route One are today worth in excess of $1 billion.
“As much as I wanted a team for St. Louis, this community has shown how much it wanted to keep the Patriots here,” said Orthwein, who passed away in 2008 at the age of 84, at the time of the sale. “I leave the Patriots with my head held high. I accomplished what I set out to do I want to tell everyone that from the day I bought the team, I tried to do the right thing. I told everyone on our staff to be guided by that single principle.”
Today, of course, such a situation is as unimaginable as the Red Sox winning three World Series in our lifetimes. All the bravado that Boston has garnered over the past decade-plus of dominance was non-existent 20 years ago. Teenagers have known nothing but.
“If we had lost one of our four major sports franchises, there are some in the business community who believe we were on our way to becoming a hick town,” William Coughlin, the head of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, told the Boston Globe in ‘93. “There was a passion on my board that it was crucial that the Patriots stayed here. It was more than football.”
Hick town?
That’s probably stretching it, but keep in mind, Boston was also a region just beginning to undergo the Big Dig, with no promises as to how the daily headache would one day improve (?) daily life. Larry Bird had just retired, the Red Sox had Butch Hobson at the helm, Cam Neely was perennially hurt, the Pats were atrocious, and the Seaport district was still a place known more for Whitey Bulger than it was a burgeoning dining district.
But in the end, the Patriots had nothing to do with Boston’s development, a factor that would have seemed disillusionary two decades ago.
Fast-forward to this week, and Kraft, who was on the relocation committee, left the vote on Tuesday calling the Rams’ move “a great solution.”
Great for L.A. Great for the NFL. Great for the league’s billionaire owners, holding cities hostage in return for palatial facilities.
Even Bob Kraft couldn’t have been St. Louis’ guy. The Rams were, simply, doomed.
