Since the National Football League is always my personal second choice for this game’s entertainment, only rarely do I care who wins the Super Bowl or any of the games preceding it. Most years, I don’t watch “America’s game” until the playoffs.
This time, I thought it would be cool if — for the first time in 60 Super Bowls and 33 NFL championships before that— two teams from the same city play the season’s last game.
Until this week, Los Angeles had a chance. That ship sailed when the Chargers collapsed. That leaves one playoff survivor, the Rams, from a city with a pro football past that surely is the craziest of them all.
Crazy?
Only the Rams have won the championship in three cities — Cleveland (1945), St. Louis (1999) and Los Angeles (2021). Their victory five years ago made them just the second team to win the Super Bowl at home, one year after Tampa Bay did it.
The first time the Rams moved, from Cleveland to L.A. in 1946, football became the first of all major sports to go coast to coast…i.e., have a team out west. When the others realized how fertile the West Coast was, while admittedly that took some time, it laid the groundwork for other major sports franchises to follow: the Dodgers (1958), the Chargers (1960), the Lakers (1960) and the Angels (1961).
The “horns” logo that is the Rams’ trademark was first painted it on a helmet 80 years ago, by one of their halfbacks.
The city’s first two pro football teams, the Buccaneers and the Wildcats, never played in Los Angeles. Both played home games in Chicago during their one-season existences, a century ago.
Twenty years later, a pre-condition of calling the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum their home was the Rams had to have at least one black player. So they signed two — Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, who finished his career with the first two Calgary Stampeders teams to play in the Grey Cup. So one of them, or maybe both, were football’s version of Jackie Robinson, before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier, but neither is celebrated like Robinson is today. More irony: Washington, Strode and Robinson were college backfield teammates with UCLA’s undefeated Bruins in 1939.
L.A. football teams have a track record of coming and going, and sometimes coming again. The Chargers played one season, then moved to San Diego (1961) and back again (2017). The Rams went to St. Louis (1995) and back (2016). The Raiders moved there from Oakland (1982), announced plans to go back (1990) before having a change of heart six months later, eventually re-locating to Oakland (1995).
The first L.A. team in the Super Bowl was the Rams (1980). The first to win it was the Raiders (1983) and it was another 38 years before the Rams won for the first time.
For 21 years (1995-2016), this was a city without a football team. Yet it was invaluable to the NFL. When a franchise needed a new stadium, the threat of moving to L.A. was a bargaining chip to find public money…for half the NFL’s teams!
Crazy, or just so California?
