When the Rams move to Los Angeles
and there is no doubt in my mind that they will, St. Louis fans have NOTHING to
be ashamed of. We’ve supported what has
been the worst team in the league for the past 10 years, with solid attendance,
high television and radio ratings and good team merchandise sales. This city has been loyal to that team, but
that team has absolutely no loyalty to this city. For several years now, Stan Kroenke has made
it abundantly clear that he wants to move the Rams to Los Angeles and has been
totally uninterested in working out any kind of compromise with the city to
stay here. With the help of the city and
private interests, Dave Peacock and his team have created a plan for an
impressive new $1 billion stadium on the riverfront and have also worked out
details for financing the project. Stan’s
reaction? Total silence. Telephone calls unanswered, no sense of
cooperation and not one gesture of personal appreciation for the Rams’
extensive fan base. Staying in St. Louis
is obviously not even on his radar.
Folks, he’s just not interested in staying here and it’s time for us to
let him go.
After all, this is the Show Me
State and what has Stan showed us? What
has he shown us, besides bad football, minimal loyalty and zero appreciation
for our efforts to design, build and finance a brand new stadium for his
team? He has shown that his deafening silence
is contempt for us and his objectives in Los Angeles are nothing more than the further
enrichment of himself and the further inflation of his already enormous ego. All of this at the expense of his team’s most
rabid supporters. You know… those little
guys who have been shelling out big bucks on the Rams for years.Stan will leave us and in doing so, he will create the impression that St. Louis cannot support an NFL franchise, when nothing can be further from the truth. Across the country, St. Louis and Rams fans will be blamed for not supporting the team. The same city and fans who have showed up at the stadium and have continued to tune-in and watch the worst team in football for the past 10 years. The same city and fans who have laid a beautiful stadium at the billionaire owner’s feet.
That, my friends, is the story
that needs to be told. The truthful
story. Perception is everything in this
world and communicating the real story behind this betrayal is the only thing
that we can control. All we have to do
is fight back with the honest-to-God truth about what really happened to our
team and we have to do it on a scale just as big as our efforts to keep the
team here. When the moving trucks
pull-up, we better be armed with press releases and video for every media
outlet in the country, so that they can hear the real story, the true story of
the blatant kidnapping of St. Louis’ NFL Franchise.
