

On Aug. 13, the Rams took the field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a preseason against the Cowboys in Los Angeles. The nation’s second-largest city has waited nearly 22 years for Sunday. (Ryan Kang/AP)

LOS ANGELES – The National Football League is back in Los Angeles, so that means Matthew Gunn has to make the beer run.

Throughout his entire adult life, Gunn has been a displaced Denver Broncos fan, wearing the foreign orange and blue while living in a city illuminated by stars except for the one that truly matters in today’s American sports landscape: the NFL. But Sunday, all that changes when the Rams host division rival Seattle inside Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — the franchise’s first home game in L.A. since 1980.

The Rams will wear throwback royal blue and gold uniforms to mark the occasion in front of a sold-out crowd inside the 93-year-old stadium.

Gunn, who joined the stampede of 70,000 who swooped up season tickets, will finally enjoy his favorite game on his home turf. For him, the excitement swirling around the return of professional football to the city calls for a toast of orange wheat ale.

“I’ve got beer detail,” said Gunn, 26, who plans on tailgating with friends before kickoff. “Everybody needs the standard Bud Light, but you have to have something fancy in there.”

Three coolers bursting with beer – the cherry on top of a nine-month ordeal to welcome back football to L.A.



Crew members including Irineo Guzman, center, move a Rams stencil while painting the field to convert the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from Southern Cal colors to Rams colors. (Patrick T. Fallon/For The Washington Post)

The homecoming started Jan. 12, when Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff walked out of a Houston hotel room after successfully convincing league owners to vote to relocate the team. Soon, the Rams would flash the peace sign to the Midwest, swapping a downtown St. Louis dome that was essentially colored by team officials as a condemned building in the boondocks for a planned $2.6 billion chateau, the largest entitled real estate project in Southern California.

But before they could even dig a hole for the Rams’ new stadium in Inglewood, Demoff had work to do. “The biggest challenge for us was starting with how do you make sure the football team isn’t impacted and giving them the best chance to have success in 2016, knowing that life is going to be a little bit helter skelter in the offseason,” said Demoff, speaking late Thursday afternoon while stuck in traffic on Wilshire Boulevard.

“It just wasn’t going to be a normal offseason by any means.”

[‘A labor of love’: Turning the L.A. Coliseum from a college stadium to a pro venue]

To get back to normalcy, the Rams’ operational staff would need 32 semi-trucks, a four-week stay at a hotel in Marina del Ray and a couple of warehouses — one in Anaheim and another 80 miles away in Camarillo — to store all the stuff packed up from the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis. And they juggled this move while Rams coaches and players prepared for the 2016 season.

“There’s no book for this. The decisions that had to be made and the speed [which they] had to be made was ridiculous,” said Bruce Warwick, the team’s director of operations. “The league did not stand still for us.”



Crews hang a Corona Beer sponsor banner to convert the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from a college venue to an NFL home. (Patrick T. Fallon/For The Washington Post)

A different commute

The team had a 10-day window from the time it closed down Rams Park in suburban St. Louis to set up a temporary spot in Oxnard, about 60 miles up the coast from Los Angeles. The Rams settled on this site, the training camp home of the Dallas Cowboys, because it was already outfitted with two football fields and a Residence Inn — which became home while coaches and players looked for more permanent rentals.

By the time the first Graebel Van Lines trucks arrived to the West Coast, coaches were deep into draft meetings. At the same time, the team was spinning another plate with construction on a college campus in Thousand Oaks, the new home of the Rams’ 60,000-square-foot practice facility for the upcoming season.

“We were ready for them,” Warwick said, “and didn’t miss a beat.”

[Ron Rivera is still complaining about the Panthers’ schedule]

Besides scouting locations for training camp, a practice facility and new business space, Rams staffers had to deal with the human element of packing up their families and moving to a new state. That produced mixed results — one staffer exhaled as he watched his sons play on the beach for the first time in their lives, another gasped when she found out her rent would triple from St. Louis to L.A. Even the millionaires felt the pinch.

“Living out here is kind of different. Trying to find a place for a lot of these guys has really been the most difficult thing,” said Rams tight end Cory Harkey, who played collegiately at UCLA. “We don’t want it to be an excuse, but it’s hard. It’s hard for these young guys, too, trying to find an affordable spot. California, which we know, it’s kind of expensive out here.”

Starting offensive lineman Rodger Saffold, who played his first six seasons in St. Louis, remembers the 10-minute commute he once had. Now he spends about 30 minutes on the 101 North to drive to California Lutheran, the private liberal arts college where the Rams condensed a 24-month project into six months.

“Everything has changed. It’s all new. Especially for me and my family. I’ve got two little kids. Just making sure they’re in the right schools, going to the right doctors, dealing with traffic,” Saffold said. “Commuting is totally different.”

However, the long-distance move, high rents and traffic headaches have paid off. Twice as much. Forbes has ranked the Rams as the NFL’s sixth-most valuable NFL franchise. The team’s value has doubled to $2.9 billion simply by moving to L.A. — which can seem more like a sound stage than a sports town.



On Jan. 14, Local 39 decorators Jack Dungey, left, and JIm McNeely remove a banner honoring former Rams Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk that hung inside the Edwards Jones Dome in St. Louis. (Laurie Skrivan/AP)

[Rex Ryan fired his offensive coordinator just after the Bills scored 31 points]

The morning of the Rams’ “Monday Night Football” kickoff in San Francisco last week, Coach Jeff Fisher conducted an interview on the popular radio show “On Air With Ryan Seacrest.” Fisher was asked about his grooming techniques for his mustache, and was played Elton John’s rendition of the 1985 rap song “Let’s Ram It!”

In part, John’s lyrics:

Ram it.

Do you know how to ram it?

Oh, please just ram it.

. . .

Just ram it.

We are going to ram it.

Just [expletive] ram it!

Also, living in L.A. means becoming reality TV stars. Harkey, Saffold, their wives and several other players have already shot scenes for the E! network’s “Hollywood and Football.”

“I don’t know how the hell that . . . happened,” Saffold said, responding to a question on why the entertainment channel would green light him for the show. “When everything comes out, hopefully it’s a good show and hopefully it shows we got a lot of work to do over here as a football player as a husband, as a father.”

The new opportunities and multi-billion dollar valuation are just two reasons why Demoff believes the NFL can thrive in Los Angeles.

Demoff, a Los Angeles native, knows all too well how, after the 1994 season, both the Rams and the Raiders had abandoned Southern California. However, Demoff points to the rising popularity of the NFL since the 1990s — the explosion of fantasy football and Sunday Ticket on DirecTV — as well as the Rams’ plans for an otherworldly stadium, which will be the largest in the NFL. Now, Demoff argues, professional football finally can succeed here.

“This city is ready for NFL football in a way that maybe it never had been before,” Demoff said. “L.A. has reinvented itself as hot as any city in the world and because of that you have this tremendous opportunity for all these people who have moved here and are living in Los Angeles to go rediscover what it’s like to be an NFL fan.”



Rams football fans hold banners, wave signs and chant while marching around the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Jan. 9 in Los Angeles. Boisterous fans gathered to herald the NFL football team's imminent return to Southern California. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel) (Richard Vogel/AP)

‘Just excited for Sunday’

Maurice Hall already knows that feeling. He’s 45 now and still remembers how he “caught the blues” when his hometown team left for Anaheim in 1980. Today, Hall owns a home within walking distance from the Hollywood Park site of the new stadium.

Dating from January 2015, Hall participated in surveys performed by research companies that were hired by the Rams. For the question, are you more likely or less likely to support a stadium in Inglewood? Hall answered enthusiastically.

But while Hall should expect his property value to skyrocket — a home down the street from where he lives just went for $70,000 over the asking price — he also warns that the new stadium could be filled with fans wearing enemy colors if the Rams don’t improve. The team hasn’t had a winning season since 2003 and failed to score a point in their opener, a 28-0 loss to the 49ers.

“If the Rams aren’t winning, it will definitely make it a lot more difficult. People don’t necessarily support losers,” Hall said. “I’d imagine if the Rams aren’t as competitive as they need to be, what will happen is you’ll see a lot of fans from the other teams at the game.

“If they’re not good, it’ll hurt the Rams because they won’t have the home advantage.”



A Los Angeles Rams banner hangs over USC colors near the locker rooms. (Patrick T. Fallon/For The Washington Post)

While the start of the Inglewood construction is still more than a month away, the Rams have made themselves at home, propping their feet up on a coffee table that stretches across Southern California: Training camp in Orange County; setting up a 20,000-square-foot business office in Agoura Hills; spreading goodwill by constructing an elementary playground in Inglewood; commissioning real estate agents for mansions in Conejo Valley.

“We’re trying to find every element,” Demoff said, “with how you connect with fans in Southern California.”

This includes hiring a creative team and flooding the market this summer with more than 100 billboards across the city. Motorists heading north on the 405 from Orange County can look up and see a larger-than-life-size Aaron Donald barreling full speed over the Getty Center. To the Rams’ defensive lineman’s right, splattered over a skyline of the city, the season’s motto: “We’re Home.”

It’s a welcome site for fans like Gunn.

On Sunday, Gunn will leave his home in Altadena, and hop on the metro gold line to the blue line — a fitting colorful route for his first Rams regular season home game.

The last time he took this journey, the Rams played the Cowboys in the preseason, and every stop on the metro would welcome a crowd wearing Rams gear. Todd Gurley jerseys. Eric Dickerson throwbacks. Shirts with Jared Goff’s name stitched across the back. By the time the ride concluded, the metro was engulfed in blue and gold. Gunn felt at home.

“You’re just surrounded by a lot of positive energy,” he said. “The overall excitement is something you can grasp and taste, and I’m just excited for Sunday.”