An open letter to Stan Kroenke

One fan’s plea to a billionaire owner.

I read Sunday that the St. Louis Rams were the “clear front-runner” to move to Los Angeles in 2016. At the time, I was watching the second half of a Rams game that was on pace to feature more penalties than points for the home team.

Late in the 4th quarter, the camera panned up to the owner’s box, where you were having a meeting and wearing a suit that probably costs more than my mortgage payments. The game seemed to be the last thing on your mind.

While I don’t own any shares of the Rams, I, like many of the 55,851 fans who paid to see yesterday’s game, have a vested interest in the team.

St. Louis is my hometown. It is part of my identity.

It also labels most of my wardrobe. Shirts, hats, jackets, even socks. All embroidered or screen printed with some combination of my three favorite letters — STL.

Before the Rams moved to town, football never caught my attention. I had been to a Super Bowl party or two, but my heroes wore my city’s name. Ozzie Smith’s backflips. Al MacInnis’ slapshots. Those were my memories.

When I was seven years old, something magical happened. Georgia Frontiere announced that she was going to move her NFL team, the Rams, to her hometown, St. Louis.

At the time, I didn’t understand all of the work that went into bringing an NFL team to a new city. St. Louis had already lost one NFL team the year before I was born, and desperately wanted to become an NFL city again. So much so that it offered hundreds of millions of dollars out of an already strained budget to help fund a stadium that would be used 8 times per year.

None of this mattered to me. I was a small boy from a little midwestern city. But on Sundays, I got to see my team fight New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Seattle. Sometimes we even won!

Now my closet had new names. Jerome Bettis. Kurt Warner. Marshall Faulk.

At 18, I left St. Louis to go to college in Michigan, and then followed my career to California. But, despite just 4 winning seasons in 20 years, the Rams continue to be a part of my Sundays. One day, I hope to move back to St. Louis and take my children to Rams games. Before each game, we’ll stop by the statue of Kurt Warner and I’ll recount the story of how a grocery clerk became a Super Bowl champion. Then they’ll remind me that I tell this same story every week, and pull me by my jacket sleeves into the stadium for another frustrating, but ultimately fun Rams game.