LOS ANGELES — On a hazy afternoon last week at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the grass was being mowed, as it is every two or three days. A location scout was studying the long staircases for use in a commercial.
LOS ANGELES — On a hazy afternoon last week at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the grass was being mowed, as it is every two or three days. A location scout was studying the long staircases for use in a commercial. A guide led a tour along the tunnel that Olympians, Rams, Chargers, Raiders, Dodgers, UCLA Bruins and USC Trojans have passed through to enter the field.
The mundane activity at the massive stadium was typical of a March day, six months before the college football season starts. But it was also the calm before the major shift in the local sports culture that will happen when the Rams restart their history in Los Angeles by playing their first three seasons there.
The Rams abandoned the Los Angeles Coliseum for Anaheim, California, after the 1979 season, and then fled to St. Louis in the 1990s and stayed there for two decades. But in January, NFL owners voted to let the Rams return to Los Angeles, where they will play in the 93-year-old stadium until the team’s owner, E. Stanley Kroenke, completes a $2.6 billion entertainment and sports complex in nearby Inglewood.
The league’s approval of the Rams’ aggressive push to leave St. Louis was the culmination of nearly 20 years of halfhearted attempts to bring a franchise back to the Los Angeles market. The San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders, who each sought to move to Los Angeles, are looking at options inside their markets, but one of them may join the Rams in Los Angeles in 2017.
Awaiting the Rams is a time capsule of a structure that opened the same year as the original Yankee Stadium, which, with its triple decks and decorative frieze.
There is a clean, timeless austerity to the coliseum — a giant concrete bowl of seats that would be instantly recognizable to players or fans from the 1930s or 1940s, as well as to the Raiders, who played there from 1982 to 1994.
It could have been built by the Romans.
“For all intents and purposes, it’s as it was when it was built,” said Joe Furin, the coliseum’s general manager, who worked as an intern 30 years ago at the adjacent Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. So little has changed over nearly a century at the stadium, he joked, that a lot of people might have the same key he used to unlock the main gate.
The classic peristyle archways that give the coliseum its distinctive look are still topped by an Olympic caldron. The gas flame is lit by an operator between the third and fourth quarters of USC games with the push of the “Main Burner On” button.
There are no luxury suites — just the sort of modular steel and canvas structures that are seen at golf tournaments. The modest food stands offer minimal fare. Many of the 92,000 seats have been sun-bleached over the decades. There is no hall of fame to memorialize the breadth of history that has unfurled at the stadium, or a lounge where fans can watch television and play fantasy football.
The locker rooms are utilitarian, not the roomy, upscale sort designed for player comfort today. For visiting teams, the locker room is a series of aisles with lockers — offering no easy opportunity for a coach to conduct a team meeting.
“They’re fine for the USC athletic department,” Furin said.
But if the Rams want a better locker room, Kroenke will have to pay for it.
And those portraits of Trojan stars on the walls above the lockers? The Rams might want to cover them with a blue and gold drape.
The Rams know that on the road to Inglewood, some minor deprivations must be endured at the stadium the team called home from 1946 to 1979.
“We were upfront — we’re their guests for three years,” said Kevin Demoff, the chief operating officer of the Rams. “We always knew that in coming back, we’d be playing temporarily in a stadium designed in the early part of the 20th century, whether it was the coliseum or the Rose Bowl. And we like that it hasn’t changed since the Rams first played there in 1946 and it’s the same place as it was when Merlin Olsen and the Fearsome Foursome were playing there.”
He added, “The nostalgia outweighs the lack of modern amenities.”
Pat Haden, who will step down later this year as USC’s athletic director, played at the coliseum in high school and as a quarterback for the Trojans and the Rams. “My dad took me to USC games when we first moved there, and we’d sit up in the 90th row,” he said. “Those days, they were selling out. In my three years in college, we never lost a game at the coliseum.”
For the last three years, Haden has been part of the fundraising and planning for a long-delayed $270 million renovation of the coliseum that he said is being paid for with private donations. About half the money has been raised so far.
The decision by USC to renovate coincided with its having taken control of the stadium’s operations in 2013 from the Los Angeles Memorial Stadium Commission, after decades of deferred maintenance and after an investigation led to bribery and conspiracy allegations against a former coliseum event manager and two concert promoters. They are awaiting trial in state court.
The renovation has two goals. The first is to restore the peristyle by removing the video boards that Haden said had “butchered” the coliseum’s signature architectural look. The second is to bring some modernity to a facility that revels in its history.
The construction that is to start after the 2017 USC season will replace all the seats (many are about a half-century old); add handrails; build a structure for luxury suites, club seats and a new press box; and upgrade wireless Internet connectivity and concession stands. When the work is finished in time for the 2019 Trojans season, capacity will be reduced to about 78,000.
By then, the Rams will be gone and will not reap any financial benefits from the premium seats and other money-making opportunities. Demoff said that the absence of high-priced luxury boxes that are common to most modern stadiums “will differentiate us from the NFL experience” in the short term.
The Rams are unlikely to put all 92,000 seats up for sale for every game; they will likely sell about 70,000 tickets on a regular basis, although there might be demand to sell thousands more for special dates like season openers.
The Rams and the Trojans will mostly play on alternate weekends, but Furin expected them to play games back-to-back on occasional Saturdays and Sundays. The scheduling would be further complicated if the Raiders or the Chargers moved in and required the installation of artificial turf through 2019. But having two teams play, even on the same weekend, is something the coliseum has faced before.
“So you bring in a crew to clean and restock in the middle of the night instead of having a week between games,” Furin said.
One challenge of a quick turnaround is painting the end zones for the Trojans on Saturday and repainting them for the Rams on Sunday. When the Trojans and the Raiders shared the coliseum, Furin said, some players stepped too soon into the black part of the Raiders’ name.
“You’d get morning dew,” he said, “and players said, ‘I’ve got black paint on my shoes.’”
So far, the Rams have not been a major presence in their former hometown. Kroenke and Demoff have not visited since the league approved the move. And a campaign to rebrand the team, along with player appearances locally, will not begin until May.
And the Rams’ offices and training center are not likely to be close to their old or new stadium. Demoff said they are looking at land for a practice complex and headquarters in nearby areas like Calabasas and Thousand Oaks, a plan that would be similar to the Dallas Cowboys’ current construction of a development in Frisco, Texas.
But for now, the Rams are heading back to the past — to a stadium they bade farewell to shortly after losing Super Bowl XIV.
