Even Rams Want to Beat L.A. : Pro football: They say that Anaheim is home to them. If the Coliseum stirs nostalgia, it’s merely of collegiate memories.

The Coliseum was their home when they won their only championship, their home when the Fearsome Foursome owned the town, their home for 33 years.

But Sunday, when the Rams run out of the Coliseum tunnel to face the Raiders as the visiting team, it will have been more than 11 years since that stadium was theirs.

And to them, it will seem longer than that. The place the Raiders call the “Black Bottom” is merely another place these days.

“It’s not home,” said center Doug Smith, who played two years with the Rams before they left the Coliseum for Anaheim Stadium after the 1979 season. “Anaheim is home.”

The Rams played the Raiders at the Coliseum in the Raiders’ first L.A. season, 1982, and even then, Smith says, the feeling wasn’t as if they were returning home.

“I had never been in the visiting locker room, so that was kind of a new experience,” he said. “But we were already three years out before we went back, so it wasn’t terribly strange.

“The people here in Anaheim and (Orange County) really have adopted us real quick and gotten behind us. So it wasn’t like the prodigal team or anything coming back home.

“We’re still called the L.A. Rams. But (even then) I associated the Rams with Orange County.”

The Rams played the Raiders again in the Coliseum in 1988, further erasing any sense that the Rams belonged there. Only Smith and right tackle Jackie Slater remain among Rams who were on the club before the move.

How can playing in the Coliseum, the old-timers suggest, mean anything more than any other game to a roster of players who have only known Anaheim Stadium as their home field?

“Those years are over,” said Nolan Cromwell, who played three years with the Rams before the move and now is an assistant coach. “There are only one or two players on the team that even played in the Coliseum as a home team. I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

Merlin Olsen, Hall of Fame defensive tackle and a symbol of the Rams’ glory years in the Coliseum, also downplays the significance of the Rams being the visiting team at the Coliseum.

“It’s always been a little strange to go there and see the Raiders playing there as their home,” said Olsen, who is broadcasting this game for CBS. “(But) one of the things you have to do as a football player is adapt. You do it very quickly.”

The Rams, miles away from the downtown hubbub, do not consider playing the Raiders much of a rivalry at all, since so much land and symbolism separate the teams.

They play only once every two or three seasons, they are in different conferences, the players almost never see each other during the off-season, they have almost totally different images and apparently attract different kinds of fans.

The only thing the teams share is their geographical designation. And even that is misleading.

“I’ve spent the last (few) days trying to tell people it’s not (a rivalry),” said Coach John Robinson, who has far stronger ties to the Coliseum as USC’s former head coach than the Rams do as its former tenant. “We’re not trying to talk the game down, we’re trying to answer the questions, and obviously we’re giving the wrong answers.”

So, comfortable in Anaheim, the Ram players are happy to let the Raiders revel in L.A., drawing some of the media attention in a town that used to be the Rams’.

“I don’t feel overshadowed,” Ram cornerback Darryl Henley said. “We’re way out here.”

Said linebacker-defensive lineman Kevin Greene: “I haven’t really thought about (being overshadowed). We’re down here in Anaheim, in Orange County. I never personally go up there unless I’m doing something media-wise.”

Cromwell said: “We were in Los Angeles. We were in the franchise that was in this area, and it’ll always stay the Los Angeles Rams. But as far as battling for Los Angeles, that’s not what we’re doing.”

In fact, the only emotional way the Rams seem to be able to rev themselves up for this game more than others is to project other rivalries into the mix, and the USC-UCLA matchup is the one that does it best.

“I’ve never won in the Coliseum,” said Henley, from UCLA. “So it’d be nice to win there. It’s a great place to play.”

Said defensive coordinator Jeff Fisher, a cornerback for USC in the late ‘70s: “The thing that sticks out in my mind about the Coliseum is the USC-UCLA rivalry. The 90,000-plus fans there when you come out of the tunnel. . . . That’s an impressive place to play when you come out of that long tunnel and there are that many people in there.”