12 Steps for Jilted Ram Fans

They are gone, gone for good, and it is time to move beyond the mourning, remove the black crepe paper from the living room portrait of Merlin Olsen, give up the ghost of Jack Youngblood and get on with a life without punt-return fumbles by Todd Kinchen.

It has not been easy, I know, coping during these first few days of the post-Los Angeles-Anaheim Ram era. There have been reports of bitter fans flinging Ram T-shirts and baseball caps over the walls of Rams Park, of mass season-ticket cancellations, of group yawnings, of candlelight vigils around the tomb of the Unknown Melonhead.

I am here to help, with a 12-step recovery program that has been proven to help similar addictions in overeaters, over-drinkers, women who love too much, men who read Robert Bly too much and people who unleashed the child within and wound up with crayon scribbles all over the veranda.

If it can work for them, it can work for the Jesse Hester-deprived.

Repeat after me:

“1. We admitted that we were powerless against Ram football--that our lives had become unmanageable, especially on autumn Sundays, when we would roust the family from a peaceful sleep; haul them to church; instruct them to pray for a 100-yard rushing day from Jerome Bettis and four Tony Zendejas field goals; haul them to the Big A; burn $200 on parking, end-zone seats, concessions and an 8-5 loss to the Falcons; drive home in excruciating silence; ruin the evening meal ambience by stewing over Chick Harris’ play-calling; angrily chide the children for whining about the green beans on their plate and ‘acting like Chris Miller’; send them to their rooms without a bedtime reading from ‘MVP,’ the Roman Gabriel biography, and spend the last remaining hours of the weekend flicking from highlight show to highlight show while slipping into a deep, harrowing, unrelenting depression.

“2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, but unfortunately his name was Chuck Knox.

“3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Leigh Steinberg and beseeched him to ‘Save the Rams’--and also prevent them from moving, if he could.

“4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and wondered what we were doing wasting hard-earned money and long hours on a football team that hadn’t won a championship since the Truman Administration; had failed to participate in 28 of the first 29 Super Bowls; had lost its last two NFC title game appearances by a cumulative score of 54-3; was playing .288 football in the 1990s; liked to draft undersized offensive tackles in the first round; took to starting an international cocaine trafficker in its defensive backfield, and was owned by a reclusive dilettante who blamed all of the franchise’s ills on a lack of fan support.

“5. We admitted to ourselves, to the empty seat next to us at Anaheim Stadium and to the neighbor who canceled his Ram season tickets and now goes to Charger home games the exact nature of our wrongs.

“6. We were entirely ready to have John Shaw, Georgia Frontiere and 22 other NFL owners remove all these defects of character and relocate them in St. Louis.

“7. We humbly asked Paul Tagliabue to remove our shortcomings, which he did just as soon as Georgia ponied up the $46 million.

“8. We made a list of all the teams we’d rather have in Anaheim, and that list included the Cincinnati Bengals, the Cleveland Browns, the Arizona Cardinals, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the Las Vegas Posse, the Shreveport Steamer, the Southern California Sun, the L.A. Express, the L.A. Dons, the Barcelona Dragons, the Scottish Claymores, the Orange County Rhinos, and any expansion team to be named before the year 2000.

(But not the Raiders.)

“9. We made direct amends to our bookmaker, who knew a sucker bet when he saw one and for some reason always forgot to mention that the percentage odds of the Rams covering the spread and Wymon Henderson covering Jerry Rice were exactly the same.

“10. We continued to take personal inventory of all the things we could be doing this football season without the Rams playing in Anaheim, such as watching two good football games on TV every Sunday instead of one bad one; not driving to a sports bar in San Diego the next time Dallas and San Francisco play during the regular season; taking the money normally spent on Ram season tickets and investing it in a good psychotherapist; buying tickets to all the Angels’ home playoff and World Series games (a little self-help humor there); playing catch with the kids in the back yard without dropping the football and having to explain, ‘See, just like Tim Lester’; not calling the Anaheim Police Department in November to file a missing-person report on Sean Gilbert, and finally taking the family to some museum besides the Orange County Hall of Fame to look at actual Ram playoff ticket stubs.

“11. We sought through prayer and meditation to have Rich Brooks continue the 5-11 and 4-12 seasons, much the same way Baltimore Colt fans prayed for a pox on the house of the Indianapolis Irsays--and pretty much got everything they asked for.

“12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we will try to carry this message to Ram fans in St. Louis, because what they don’t know now is enough to drive a personal seat license holder to drink.”