COMMENTARY : Grid Unlock : L.A. Fans Felt Abandoned Long Before Georgia and Al Left

The Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game at Ebbets Field on Sept. 24, 1957, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0.

Among the songs organist Gladys Goodding selected to play that day were “Am I Blue?” and “What Can I Say, Dear, After I’ve Said I’m Sorry?”

Author Roger Kahn captured the mood when he wrote of Benny Weinrig, a sandwich server in the Ebbets Field press box, who broke down that night and wept to his mother, “This team has been my whole life. What is it now? Just a joke. . . . “

The loss of the Colts to Baltimore had a similar impact when owner Robert Irsay sneaked the team to Indianapolis in the dead of night, March 28, 1984.

The Colts’ Marching Band, 200 strong, never disbanded and still practices once a week.

And then, well, there’s Los Angeles.

When the Rams packed up the 18-wheelers recently and headed for St. Louis after a 50-year visit, season ticket-holder Bill Halpin remarked, “I’m ecstatic.”

When Raider owner Al Davis signed a letter of intent to return the team to Oakland next season, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky remarked, “Good riddance.”

The headline in the Los Angeles Times the day the Raiders made it official, “See Ya, Baby,” said it all.

The loss of pro football in Los Angeles, rest assured, will not be the subject for Ken Burns’ next documentary. There will be no poets gushing on camera in soft light about profound senses of loss.

What owners Georgia Frontiere and Al Davis failed to grasp was that love in Los Angeles is not unrequited. It has to be earned, nurtured and maintained. Fans here are multicultural, diverse as the landscape. They are not captives of brutal winters, nor bound by blood-oath pacts with their teams. Worse, they are capable of finding other things to do on Sunday afternoons in the fall.

“Up until October, I’ll be tending my tomatoes,” Halpin says. “Then, I’ll have the Ducks and Lakers.”

This must have been disconcerting to Frontiere, whose husband Carroll Rosenbloom--in a straight swap with Irsay in 1972--traded ownership of his cult-worshiped Baltimore Colts for the Rams.

And to Davis, who never worried one whit whether Raider fans would show up at the Oakland Coliseum.

In Los Angeles, loyalty is awarded the highest bidder. L.A. held Davis accountable to his own motto about winning and it was he, ultimately, who failed to deliver.

Halpin, who runs an advertising agency and lives in Huntington Beach, had Ram season tickets for 25 years. He was also a Raider season ticket-holder in the 1980s.

“This is the toughest market in the country,” Halpin says. “If you can’t compete, pack up and get out of town.”

The Rams and Raiders did.

That there appears to be no great public outcry does not surprise many who have long stirred up America’s melting pot.

Part of our ambivalence is knowing Los Angeles will not be without a team for long. Part is knowing the best network games of the week will no longer be blacked out locally.

Part is our Left Coast nature.

“It’s not a cultural loss in Los Angeles,” former USC and Ram quarterback Pat Haden, says. “There isn’t a passion, I think, for the hometown team, because this isn’t a lot of people’s hometown.”

No football?

Cleveland might cringe at the thought.

But L.A.?

“I don’t think most of the people I’m aware of are terribly concerned,” says Haden, an attorney, broadcaster and Los Angeles resident. “It’s nice to have a team, but there isn’t the passion for athletics here that there is in a lot of towns.”

It could be argued that some of this indifference was fostered by Frontiere and Davis, outsiders who never understood the marketplace.

Once, the Rams had a strong connection to their fans, primarily in the period from 1946 to 1958, when they were the only professional team in town.

Crowds of 100,000 at the Coliseum for Ram games were not uncommon.

The Rams’ disconnection happened in stages, like the separation of rocket boosters.

The team lost its base, its heart, when Carroll Rosenbloom made his land-grab and orchestrated the move to Orange County in 1980.

To many ardent followers on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, that was the death knell.

The team lost its soul when Rosenbloom drowned off the Florida coast in April, 1979, leaving the team to his wife, Georgia--a former chorus girl.

Acceptance in Anaheim was always lukewarm. Georgia’s decision to hire former--and now current--USC Coach John Robinson in 1983 was a rare master stroke, but Robinson’s flame burned only as long as he fielded winning teams. He was snuffed out not long after making a smoke-and-mirrors run to the NFC championship game in 1989.

The ultimate breach occurred when the Rams tried blaming its futility on the fans, using the nonsupport of a sorry team as an excuse to escape their lease with Anaheim Stadium.

In fact, the Rams’ problems were self-induced. Football historians will record the turning point as Oct. 31, 1987, the day disgruntled tailback Eric Dickerson was traded to the Colts for three first- and second-round draft choices.

Had that deal not been made or, better yet, had those draft choices not been so thoroughly squandered, it’s a safe bet the Rams would still be in Anaheim, perhaps reflecting on a mini-dynasty.

Instead, failure was used as an excuse for leaving.

Says Halpin, “It really ended when it became obvious, to me, a year ago that Georgia and [Vice President] John Shaw were out for the cash, that they really had no intention of staying here. We watched this whole little charade last year and knew it was going to be settled with numbers.”

The Raiders, of course, never belonged here. If, indeed, Al Davis was wronged by the Coliseum Commission; if, indeed, he deserved a better shake, his idea that Los Angeles would embrace him blindly, as Oakland had, was folly.

Rather than admit he was wrong and adapt, Davis stubbornly refused to market his team. The Raiders openly scoffed at advertising strategies, preferring the motto, “Just show up, baby.”

Fact is, people did show up when the Raiders were worth watching. For a decade, though, the franchise has been mostly mediocre. Not surprisingly, it was during this stretch that Davis began negotiating possible moves.

“Neither team seemed to reach out to Los Angeles,” Haden says. “Neither team seemed to go out of their way to try to have a connection to the fans. I think it is a marketing game and, just as an interested observer, teams that do a good job of that are successful.”

Might Davis have learned something from Disney’s magic touch with the Mighty Ducks?

Sure, the Rams and Raiders will be missed.

The Raiders had a base of hard-core fanatics, some of them capable of beating a fan senseless for wearing a Pittsburgh Steeler jersey to a game.

And who could forget the rowdy tailgaters in Lot 6 at the Coliseum who liked to compare tattoos before the game and boast of barbecuing stray dogs that wandered into the area?

It remains to be seen whether there will be enough Hells Angels conventions or revival-house showings of “A Clockwork Orange” to fill the vacuum of eight Sundays next fall.

Yes, the Raiders left memories, but they also left scars--some on faces, some on communities.

In Irwindale, a Los Angeles suburb, few of its 1,081 residents are welling up over the loss of a team that promised to move into its gravel pit in 1988, only to back out, with Davis pocketing the $10 million deposit.

“If you talk to people in the community, I think they would say generally it’s sort of good riddance,” Irwindale City Manager Dave Caretto says. “There’s this bad taste in everyone’s mouth around here.”

Irwindale, which operates on an annual budget of $8.5 million, sure could use that $10 million now.

“We’re experiencing the same kind of financial difficulties that other communities are at this point, with increasing costs and decreasing revenues,” Caretto says.

Gee, how will fans ever pass the time on Sundays?

“How many things can you do this Sunday?” Halpin asks. “You want to golf, surf, ski, lay in the sun?”

In this town, you get back only as much as you give.

“They never gave us any heart,” Halpin says of the departed teams. “We never became entwined. They were always like tourists here, looking for something better to do. Both of them.”

Says Haden, “I would like someone to show me the economic benefit to the city of L.A. having a professional team.”

Maybe towns and teams will never be as they were.

“Franchises are free agents, players are free agents and the fans can become free agents now,” Haden says.

“In a sense, we’re not tied to a team. We can root for whomever we want. The dynamic of professional football changed when free agency arrived. You could no longer go down to the stadium and buy No. 29 jersey for your son if he was an Eric Dickerson fan, because you didn’t know who No. 29 was going to be next year.”

Poor Benny Weinrig and all his Ebbets Field memories.

He wouldn’t have stood a chance in Los Angeles, 1995.

“You’ve got an empty life if all you’ve got is football,” Halpin says.