NEW FRONTIER TO WASTELAND

It was modeled after a relic from the glorious days of ancient Rome, the original Colosseum. It was the centerpiece of the glorious days of sports in Los Angeles in the 20th century.

But as the 1900s come to a close, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is itself a relic, a decaying reminder of the way it was when professional football was here.

The grand old saucer in Exposition Park still shows some life on fall Saturdays when the USC Trojans run up and down its field, but it is quiet and deserted on Sundays when the football focus is on the pro game.

Rams and Raiders, Chargers and Dons and even the Express, ran down the Coliseum tunnel to do battle, blocked and tackled under its familiar arches and gave Los Angeles a presence in the game that has become America’s most popular in the second half of the 20th century.

Yes, the Coliseum hosted two Olympics and a World Series and was the site of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech, accepting the Democratic presidential nomination and promising a New Frontier.

But in terms of an enduring presence and a pivotal role in this city, it was pro football that was most important to the Coliseum.

WESTWARD HO

It may be hard to fathom in the jet age when American teams have even played games overseas, but before the mid-1940s, sports owners shuddered at the thought of allowing an L.A. entry into their East Coast-based leagues. The travel costs and distance involved, known as the “train barrier,” outweighed the benefits of doing business in an area considered an enclave of college football.

USC was the football king in this town, until it was grudgingly forced to share its throne with those new kids from Westwood, the UCLA Bruins.

Pro football? Forget it.

There is no better evidence of that opinion than the existence of the Los Angeles Buccaneers of the NFL.

Never heard of them? That is no surprise. The Buccaneers existed for one season, 1926.

And they avoided the problems of traveling to Los Angeles by playing all of their games on the road.

Dan Reeves had other ideas. He saw the Trojans and Bruins packing in fans for their games. And he was confident he could do the same with the team he owned, the Cleveland Rams.

Besides, travel problems were soon to be solved by air travel.

Reeves certainly had a product to sell in Los Angeles. In their last season in Cleveland, 1945, the Rams had won the NFL title.

Reeves even had a built-in local attraction. The Ram quarterback was rookie Bob Waterfield, who had led his team to a 15-14 victory over Sammy Baugh and the Washington Redskins in the title game. Waterfield, named the NFL’s most valuable player in a unanimous vote in 1945, was a triple threat. He threw 14 touchdown passes in his first season, along with 17 interceptions, completed 52% of his passes, scored five touchdowns on the ground and averaged 40.6 yards punting.

Best of all for Reeves’ dream of pro football in Los Angeles, Waterfield was an L.A. guy, who had played at Van Nuys High and UCLA. He was also a Hollywood guy, having married actress Jane Russell.

Still, the skeptics tried to block the path west for Reeves, only 33 and the youngest owner in the league.

After winning the ’45 NFL title, Reeves petitioned his fellow owners to let him move. When the opposition wouldn’t budge, Reeves provided proof that he had lost $50,000 in Cleveland the previous season despite his team’s success.

It also didn’t hurt that a rival league, the All-America Football Conference, was being formed, complete with an L.A. entry, the Dons.

All right, go west young man, Reeves was finally told.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, he announced, “We are here to stay.”

The Times was proudly in the Rams’ corner. An editorial before the team’s arrival was headlined “Chance To Prove We Are Big League.”

THE SWEET SEASONS

On the field, the optimism quickly faded. The NFL champions finished their first season in Los Angeles 6-4-1. The brother act of general manager Chile Walsh and coach Adam Walsh was disbanded as both resigned.

Despite the problems, the fans were loyal. The Rams drew a pro-starved crowd of 68,188 for their exhibition opener at the Coliseum against the Redskins.

In the Rams’ championship game the previous season in Cleveland, only 32,178 paid their way in to see the club beat Washington.

The Rams drew 68,381 at the Coliseum for a 1946 game against the Chicago Bears and averaged 42,394 for the five home games of their first season in L.A. Their last season in Cleveland, the Rams had averaged 19,402.

Things weren’t so good for the Dons, named after actor Don Ameche, who had invested in the team along with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Louis B. Mayer.

The Dons were averaging only 22,095 by their fourth and final season, 1949, also the final year for the AAFC.

In the meantime, the Rams were prospering. In 1949, they drew an average of 51,555, a league high, and began to assemble a team of stars that would win the NFL title in 1951, ironically against the team that followed them in Cleveland, the Browns.

With Norm Van Brocklin throwing bombs, Tom Fears catching them, Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch leaving many a defender grasping nothing but air, the Bull Elephant Backfield of Deacon Dan Towler, Tank Younger and Dick Hoerner stomping the opposition and defensive players such as Woodley Lewis, Larry Brink and Don Paul, the Rams beat the Cleveland Browns in the NFL title game, 24-17, the difference being a 73-yard touchdown pass play from Van Brocklin to Fears.

THE BITTER SEASONS

It would be the Rams’ only title in L.A., and, although there would be lean times ahead, the club would rarely be boring.

Not with quarterbacks such as Roman Gabriel, James Harris and Pat Haden, runners such as Jon Arnett, Dick Bass and Lawrence McCutcheon, receivers such as Del Shofner, Jim Phillips and Jack Snow, and defenders such as Dick “Night Train” Lane, Eddie Meador and Les Richter.

And certainly not with the Fearsome Foursome--Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, Roosevelt Grier and Lamar Lundy--perhaps the greatest defensive line ever assembled and certainly the first to carve a national identity out of the hides of opposing quarterbacks.

Nothing seemed to help, though. Through the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Rams came up short whether Hamp Pool was coaching or Sid Gillman or Waterfield or Harland Svare, or even George Allen.

Allen came to L.A. and announced, “The future is now.”

But it never was.

He had disdain for most rookies, preferring veteran teams that always seemed to run out of gas at season’s end. A sometimes brilliant, always eccentric, coach, Allen had two tours of duty as Ram coach, but, by the end, it seemed as if the disappointing finales to season after season had finally gotten to him.

He lasted through only two preseason games in his second chance with the club before being fired by owner Carroll Rosenbloom.

Allen was so obsessed with winning that once, after losing a playoff game on the road on Christmas Eve, he told a reporter who asked if the team would get home in time to celebrate the holiday, “When you lose, there is no Christmas.” But for all their suffering, the Rams remained L.A.’s team. They once drew 102,368 fans to the Coliseum for a game against the San Francisco 49ers.

INTRUDERS BEWARE

The American Football League, like the AAFC before it, tried to capture a piece of the lucrative L.A. market in 1960, its first year of existence, putting the Chargers in the Coliseum.

The team even got its name from the L.A. scene, using the “Charge!” yelled by fans at Dodger games in response to a bugle-playing rooter.

But by 1961, the Chargers, seeking to escape the Rams’ shadow, had left for San Diego, nickname and all.

In 1974, Orange County had a brief fling with pro football when the World Football League was formed with a team in Anaheim named the Southern California Sun. The marketing strategy included using familiar local players to attract interest. Haden and another former Trojan, running back Anthony Davis, were on the team, but, in less than two full years, the Sun and the rest of the WFL had dissolved.

MADAME RAM

After 34 years in the Coliseum, it was the Rams who were soon headed south. In 1978, Rosenbloom agreed to move the team to Anaheim Stadium after the 1979 season, envisioning better days in Orange County.

That vision soon blurred, but Rosenbloom wasn’t around to see it. He died in a drowning accident in 1979, putting the team in the unsteady hands of his widow, Georgia, who became a league-wide joke.

But she soon had the last laugh as the Rams, in their first year under her sometimes erratic leadership, made it to the Super Bowl, where they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31-19, in the Rose Bowl.

That was one of seven Super Bowls held in the L.A. area. Super Bowl I, pitting the NFL’s Green Bay Packers against the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, was held at the Coliseum in 1967. Even though the game, with a crowd of 61,946, didn’t sell out, the only Super Bowl game that failed to do so, the owners, enamored of the size of the metropolitan L.A. area, kept bringing the game back.

The Rams never returned to football’s big show despite some success under the coaching of Ray Malavasi and John Robinson.

With Georgia at the wheel, the Rams were back on a bumpy road that always ended at a dead end.

Example? They had Eric Dickerson, one of the best running backs in NFL history. But they got into an ugly contract dispute with him and wound up trading him in 1987 for draft picks and running backs Greg Bell and Owen Gill.

Dickerson got his money with the Indianapolis Colts and the Rams got blasted by their critics.

By then, the Rams had company when it came to controversy in town.

DISASTER IN THE SPRING

The United States Football League, whose games were played in the spring, put the Express into the Coliseum in 1983, the league’s first season, and the team drew 34,000 for its first game.

Three years later, despite the presence of quarterback Steve Young, the Express was averaging about 7,000 with one crowd estimated at 2,000.

How bad were things going? The Express played its final game at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley before it and the league folded.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST PARK

When the Rams left the Coliseum, Raider owner Al Davis couldn’t believe his good luck. Stuck in small-market Oakland, he heard the siren call of big-market L.A. and, over the objections of the NFL, relocated his team in the Coliseum in 1982.

For a while, Davis beat them all, the NFL in court and the opposition on the field.

Davis’ Los Angeles Raiders won the 1984 Super Bowl and the team was averaging 70,000 fans in L.A.

Eat your heart out, Georgia.

Or as Davis once put it in a memorable locker-room scene after a Super Bowl victory, “Just win, baby.”

But he couldn’t.

The Raiders were hit with a huge loss when running back Bo Jackson suffered a career-ending hip injury in 1991.

Davis, unorthodox in the best of times, became downright self-destructive as the Raiders soon found themselves in the worst of times. It seemed he had made a commitment to eccentricity.

When his feud with running back Marcus Allen went public in 1992, it split the team apart.

After that, nothing seemed to satisfy Davis. With the Rams leaving in 1994 for St. Louis, it appeared the Raiders would have the whole area to themselves--and a new proposed stadium at Hollywood Park in which to enjoy it.

But with the Rams barely out the door, Davis stunned the league and the city by following them to the exit, giving up his proposed new park.

Davis went home to Oakland after that 1994 season and L.A. was back where it had been a half century earlier, without a team.

Pro football had led the way into this city on a path followed by baseball, basketball and hockey. And now, while all the other sports reaped the benefits, football was gone.

No problem, said the city fathers, it won’t be long. Everybody will want to come here.

That was five years ago.

And nobody has.