Lyght Has Good Angle on Rams’ Moving Win

Todd Lyght observed with wide-eyed amazement when an estimated 200,000 people jammed the streets of downtown St. Louis, barreled over the safety barricades, had the police throwing up their hands and utterly giving up on crowd control during last Monday’s Super Bowl celebration parade.

“If this had happened in Anaheim,” Lyght said, “if we had won the Super Bowl, then where would they have had the parade? Downtown Irvine? No matter what the people back in L.A. think, there were a lot of good reasons to move this team to St. Louis.”

Before you locals clench your fists, throw down your breakfast utensils, crank up the computers and send angry messages, here’s something you might not know.

Todd Lyght, a member of the Rams in Anaheim and still a member of the Rams now, makes his off-season home in Tustin Ranch. He grew up in Alexandria, Va., went to college at Notre Dame, so Lyght has no ties to Orange County except that he grew to love the area, the weather, the beach, the golf courses, the mountains, the restaurants and shopping, the entertainment, just about everything. Which makes Orange County, Lyght says, a great place to live but maybe not a great place for a pro football team.

Lyght diplomatically said he didn’t hear it when Ram owner Georgia Frontiere babbled on and on in front of a national television audience--which, she must have known, included some actual people from Southern California--about how this St. Louis Ram Super Bowl triumph vindicated her decision to move the team, which had belonged to her late, sixth husband Carroll Rosenbloom, and take a better deal under that big arch, so there Los Angeles, so there Orange County, nyah, nyah, nyah, I took my ball and I won the game too.

But then Lyght said, and he only means this in a good way, that the Rams are better off in St. Louis.

“I think what she’s talking about,” Lyght says, “she just feels St. Louis is a better place for a pro football business. I have to say that the support we have in St. Louis is 10-fold to what we had in Orange County.

“There is so much to do in Orange County, as opposed to just going to the ball game on Sundays. In St. Louis there’s not that much to do the whole weekend. In California we can go to the beach, up to the mountains, take the kids to the amusement parks. Then you can come home, watch ESPN SportsCenter and catch up on your sports. In St. Louis the mentality is that people just want to go to the game itself.”

By moving the team, Lyght believes, Frontiere was able to afford the personnel moves that made the Rams a Super Bowl winner.

Hey, people. Frontiere is Lyght’s boss. If you want to scream that Frontiere wouldn’t know a good quarterback from a good backpack, Lyght can’t say that. Really, he can’t.

And besides, Lyght, a Pro Bowl cornerback who led the Rams with six interceptions this season, says he remembers too many games like one his rookie season, in 1991, when the Rams hosted the San Francisco 49ers on a Monday night. “I remember walking out onto the field, looking up in the stands and saying to myself, ‘I think there’s more people here cheering for the 49ers.’ I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I went to Notre Dame. We didn’t have home games where the opponents had more fans.”

That is a complaint our other pro teams can relate to. On nights the Mighty Ducks are playing the Detroit Red Wings or Philadelphia Flyers, it seems as if the Pond is filled with aliens--noisy, boisterous, rowdy cheerers of the opposition. There are nights when Edison Field feels like Yankee Stadium, West Coast Division.

“OK,” Lyght says, “I know that there were a group of very good fans in Orange County who were devastated by the move. And I really appreciate those fans. I really do. But it’s just a whole different thing in St. Louis.”

And here is some consolation to you local Rams fans who will never accept the St. Louis version as worthy of cheering for until Ms. Frontiere is no longer involved.

After the Super Bowl win, in a madhouse locker room filled with spraying champagne, tears, hugs, cheers and overall mayhem, Lyght said there was a very special gathering for a photo opportunity.

“Myself, Isaac Bruce, Keith Lyle, Jay Williams, D’Marco Farr, John Shaw, Jay Zygmunt, we got together, made a special point of it, to take a picture. Just us, the last leftover California Rams,” Lyght says. “It’s going to be a great photo. I’m going to hang it in a prominent place in my house.”

But there seems to be a missing person. A certain owner. Was Frontiere invited to this photo shoot?

“Um, no,” Lyght says. “No, she wasn’t.”

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com