LOS ANGELES — The fired-up young man walked into Big Wangs sports bar — listed on some sites as a “Los Angeles Rams” establishment — at about noon Saturday. He sat down in the relatively empty bar, looked around with confusion and asked:
“What time’s the game?”
Once the bartender and a regular named Todd determined that the new arrival meant the Rams vs. Saints NFC Championship Game, he was told: “That game’s tomorrow.”
“Really? Not today?”
The disappointed dude left, perhaps to return Sunday. Or perhaps not.
“Typical L.A. Rams fan,” Todd said. “Doesn’t even know when the game is.”
It’s always dangerous to make assumptions based solely on anecdotal evidence, especially in a city as vast as Los Angeles. Perhaps there is an underground, insanely rabid Rams fan base that could rival those of the Packers or Steelers. But, as someone who has lived and worked in Los Angeles and has plenty of friends here, I kind of doubt it.
The Rams are one of the hottest teams in America’s favorite sport, in the nation’s second-biggest market. They are one step away from the Super Bowl.
Yet their success is largely met here with a good-natured shrug.
Sunday’s
title games
NFC (12:05 p.m.)
Rams at Saints Channel: 2Channel: 40
AFC (3:40 p.m.)
Patriots at Chiefs Channel: 5Channel: 13Channel: 46
“Sure, I guess people are excited,” said my Lyft driver Javier, a longtime L.A. resident. “They’re good. But I’m a Raiders fan.”
Unlike the Raiders, the Rams are good. And, after fleeing Southern California for St. Louis in 1995, the Rams are theoretically here to stay this time. If you fly into LAX, you might soar directly over the new stadium, which has emerged from a large pile of dirt and may cost as much as $5 billion by the time it is ready to open in 2020.
But, when the Rams returned in 2016, it wasn’t an impassioned reunion the way it was when the Raiders came back to Oakland. The Rams had begun their slow fade from Los Angeles’ consciousness many years before they left for St. Louis, moving to Orange County in 1980. It’s a drift similar to the 49ers moving to Santa Clara. Today, Orange County still isn’t Los Angeles, and, almost 40 years ago, it definitely wasn’t.
In 1995, when L.A. became the biggest market in the country without an NFL team, poll after poll showed that the potential arrival of a new team was met with apathy. In an enormous city with thousands upon thousands of transplants, residents enjoyed getting the best games of the week and not being tethered to some mediocre team.
“Usually when an NFL team comes to town it imbues the city — St. Louis, Baltimore, Jacksonville, etc. — with an added sense of importance,” said my friend Steve Lowery, a Los Angeles native. “But in L.A., it’s the other way around. The city adds immeasurable value, real and conceptual, to the team. They need us way more than we need them.”
Lowery, an original Rams fan, longtime sports journalist and observer of the Southern California scene, said that these days people think the Rams are “fun.”
“But it’s not like the Lakers or Dodgers where people live and die with the team,” he said. “Especially the Lakers, who dominate this market even when they’re dreadful.”
This is true. Los Angeles is a crowded sports scene with two of everything — even Major League Soccer teams. But it remains, at heart, a Dodgers and Lakers town. For pro-level football there’s always been (except for awful stretches like the current one) USC.
Even when the Rams were here originally, it was a lukewarm love. Lowery, whose childhood heart was broken by the Minnesota Vikings too many times to count, thinks it’s because the Rams were never very dazzling.
“They never won anything big and they were a milquetoast outfit,” he said. “Not Hollywood stuff.”
When the Rams vacated the city for Anaheim, the Raiders quickly filled the void. They drafted USC star Marcus Allen, who almost immediately led the team to a Super Bowl, who was a bona fide Hollywood-style superstar (one reason Al Davis hated him), and who was regularly out on the town, often with his friend, the once-popular O.J. Simpson.
There was, during the 1980s in Southern California, far more passion for the interloping and exciting Raiders than for the original and dull Rams. Anyone paying attention to the reception the two relocated franchises received since they left in 1995 would see that the passion for the Raiders remained, while the Rams were treated with indifference.
That’s why Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s strongest move may have been blocking the Raiders from being co-tenants in his new palace. He knew his team would be overshadowed. Instead, the Raiders will be a four-hour drive away.
“I joke that by the Raiders moving to Las Vegas, we’ve really got three teams,” L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti told the Washington Post. “You can get on a plane and probably be at the Vegas stadium more quickly than getting through some crosstown traffic to get to Inglewood.”
The Rams returned to Los Angeles in 2016 and were awful. Though they were decent last year, and made the playoffs, they had the biggest attendance drop in the league and low TV ratings. This past season, both attendance and TV ratings rebounded as the team got off to an 11-1 start and played exciting football.
In last weekend’s NFC divisional playoff game, the stands were largely full (77,187 in a stadium that holds 93,000, though half seemed to be Dallas fans) and the ratings were decent but nowhere near what other markets had for their team. The Rams drew a 23.4 share in the Los Angeles market. In contrast, Sunday’s opponent, the Saints, drew a 60.2 share in New Orleans.
There’s a lot to do in Los Angeles besides getting emotionally invested in a team that left once and still has a lot to prove to the city.
Maybe, if the Rams win Sunday and get to the Super Bowl, there will be true passion.
“And if they lose,” Lowery said, “it will be, ‘What time is the Lakers game on?’”
Ann Killion is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @annkillion