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Reusse: Los Angeles proved itself as a football town, but the baseball Dodgers and basketball Lakers still reign

L.A. went 21 years without an NFL team and still came to rule North America as a pro sports spot.

 

Stars from the modern L.A. pro sports universe, clockwise from left: the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, the Lakers’ LeBron James and the Rams’ Matthew Stafford. (Associated Press photos)

 

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was opened in 1923 with public financing. The University of Southern California campus is adjacent. It has remained the home for Trojans football for over a century.

Notre Dame and USC started a football series on Dec. 4, 1926, at the Coliseum. A crowd of 78,000 attended Notre Dame’s 13-12 victory. Paul Lowry from the L.A. Times wrote that it was “a football battle that has never been excelled for brilliance, thrills and pulsating drama.”

 

Perhaps, although there’s no evidence that Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne was so thrilled that he allowed himself to be covered head-to-toe in mayonnaise after the narrow victory.

 

What is brilliant is that the series started with long train rides between South Bend, Ind., and Los Angeles, and it still exists today. The Irish and the Trojans have missed only four times in 99 seasons: 1943 to 1945 because of World War II, and 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Notre Dame has won 51, Southern Cal 38, and there have been five ties. The Irish needed a 49-35 victory over the Trojans on Nov. 30 to advance to the first 12-team College Football Playoff. Three wins later, they are in the title game.

 

What Notre Dame and USC did achieve way back then was proving the Los Angeles area had an appetite for football that went beyond the Rose Bowl.

 

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Baseball was truly the national pastime, and into the ‘50s it looked at St. Louis as the “West.” Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, gets much of the credit for leading the pro sports charge to the land of milk and honey (and today, fierce wildfires).

 

Actually, Walter took the honey (Los Angeles) and gave his cohort in this move, Giants owner Horace Stoneham, the milk (San Francisco). But it was not the sagacious O’Malley who brought big-league sports to California.

That would be Dan Reeves, owner of the Cleveland Rams’ 1945 NFL championship team. Reeves had to strong-arm his way through opposition from the other nine league owners to take his Rams to Los Angeles — and the Coliseum — for 1946.

 

Reeves had been losing money in Cleveland, and now Paul Brown, a popular coach at Ohio State and Great Lakes Naval during World War II, would be bringing a new pro team into the market with the All-America Football Conference.

 

So, it was Dan Reeves fleeing the Cleveland Browns that made L.A. a pro-team market. Unless it was businessman Benjamin Lindheimer, movie studio owner Louis B. Mayer and Hollywood celebrities Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Don Ameche — co-owners of the L.A. Dons, another franchise in the new All-America Football Conference to agitate Reeves in his new home.

The Dons also got a lease at the Coliseum and played a game there two weeks before the Rams. Four years later, the NFL absorbed three AAFC teams — Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts — and Reeves and the Rams had L.A. to themselves.

 

Until the Dodgers showed up and took over L.A. in 1958, and the Lakers showed up from Minneapolis in 1960 and became immensely popular.

 

“One very smart thing Reeves did when he first got here was to get a relationship with the Chandler family, the owners of the Los Angeles Times,” Pete Donovan said. “They started the Times Charity Game, an exhibition that drew as many as 68,000 fans. That gave the Rams very good coverage in the very influential newspaper.”

 

Donovan was the Rams’ public relations director for a decade, before owner Georgia Rosenbloom couldn’t get the stadium situation she wanted and moved the Rams to St. Louis in 1995.

 

The Raiders also had been in L.A. from 1982 to 1994, when Al Davis decided to take them back to Oakland. So this became an amazing fact:

 

The gargantuan universe of Los Angeles did not have an NFL team for 21 seasons, even as it was taking unfathomable command of the North American sports and entertainment world.

 

“Two things about that,” Donovan said. “The NFL is the greatest PR machine in the history of the world, and the recipients of those riches today can thank Pete Rozelle for paving the way back in the ‘60s.

 

“And second: L.A. has always been a Dodgers city and a Lakers city. They both came in and started winning and did it with the biggest stars. L.A. still loves stars.

“Rams win a Super Bowl a couple of years ago, great, but the Dodgers being back on top, with Ohtani … that’s as big as it gets.”