In St. Louis, Anger and a Fighting Mood

The euphoria that enveloped St. Louis when the Rams announced they were moving to Missouri two months ago was replaced by a wave of anger and frustration after NFL owners voted to block the move Wednesday.

It’s as if the city can’t catch a break when it comes to football.

First, St. Louis loses the Cardinals to Phoenix in 1988. Then it is snubbed as an expansion city in 1993.

Then, St. Louis finally does something right, building a state-of-the-art $260-million domed stadium and putting together one of the most lucrative deals in all of pro sports to lure the Rams. Now, this happens.

In the same downtown convention center where St. Louis held a gala news conference to honor the Rams, and where team owner Georgia Frontiere raised her arms in a victory salute after signing a relocation agreement on Jan. 17, city officials and civic leaders vowed on Wednesday to fight the NFL decision.

“Litigation is usually a last resort, but we’re at that point now,” St. Louis County Executive George (Buzz) Westfall said. “If the NFL isn’t prepared to play in our stadium, perhaps they’d like to pay for it. Maybe we’ll have the last laugh if we win a lawsuit, but there’s going to be a lot of tears until then.”

Missouri Atty. Gen. Jay Nixon has already threatened to file a federal antitrust suit against the league. Former U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, head of the St. Louis group that lured the Rams, said no action will be taken until he consults with Ram President John Shaw in the next few days.

But unless the Rams can work out some kind of deal with the league enabling them to move, this battle could be headed for court.

“A lawsuit is an option,” Eagleton said.

Maxwell Blecher, a Los Angeles-based antitrust attorney who represented the Coliseum Commission and the Raiders in their suit against the NFL in the early 1980s, likes the Rams’ chances in court.

“The NFL gives arrogance a bad name,” said Blecher, who helped the Raiders defeat the NFL in a case sparked by the team’s move from Oakland to Los Angeles.

“They never seem to learn. There will be an inevitable antitrust suit, which the Rams will win, and the league will get the message that this is a free country and you can’t tell a competitor where to run his business.”

Stephen Ross, who teaches antitrust and sports law at the University of Illinois, disagrees. He believes the NFL, which adopted a set of relocation guidelines in the wake of the Raider case, is on solid legal ground.

While the Raiders successfully argued they were moving to a bigger market without affecting league travel, television revenue and divisional alignments, the opposite applies to the Rams.

The team would be moving from the nation’s second-largest market to the 18th-largest, which would result in a significant loss of television revenue, and the NFC West would be left with only one team in the Pacific time zone.

“This is an area where motives matter,” Ross said. “Unless St. Louis can come up with a compelling bad motive (for blocking the move), their chances aren’t very good.”

Still, Ross wouldn’t rule out a St. Louis victory in court.

“I would make the NFL a favorite,” he said. “But, I wouldn’t bet my daughter’s college bank account on it.”

Westfall has questioned the league’s motives. He said he could understand the NFL voting the move down because it wanted more of the $70 million St. Louis raised through a personal seat licensing program, or because it wanted to mollify the Fox network, which holds rights to NFC broadcasts.

But he said he had trouble believing reports that NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue had suggested that one of the reasons for turning down the move was that the Rams had declined to help pay for a new stadium in Southern California.

“I find it hard to believe the commissioner would mouth those words for the national marketplace to consume,” Westfall said. “I have to think people around the nation will consider it as outrageous as we do. He might say something that silly in private, but not in public.”

Meanwhile, fans in St. Louis are left wondering what they have to do to get an NFL team. Some 74,000 applications for personal seat licenses, ranging in price from $250 to $4,500, were sold in a three-week period after the Jan. 17 news conference, guaranteeing the Rams sellouts and defying the reputation that St. Louis is a bad football town.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.