LOS ANGELES — You don’t need to shut your eyes on the high of this stadium as a result of it's, because it normally is, an attractive day in Southern California. The solar sits alone in a piercing blue sky, and it's 80 levels in the midst of February. It's the form of day that remembers one thing Rob informed Mike in “Swingers,” the quintessential L.A. film:
“Look out the window. It’s sunny every single day right here. It’s like manifest future.”
However for those who do shut your eyes right here, on the high of this stadium — the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — then you can begin to check the ghosts, the entire issues which have occurred right here, witnessed by greater than 100,000 followers (its authentic capability) and 77,000 (which is what it seats now).
The 1932 Olympics had been right here; Babe Didrikson received the javelin and the hurdles all the way in which down there, on the sector. Jackie Robinson performed soccer right here, for UCLA, and years later Reggie Bush performed brilliantly right here for USC. Carl Lewis received all 4 of his gold medals right here in 1984. The Dodgers performed right here for 4 years whereas Dodger Stadium was being constructed, and the outfield dimensions had been hilarious — 440 ft to right-center, 251 to left, quick sufficient that they wanted to construct a 42-foot display.
“The primary time I walked into the Coliseum,” Vin Scully informed me in 2013, “I wasn’t positive whether or not to gasp or to genuflect.”
That is additionally the place the place the trendy NFL was born. On this home. On these grounds. Look down on the discipline: on one sideline on Jan. 15, 1967, Vince Lombardi prowled nervously, realizing he would by no means coach a extra pressure-packed recreation. His Inexperienced Bay Packers had been taking part in the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs of the AFL. The Packers didn’t simply need to win the sport.
They needed to win the sport.
They received the sport, 35-10.
“I feel the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs are a tricky soccer group, however I don’t assume the Chiefs evaluate to the groups within the NFL,” Lombardi mentioned afterward. “There, I mentioned it. That’s what you wished me to say, proper?”
And thus was the sport as we all know it reworked eternally. It was, on that day in 1967, generally known as the “AFL-NFL World Championship Recreation,” and retrofitted a number of years later as Tremendous Bowl I.
Los Angeles is — as New York is aware of in addition to anyplace — thought-about a city of sporting thievery. It stole the Rams from Cleveland, and later from St. Louis. It pilfered the Raiders from Oakland and the Chargers from San Diego. It robbed the Lakers from Minneapolis, and the Clippers from San Diego (by means of Buffalo).
However the Tremendous Bowl?
The Tremendous Bowl was L.A. from Day 1. And so when the 56th model of the Massive Recreation is performed Sunday at SoFi Stadium in close by Inglewood, will probably be a grand homecoming of types. SoFi is 11 miles away from the Coliseum — which, translated to L.A.-area site visitors, is wherever from 25 minutes to 2 and a half days away — and when the Rams and Bengals convene there it'll really feel like a giant deal as a result of it needs to be. As a result of the Tremendous Bowl is the one factor L.A. can legitimately say it was in on from the beginning.
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“Such an important setting,” Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford mentioned this week. “Such an important place to have such an essential recreation.”
It's a part of Tremendous Bowl legacy that the Packers-Chiefs recreation didn’t promote out, that there have been 30,000 empty seats on a textbook-perfect sunny day similar to this one. However that had extra to do with the sport than town. By the point the Massive Recreation returned for the second and last time, on Jan. 14, 1973, each one of many 90,182 seats was occupied to observe the Dolphins end off their good season towards the Redskins, 14-7 in Tremendous Bowl VII.
After that the sport flirted with L.A., 5 occasions going to Pasadena, to the Rose Bowl, together with Tremendous Bowl XXI when the Giants received their first Tremendous Bowl. However Pasadena may be as much as an hour away. It isn’t L.A., identical because the Meadowlands isn’t New York Metropolis.
It took awhile, solely 49 years, for the Massive Recreation to make it house once more. However house it's. And what a house. Look out the window. It’s sunny every single day right here.
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