Throwback Thursday: The NFL's Cleveland Rams Leave For Los Angeles

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

Daniel F. Reeves was the son of a fruit peddler-turned-grocery store magnate, and the captain of his high school football team in New Jersey. He did not dream of playing professional football; he dreamed, rather, of owning a professional football team. He was 28 when the family business merged with Safeway, and he was not yet 30 when he purchased a two-thirds stake in the Cleveland Rams, a team with a miniscule fan base—roughly 200 season ticket owners, according to accounts at the time—and a tight budget.

Reeves slowly turned the Rams around, briefly served in World War II, and eventually became the team's sole owner. The Rams did not play in 1943 due to a lack of manpower, but then in 1945, with the war behind them, they won the NFL Championship in frigid temperatures over Sammy Baugh's Washington Redskins. And then—perhaps drawn by the weather, perhaps by manifest destiny—Reeves became the first mogul, but certainly not the last, to abandon Cleveland for a sunnier climate.

Largely lost amid the news of the Rams' jump from St. Louis to Los Angeles this week was the bizarre coincidence that the Rams had received approval to move from Cleveland to Los Angeles exactly 70 years earlier, on December 12, 1946. It is difficult to draw direct parallels between the two stories, because (a) Reeves' move did not cause the same emotional rift that current Rams owner Stan Kroenke's has wrought in St. Louis; and (b) because in retrospect, Reeves' political push could be considered the most important and most successful franchise relocation in NFL history, a decision that had both deep cultural and even racial implications.

Even so, there are certain unavoidable historical echoes, and an overarching sense that owners like Kroenke would carry the weight that they do today if Reeves had not made his own power play.

"Dan Reeves was going to get what he wanted," says football historian Chris Willis, who works at NFL Films. "Having a presence in L.A. was a big step for the league."

In part, this was because the rival All-America Football Conference was already establishing a base in California, with teams in San Francisco and Los Angeles. At the same time, the expansion Cleveland Browns of the AAFC were set to begin play in 1946; if Reeves had chosen to stay in Cleveland, one of those franchises wouldn't have made it. The Rams had only been around for less than a decade, and so the team's roots in Cleveland were not as deep as they were when Art Modell moved the Browns to Baltimore in 1995. While the Rams struggled to fill cavernous Municipal Stadium, the Browns had hired Paul Brown, already a local legend from his years coaching at nearby Massillon High School; moreover, Brown already had managed to lure star quarterback Otto Graham onto his roster.

Yet there was more to the decision to leave than simple competition. There was the commanding presence of Reeves himself, a maverick who was the first NFL owner to hire a full-time scouting staff and one of the first to broadcast his franchise's road games on television. Reeves wanted Los Angeles because he saw the potential in the market, just as Kroenke does today; but Reeves also had a built-in celebrity connection, since his quarterback, former UCLA star Bob Waterfield, was married to the pinup-turned-actress Jane Russell, his high-school sweetheart. "(Reeves) saw the value of Hollywood," Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Joe Horrigan told the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Tom Reed.

"He just wanted to be in California," Willis says. "With Waterfield and Russell, I think he said, 'Now I have a show.'"

Still, Reeves had to work to prevail over his fellow owners. They were concerned about the travel costs, given that the NFL had no other presence west of Chicago; they initially voted against Reeves' proposed move, and Reeves responded by threatening to remove his team from professional football altogether. ("And you call this a national league," he shouted. "Well, you can consider the Cleveland Rams out of pro football.") Eventually, owners compromised, with Reeves offering to pay visiting teams $5,000 in addition to 40 percent of the gate receipts. (A few years later, Willis says, when the 49ers were absorbed into the NFL, teams would often travel to the West Coast for two weeks to play both teams.)

Yet there was even more to it than that. As part of Reeves' deal to play at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Reeves was required to sign black players. So he picked up a pair of former UCLA stars, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode; this after the NFL had gone 12 years, from 1933-45, without employing a single black player.

There is a sense that the Rams' initial move to Los Angeles aided both cities, that it was one of those rare franchise relocations that proved fruitful all around. "Nobody was really crying foul that the Rams moved," Willis says. "The reaction was not as big an issue in 1946."

The Browns drew more than 60,000 fans in their AAFC debut, and while also signing a number of black players—including future Hall of Famers Marion Motley and Bill Willis—the team planted the seeds for what would become a dynastic franchise. In 1950, the NFL absorbed the AAFC, and in both 1950 and 1951, the Browns and Rams met for the NFL Championship, with the Browns winning in 1950 and the Rams winning in 1951. Nearly half a century later, both cities would wind up losing their teams. And now, with Kroenke fleeing St. Louis, both franchises are ensconced back in the cities where it all began, thanks in part to decision Dan Reeves made all those years ago.