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LOS ANGELES — You don’t want to close your eyes at the top of this stadium because it is, as it usually is, a beautiful day in Southern California. The sun sits alone in a piercing blue sky, and it is 80 degrees in the middle of February. It is the kind of day that recalls something Rob told Mike in “Swingers,” the quintessential L.A. movie:
“Look out the window. It’s sunny every day here. It’s like manifest destiny.”
But if you do close your eyes here, at the top of this stadium — the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — then you can start to envision the ghosts, all of the things that have happened here, witnessed by more than 100,000 fans (its original capacity) and 77,000 (which is what it seats now).
The 1932 Olympics were here; Babe Didrikson won the javelin and the hurdles all the way down there, on the field. Jackie Robinson played football here, for UCLA, and years later Reggie Bush played brilliantly here for USC. Carl Lewis won all four of his gold medals here in 1984. The Dodgers played here for four years while Dodger Stadium was being built, and the outfield dimensions were hilarious — 440 feet to right-center, 251 to left, short enough that they needed to build a 42-foot screen.
“The first time I walked into the Coliseum,” Vin Scully told me in 2013, “I wasn’t sure whether to gasp or to genuflect.”
This is also the place where the modern NFL was born. In this house. On these grounds. Look down at the field: on one sideline on Jan. 15, 1967, Vince Lombardi prowled nervously, knowing he would never coach a more pressure-packed game. His Green Bay Packers were playing the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL. The Packers didn’t just want to win the game.
They had to win the game.
They won the game, 35-10.
“I think the Kansas City Chiefs are a tough football team, but I don’t think the Chiefs compare to the teams in the NFL,” Lombardi said afterward. “There, I said it. That’s what you wanted me to say, right?”
And thus was the game as we know it transformed forever. It was, on that day in 1967, known as the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game,” and retrofitted a few years later as Super Bowl I.
Los Angeles is — as New York knows as well as anyplace — considered a town 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 way of Buffalo).
But the Super Bowl?
The Super Bowl was L.A. from Day 1. And so when the 56th version of the Big Game is played Sunday at SoFi Stadium in nearby Inglewood, it will be a grand homecoming of sorts. SoFi is 11 miles away from the Coliseum — which, translated to L.A.-area traffic, is anywhere from 25 minutes to two and a half days away — and when the Rams and Bengals convene there it will feel like a big deal because it should be. Because the Super Bowl is the one thing L.A. can legitimately say it was in on from the start.
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“Such a great setting,” Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford said this week. “Such a great place to have such an important game.”
It is part of Super Bowl legacy that the Packers-Chiefs game didn’t sell out, that there were 30,000 empty seats on a textbook-perfect sunny day just like this one. But that had more to do with the game than the city. By the time the Big Game returned for the second and final time, on Jan. 14, 1973, every one of the 90,182 seats was occupied to watch the Dolphins finish off their perfect season against the Redskins, 14-7 in Super Bowl VII.
After that the game flirted with L.A., five times going to Pasadena, to the Rose Bowl, including Super Bowl XXI when the Giants won their first Super Bowl. But Pasadena can be up to an hour away. It isn’t L.A., same as the Meadowlands isn’t New York City.
It took awhile, only 49 years, for the Big Game to make it home again. But home it is. And what a home. Look out the window. It’s sunny every day here.
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