Biography | Stan Kroenke — The Azalea Ballroom Vote That Put the Rams Back in Los Angeles

The stadium in Inglewood is what people see. The vote that let Stan Kroenke build it happened in a Houston hotel ballroom. On 12 January 2016 the league’s owners met at the Westin Houston Memorial City, at 945 Gessner Road, attached by skybridge to Memorial City Mall. Peter King’s contemporaneous account for Sports Illustrated places the afternoon session in the Azalea Ballroom. A six-owner Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities had just recommended, 5-1, that the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders share a stadium in Carson. Kansas City’s Clark Hunt was the one dissent on that committee. Kroenke’s Inglewood site sat on land his holding company had already bought beside the closed Hollywood Park racetrack. Relocation needed twenty-four of thirty-two votes. Early ballots on a Rams-and-another-team plan for Inglewood were reported as 20-12, then 21-11 — short of the threshold. A Rams-only option and a Carson option also failed to clear twenty-four. By evening the room had a different motion: the Rams to Inglewood at once, with a one-year option for the Chargers to share the building. That motion passed 30-2. The Raiders were left out of Los Angeles. Figures circulated that day for Kroenke’s stadium ran from under two billion dollars to more than two and a half. Later reporting on the finished Hollywood Park project put the private cost much higher. St. Louis had offered public money toward a riverfront stadium the league did not treat as enough. The Rams would play the 2016 season in Los Angeles and wait on the bowl that became SoFi Stadium. A visitor on Gessner Road is looking at a mall and a hotel, not a football field. The field moved because of what the owners did in the ballroom upstairs. Photo: WhisperToMe, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Photo: Fox Sports, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons