Hired at age 30, Sean McVay is the youngest head coach of the NFL’s modern era.  But 79 years ago, before the Rams moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles, the team hired 26 (or some say, 27) year old Art “Pappy” Lewis who, like McVay, also hailing from Ohio and also charged with bringing back a sense of razzle-dazzle to a moribund Rams roster. Joshua Neuman speaks to James C. Sulecki whose recent book The Cleveland Rams: The NFL Champs Who Left Too Soon about “Pappy” Lewis and other early icons of Rams history like Damon “Buzz” Wetzel, Hugo Bezdek, and Earl “Dutch” Clark. Neuman and Sulecki discuss the early struggles of the team and their eventual success, which culminated in their 1945 NFL Championship, the Rams first of three championships in three different cities.

#34: An Elegy for the 1989 L.A. Rams

The Greatest Show on Grass: Los Angeles Rams podcast that celebrates the present-day NFL team against the backdrop of its rich and little-known Hollywood past. Hosted by Los Angeles-based writer, filmmaker, and Rams chronicler Joshua Neuman, The Greatest Show on Grass connects on-the-field analysis with broader conversations about pop culture, politics, gender, and race as it explores a football franchise that’s been as interesting off the field as on it. The Greatest Show on Grass is also a love story between a team and a city. As one prominent sportswriter wrote a half century ago: “The Rams find themselves as much a part of the scenery [of Los Angeles] as the Hollywood Hills, the subject of more newspaper space than the atom bomb, and an object of civic concern second only to smog.” Long before the St. Louis Rams of 1999-2001 were The Greatest Show on Turf, the Los Angeles Rams were The Greatest Show on Grass.