How Long It's Been: The Los Angeles Rams Won the NFL Championship

Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch

Congratulations to the Los Angeles Rams, winners of Super Bowl LVI, 23-20 over the Cincinnati Bengals yesterday, at SoFi Stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, California.

This is the 4th NFL Championship for the Rams, and they are (so far) the only team to win them in 3 different cities. They were founded as the Cleveland Rams in 1936, and won the NFL Championship in 1945. But they didn't draw well there, and moved to Los Angeles in 1946. They won the NFL Championship in 1951, and also lost the NFL Championship Game in 1949, 1950 and 1955, and Super Bowl XIV in 1980. They won the Super Bowl in the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, but that was fiction.

In 1995, they moved to St. Louis, and won Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000, before losing Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002. In 2016, they moved back to St. Louis, and lost Super Bowl LIII in 2019. Now, they've won another.

But that was the St. Louis Rams that won in 2000. The Los Angeles Rams haven't won the NFL Championship since December 23, 1951, beating the team that replaced them in their original hometown, the Cleveland Browns, 24-17 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They had played each other in the title game the year before, with the Browns winning in Cleveland.

That 1951 title was a little over 70 years ago. How long has that been?

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The 1951 NFL Championship Game was broadcast live on national television, on the DuMont Television Network. Don't feel too bad if you've never heard of DuMont: It went out of business in 1956, unable to compete with the established NBC and CBS, and the new ABC.

The Rams were coached by Joe Stydahar, a two-way tackle on the Chicago Bears' NFL Champions of 1940, '41 and '46. (He was serving in World War II when they won in '43.) He had not one but two great quarterbacks: Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin. Waterfield was also one of the game's finest placekickers.

His running backs included 1946 Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis, early black stars "Deacon" Dan Towler and Paul "Tank" Younger, Dick Hoerner, and Verda Thomas "V.T." or "Vitamin" Smith. His receivers included Tom Fears and Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch. His defense was led by end Andy Robustelli.

Stydahar, Waterfield, Van Brocklin, Fears, Hirsch and Robustelli are all in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That high-powered offense, in the 3 straight years they reached the NFL Championship Game, had games where they scored 70 points against the Baltimore Colts; 65 against the Detroit Lions; 53 against the Washington Redskins; 52, 48 twice, 45 and 43 against the football version of the New York Yankees; 51, 45 and 42 against the Green Bay Packers; 45 against the Chicago Cardinals; 42 against the Chicago Bears; and 42 against the New York Bulldogs.

In the 1951 season's opening game, Van Brocklin passed for 554 yards. That is not a misprint: Five hundred and fifty-four yards. That is still a single-game record: In the 70 years since, the closest anyone has come is Warren Moon with the 1990 Houston Oilers and Matt Schaub with the 2012 Houston Texans, both with 527; and Joe Burrow with this season's Cincinnati Bengals, with 525. Hirsch set an NFL record with 1,495 receiving yards, and tied the record of 17 touchdown catches set by Don Hutson.

In addition to having the NFL's flashiest uniforms, gold with blue numbers and trim, they were also the only team in the NFL that yet had a helmet logo. At training camp in 1948, Fred Gehrke, a two-way back for the Rams and a commercial artist in the off-season, painted his helmet blue, and then painted golden ram horns on it. Waterfield liked it, and, being a big star in Los Angeles -- then married to the voluptuous actress Jane Russell -- what Waterfield wanted, Waterfield got. And he wanted the entire team to have the horned helmets. So they got them.

It would take a while for the rest of the league to catch up. The Colts put horseshoes on their helmets in 1953, the Philadelphia Eagles wings on theirs in 1954, but it would take until 1961 for most of the familiar logos to be used: The Giants lower-case ny, the Packers' G, the Bears' wishbone C, and so on. The Pittsburgh Steelers didn't use the Steelmark logo until 1962, and the Cleveland Browns, who briefly experimented with uniform numbers on the sides, dropped them, and still don't have a helmet logo.

There were only 12 teams in the NFL. The Rams and the San Francisco 49ers were the only ones west of Chicago, which had 2 teams, the Bears and the Cardinals. No team was further south than Washington. Major League Baseball and the NBA hadn't even gotten that far: St. Louis was their Western limit. And the NHL had 6 teams: Montreal, Toronto, Boston, New York, Detroit and Chicago.

None of the 12 teams then in the NFL is still using the same stadium it was using then, although the Rams did use the Coliseum for their 1st 3 seasons back in L.A., while waiting for SoFi Stadium to be built. In addition to the Coliseum, the only stadium used in that NFL season that is still standing is the Bears' home, Wrigley Field in Chicago.

Football pioneers Amos Alonzo Stagg, Pop Warner, Pudge Heffelfinger, John Brallier and Jim Thorpe were still alive. Bear Bryant was the head coach at Kentucky. Vince Lombardi was an assistant coach under Red Blaik at West Point. Joe Paterno was in his 2nd season as an assistant at Penn State. Al Davis was an assistant at Adelphi University on Long Island. Tom Landry and Don Shula were playing in the NFL.

Frank Gifford was at USC in Los Angeles. Lamar Hunt was at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Chuck Noll was at the University of Dayton in Ohio. Bill Walsh was at San Jose State. Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr, Sam Huff, Paul Hornung, Jim Brown, John Madden and Ray Nitschke were in high school.

Bob Lilly and Mike Ditka were 12 years old; Fran Tarkenton was 11; Bill Parcells was 10; Roger Staubach and Dick Butkus were 9; Gale Sayers and Joe Namath were 8; Mean Joe Greene was 5; Larry Csonka and O.J. Simpson were 4; Terry Bradshaw was 3; Joe Theismann was 2; Ron Jaworski was 9 months old; and Bill Belichick, Randy White, Tony Dorsett, Walter Payton, Earl Campbell, Joe Montana, Lawrence Taylor, John Elway, Dan Marino and Jerry Rice weren’t born yet.

Nor were any of the current managers and head coaches of the New York Tri-State Area sports teams. Indeed, the baseball version of the Giants and the Dodgers were still in New York City, while the Mets, the Jets, the Nets, the Islanders and the Devils didn't exist yet.

As I said, the Rams dethroned the Browns, while the current titleholders in the other sports were the Yankees in baseball, the Rochester Royals in basketball, and the Toronto Maple Leafs in hockey. (Did I mention that this was a long time ago? As of Super Bowl LVI, the Royals, now the Sacramento Kings, have never reached the Finals again, the Browns haven't done so since their 1964 NFL Championship, and the Leafs haven't done so since their 1967 Stanley Cup.) The Heavyweight Champion of the World was Jersey Joe Walcott. England's Football League had been won by Tottenham Hotspur of Middlesex (absorbed into North London in 1965), and its FA Cup by Newcastle United.

The Olympic Games have since been held 5 times in America; 4 times in Japan; 3 times each in Canada and Italy; twice each in France, Australia, Norway, Austria, Korea, Russia and China; and once each in Britain, Finland, Mexico, Germany, Bosnia, Spain, Greece and Brazil. The World Cup has since been held twice each in Mexico and Germany; and once each in America, England, Switzerland, Sweden, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Italy, France, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Brazil and Russia.

There were 48 States in the Union, and 22 Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. There had not been a Civil Rights Act since 1875. There was no Medicare, Medicaid, Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA or Title IX. The ideas that women could decide for themselves if and when to have a child, and that people of the same gender could get married and have all the legal rights of a regular marriage, were radical. But the idea that corporations were "people" and entitled to the rights thereof was absolutely ludicrous.

The President of the United States was Harry Truman. Herbert Hoover, and the widows of Franklin Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson were still alive. Dwight D. Eisenhower was President... of Columbia University in New York. John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lyndon Johnson was in the U.S. Senate. Jimmy Carter was in the U.S. Navy.

George H.W. Bush was in the oil business in Texas. His son George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were all 5 years old. Joe Biden was about to turn 9. Barack Obama wasn't born yet.

The Governor of the State of New York was Thomas E. Dewey, who had been the Republican Party's nominee for President in 1944 and 1948, and an organized crime-busting District Attorney before that. The Mayor of the City of New York was Vincent Impellitteri. The Governor of New Jersey was Alfred E. Driscoll, whose New Jersey Turnpike would open on November 30, and whose Garden State Parkway would soon begin construction.

There were still living veterans of the American Civil War, America's Indian Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Zulu War. French trade union leader Léon Jouhaux was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his work on social equality and Franco-German reconciliation."

The Prime Minister of Canada was Louis St. Laurent; and of Britain, Winston Churchill. The monarch of both nations was King George VI, but he was dying of lung cancer, and would be succeeded 6 weeks later by his 25-year-old daughter, who became Queen Elizabeth II.

The Pope was Pius XII. The current Pope, Francis, was then 15-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in school in his native Buenos Aires, Argentina. There have since been 14 Presidents of the United States, 15 Prime Ministers of Britain, and 7 Popes.

Major novels of 1951 included The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, From Here to Eternity by James Jones, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, The Teahouse of the August Moon by Vern Schneider, and, from science fiction, Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein, and The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

Tennessee Williams' play The Rose Tattoo debuted. The year's nonfiction bestsellers included Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren, The Rebel by Albert Camus, White Collar: The American Middle Classes by C. Wright Mills, and The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, in which she made the absolutely correct judgment that "The most ardent revolutionary will become a conservative, the day after the revolution."

Major films of late Autumn of 1951 included The African Queen, the Roman epic Quo Vadis, the 1st film version of Death of a Salesman, the Alastair Sim version of Scrooge, and the science-fiction film When Worlds Collide. The same week as the NFL Championship Game, the Western film Distant Drums premiered. It included the 1st use of what became known as "The Wilhelm Scream."

C.S. Lewis published Prince Caspian, part of his Narnia series. His close friend J.R.R. Tolkien had published The Hobbit years earlier, but had not yet published any part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Ian Fleming was writing for The Times of London, and would soon begin to stop talking about writing a spy novel, and start writing Casino Royale. Gene Roddenberry was the chief speechwriter for William H. Parker, Chief of Police for the City of Los Angeles, and had begun writing episodes of a new TV series, Mr. District Attorney. George Lucas was 7 years old, Steven Spielberg 5, Stephen King 4, George R.R. Martin 3, and J.K. Rowling wasn't born yet.

The film Superman and the Mole Men premiered the month before, beginning George Reeves' run as the Man of Steel. Robert Lowery was the most recent actor to play Batman. Wonder Woman had yet to debut onscreen, and, except for Captain America, played in a 1944 film by Dick Purcell, most of the classic Marvel Comics characters hadn't yet been created.

Television shows that had recently debuted included Dragnet, Watch Mr. Wizard, The Roy Rogers Show; the soap operas Love of Life and Search for Tomorrow; the anthology series Hallmark Hall of Fame, which eventually grew into The Hallmark Channel; the disastrous TV version of Amos & Andy, proving that audiences would rather listen to white actors playing black men on the radio than watch black men playing black men on TV; and I Love Lucy, which broke ground in that it not only starred, but was produced by, a woman and a nonwhite man, who were married to each other: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (who was, nonetheless, a very light-skinned Cuban). In addition to I Love Lucy, CBS also debuted its "Eye" logo.

The Number 1 song in America was "(It's No) Sin," by Eddy Howard & His Orchestra, with Howard himself singing lead. Frank Sinatra lied when he sang, years later, "When I was 35, it was a very good year": He left his 1st wife, Nancy Barbato, to marry actress Ava Gardner, and was ripped for it in the media, and his career fell apart. (Ava soon helped to restart it by getting him cast in the film version of From Here to Eternity.) Elvis Presley was in high school. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were 10 years old, John Lennon was 11, and Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen were 3.

Inflation was such that what $1.00 bought then, $10.81 would buy now. A U.S. postage stamp cost 3 cents, and a New York Subway ride 10 cents. The average price of a gallon of gas was 27 cents, a cup of coffee 30 cents, a burger 15 cents, a movie ticket 47 cents, a new car $1,315, and a new house $18,000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the preceding Friday at 266.34.

The tallest building in the world was the Empire State Building in Manhattan. There were no mobile telephones. Telephone numbers were still based on "exchanges," based on the letters on a rotary dial. So a number that, today, would be (718) 293-6000 (this is the number for the Yankees' ticket office, so I’m not hurting anyone's privacy), would have been CYpress 3-6000. There were no ZIP Codes, either. They ended up being based on the old system: The old New York Daily News Building, at 220 East 42nd Street, was "New York 17, NY"; it became "New York, NY 10017."

There were no photocopiers. Computers were new and huge: Alan Turing was still alive, and Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates weren't born yet. Diners Club had introduced the credit card, but American Express had not yet popularized it. There were no automatic teller machines. There were artificial kidneys, but no artificial hearts. Transplanting a kidney was possible, but not a heart, lung or liver. The polio vaccine was still in development. Insects, dogs and apes had been launched into the accepted definition of "space," but no object had yet been put into orbit.

Toward the end of 1951, Britain sent troops to Egypt, which it still controlled, to put down unrest in the Suez Canal zone. Neighboring Libya gained its independence from Italy. The Po River flooded northern Italy. And the Marshall Plan expired. In America, direct coast-to-coast telephone service began. The Broadway musical Gigi opened, starring Audrey Hepburn. And the world's 1st nuclear power plant opened in Idaho.

Maxim Litvinov, and Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Bobby Lowe, the 1st major league player to hit 4 home runs in a single game, died. Lou Ferrigno, and Butch Davis, and Bucky Dent were born.

December 23, 1951. The Los Angeles Rams won the NFL Championship. It took 70 years, and moves to Anaheim, to St. Louis, back to Los Angeles, and finally to Inglewood, but now, it can again be truthfully said: The Los Angeles Rams are the NFL Champions, the World Champions.