Georgia Frontiere hasn't owned the St. Louis Rams since 2008, when she passed away. More than three and a half years away from this world and the professional football team she uprooted from Los Angeles and moved to St. Louis in 1996, has not kept her off a recent list of the most despised owners in professional sports.
Frontiere comes in seventh, wedged right between Peter Pocklington, the man who sent Wayne Gretzky to LA, and the Tribune Company, which owned the Chicago Cubs for almost thirty years of futility. Say what you will about Frontiere, they did win a Super Bowl during her time.
Our little community of Rams fans includes a fair share of SoCal based fans, jilted in 1996, when Frontiere moved the team back to her hometown. Some lucky fans got stiffed twice with the move from LA to Anaheim. St. Louis fans can kind of understand your pain, but we're glad to have the Rams.
Front office dysfunction was more the rule than the exception with Frontiere at the helm, starting with the rift between her and Carol Rosenbloom's son, Steve. She gave John Shaw the keys to the front office, which worked only for a brief period when Dick Vermeil was the head coach. Then it all went to hell again.
Frontiere's children, Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez, made it right upon inheriting the team. They played a role in bringing in Billy Devaney in 2008 to be the team's personnel man and to run that year's draft. After that season, they purged the front office, ridding it of turf-warring bean counters like Jay Zygmunt, made Devaney the GM, hired a smart businessman in Kevin Demoff and no nonsense coaching staff led by Steve Spagnuolo.
Now Stan Kroenke owns the team and a better product on the field is helping fans forget. Maybe, just maybe, they can be the salve for the still-festering sores left in Southern California. Or, hell, maybe the team will just move back there eventually.