There are already good tributes to the late Rams owner, so I'll keep it short. No matter how you pronounced her last name, Georgia Frontiere loved football and loved her hometown, and we'll always be grateful around here that she brought the two together in 1995 and created memories that will last a lifetime. Here in St. Louis there's little reason to remember Georgia as anything less than a good owner. She treated her players well. She wasn't cheap. The Rams have been spending to the limit under the cap, and the Rams have signed a lot of players to big contracts here: Kurt Warner, Marc Bulger, Orlando Pace, Torry Holt, Isaac Bruce, Leonard Little, Will Witherspoon. The success, or lack of, for the Rams here was never a matter of the owner being unwilling to spend. Name the qualities you want in the owner of a sports team, and Georgia had most of them. She's the antithesis of Jerry Jones, who you'd definitely call a "meddler", but has won just as many Super Bowls since the Rams moved here as him, or the legendary Rooney family, for that matter. Yes, you'd prefer it had Georgia looked past her lawyer friend John and his accountant friend Jay and put some legitimate football people in charge, but there was still a Super Bowl parade downtown right here in River City.
The team will be run by actual football people one day, but even so, Georgia Frontiere deserves to stand with the pioneering women in sports. She deserves credit she never seemed to get as a woman competing in an industry dominated by men. Most of all, she deserves credit for making a city whole again, and bringing far more football success and happiness here in 12 years than worthless Bill Bidwill subjected us to for 30 years.
Bless you, Georgia; your hometown will remember you fondly and always.
Retrospectives on Georgia Frontiere:
Georgia gave us an NFL title, and more - Bernie Miklasz
Frontiere not only survived, but thrived in NFL's boys club - Len Pasquarelli
Georgia Frontiere: an extraordinary life - Jim Thomas
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