Rams PA announcer displaced by fire but keeps voicing optimism at relocated playoff game

GLENDALE, Ariz. —  In re-creating their home environment for Monday night’s playoff game, the Rams made sure to bring a signature element from SoFi Stadium.

The voice.

If you’ve been to a Rams home game, you likely know Sam Lagana. He’s the in-stadium announcer who fires up the crowd by bellowing, “Whose house?” Thousands respond, “Rams’ house!”

The Rams made sure to bring Lagana with them to Arizona to give State Farm Stadium a familiar vibe. They received several calls and emails from fans requesting that. It was a touching invitation for a man coming to grips with the destruction of his Pacific Palisades neighborhood, devastated by wildfires.

“This means the world to me,” Lagana said from his 20-yard-line perch at the press box level. “I have an opportunity to work with the Rams organization and bring Los Angeles this great spirit. I’m getting goose bumps with this whole idea about what America’s going to see. We can bring L.A. together and that means a lot to me.”

Lagana has had all sorts of jobs in sports marketing over the years, and a parallel life in education. He was a vice chancellor of Pepperdine for 20 years, and president of Notre Dame High School for three more.

His little yellow ranch house mostly survived the fire, but the roof was singed and all his trees and vegetation burned. He and his wife, Eileen, raised their two daughters in that happy place, which they’ve owned for 28 years.

Lagana is relentlessly upbeat and positive, but his voice trembles when explaining that of the 75 or so homes in his immediate neighborhood, only 11 remain.

He borrowed a friend’s bicycle in Santa Monica late last week, pedaled up to his house and checked out the inside. Everything was covered in an inch-deep layer of ash and the place had an overpowering smell of wet campfire. His beloved home is basically a wooden storage container on a burned-out lot.

What the future holds, he doesn’t know. He figures he and his wife will be out of their house for two years at a minimum. The elementary school across the street is gone. So is his church, along with the homes of too many friends to count.

To the game, he wore a sweatshirt from Pacific Palisades Fire Station 69, a gift he received when he once was named honorary fire chief.

“The leadership roles I’ve had besides announcing have allowed me to experience some complicated things in my life,” he said. “I feel like I can stay calm. I know how to stay calm and bring people together, or get them to move in directions they need to move in a calm way. Or, like a coach, in a more assertive way when necessary.”

By his thinking, the NFL picked an ideal place to relocate the game.

“I look at it this way,” he said. “Here we are in Phoenix. We have an opportunity to show Phoenix what a rising Phoenix is really going to look like. Because our communities are coming out of the ash.”