INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The battle for Los Angeles took place Sunday at SoFi Stadium, with the Los Angeles Rams defeating the winless Chargers.
The matchup took place just over two weeks before the place both teams call home marks a milestone of its own: 10 years since crews first put shovels in the dirt.
The stadium that hosted Sunday's game began as a hole.
Crews broke ground on Nov. 17, 2016, on the site of the former Hollywood Park racetrack, which ran thoroughbred races from 1938 until it closed in December 2013. Because the site sits under the flight path into Los Angeles International Airport, builders dug roughly 100 feet down to keep the structure low enough — and lowered cranes into the excavation to build it.
"So we had to dig a hole... to put the cranes in the hole to build the stadium," said Otto Benedict, executive vice president of operations and development.
Benedict remembers standing at the bottom.
"I got to stand in what is the giant hole that is now the football stadium behind me, and at that moment, I said, 'This will be something you'll never see again, at least in my lifetime,'" he said.
Construction took nearly four years. It required the third-largest crane on ...