WHY THE VALLEY REMAINS UNPROFESSIONAL : It Missed Its Chance to Go Big League in the ‘60s, and Now the Opportunity of Gaining a Pro Sports Franchise in the Future Looks Bleak

The Valley area--from Canyon Country to Sherman Oaks, Tujunga to Camarillo--is bigger than Detroit and more affluent than Dallas. It has nearly 1.6 million people, a great many of them supporters of Los Angeles’ eight professional sports teams. But unlike Orange County, which has similar demographics and also the Rams and Angels, the Valley area has no major league teams and no major league facilities.

And no luck. In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, when the land was cheap and available and the homeowners were unorganized, neither Walter O’Malley nor Gene Autry wanted to build stadiums in the Valley. Later, when professional teams began seeing the potential in locating in the Valley, it was too late. The land was either gone or too expensive or belligerent homeowners raised enough fuss to kill any proposal.

In 1956, O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was being wooed to Los Angeles, had his pick of land almost anywhere in the area and could have put a stadium in the Valley. He was taken on a helicopter ride to scout available sites. The choice was obvious to him. He wanted Chavez Ravine, said Dodger Vice President Al Campanis, “because all the freeways revolved around it. He didn’t entertain any other area.”

In 1961, two years after the Dodgers moved here, the American League, with O’Malley’s permission, put an expansion team in Los Angeles. The then-Los Angeles Angels played their first season at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles and their next four at Dodger Stadium before becoming the California Angels and moving to Orange County. From the beginning, Autry, the Angels owner, looked for a site for a new stadium.

Then a resident of Agoura, Autry didn’t even consider the Valley, which then was well under a million in population. Marketing studies done for Disneyland, which was already in Anaheim, pointed to a population explosion in Orange County. The freeways were already in place. Land was cheap. And the Anaheim city government was ready to make a deal.

Agreeing to finance a stadium through revenue bonds, the city spent $24 million to build a home for the Angels and leased it to Autry for 35 years. Although the stadium lost money every year for the first 15 years, costing Anaheim taxpayers $4 million, it began to make money when the Rams moved there in 1980, and is expected to go in the black by 1990, according to Greg Smith, the manager of events at the stadium.

Autry’s foresight paid off. In 20 years, Orange County has grown from a little more than 700,000 to 2 million, making Anaheim the sports epicenter of a huge region that not only takes in the Los Angeles metropolitan area but Riverside, San Bernardino and northern San Diego County as well.

When the Rams were thinking of getting out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the late 1970s, they did discuss the possibility of building a stadium in the Sepulveda Basin, “but the talk wasn’t very serious,” recalled Jerry Wilcox, then the National Football League club’s public relations executive. By then, Valley homeowners were on the warpath and land values were shooting up, so the move that made the most sense to the Rams was to Anaheim Stadium.

It was the departure of the Rams that left the Coliseum conveniently vacant for the Raiders, who abandoned Oakland for Los Angeles in 1981.

The Coliseum was completed in 1923. Financed through private loans and owned jointly by the state, county and city, it was erected in downtown Los Angeles for two clear reasons: The neighborhood already had USC, which needed a stadium for football, and all the right demographics, including population density and, at that time, affluence. In the early 1920s, the Valley was hardly more than orange groves and wide-open spaces; the population was only slightly more than 20,000.

In 1959, it was a natural for the Sports Arena to go up adjacent to the Coliseum on land owned by the state. The Trojans began playing their basketball games there, and when the Lakers moved to Los Angeles from Minneapolis in 1960, they also took up residence at the Arena.

But in 1966, when Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke was denied a 10-year lease at the Arena, he thumbed his nose at the Coliseum Commision and put a deal together to finance and construct his own facility. Only 23 months later, the Forum, built at a cost of $16 million, opened in December, 1967, adjacent to Hollywood Park.

By putting the Forum in Inglewood, Cooke apparently kept major indoor sports like basketball and hockey locked out of the Valley.

Cooke’s decision wasn’t based on scientific study. What sold him on the Inglewood site, he said in a recent interview, was its “proximity to the remarkable, gargantuan parking facilities at Hollywood Park”--which can accommodate about 25,000 cars.

But the sports history of Los Angeles--and especially the Valley--may have been altered drastically had Cooke waited a little longer to make his decision. Sam Yorty, then the mayor of Los Angeles, “recommended the Sepulveda Basin to me,” Cooke said, “but I had already made a commitment” on the Inglewood site.

Inglewood, as it turns out, was a smart choice. It is as centrally located as you can get. Today, the Forum is within a 30-mile drive of an estimated 95% of the 10.6 million metropolitan-area residents (based on the 1980 census). Close by are the upscale communities of Long Beach, the Westside and South Bay.

By building his sports palace in Inglewood instead of the Valley, Cooke made life easier for a lot of sports fans. Eighty-five percent of L.A.-area residents--9 million potential fans--live southeast of the Valley area. A sports facility in the Sepulveda Basin would be within a 30-mile radius of only 65% of the population, and the basin, unfortunately, is at the intersection of the two worst motoring arteries in the area--the perpetually packed San Diego Freeway and the Ventura Freeway, the world’s most-traveled freeway.

Although a Valley stadium would undoubtedly be convenient for the thousands of Valley sports fans, what about the poor commuters and homeowners who would have to deal with the traffic?

Let’s say O’Malley had put Dodger Stadium in the basin. The Dodgers are playing a 7:30 p.m. game against the New York Mets at Sepulveda Stadium. Commuters competing with baseball fans who probably left their homes before noon could create gridlock Armageddon, and it is this frightening possibility that has turned some Valley residents against a major league facility in their backyard.

Despite a population base and the kind of demographics that attract TV advertisers, the Valley area seems to have little chance today to become home to a major league team in any sport. The hard realities of geography notwithstanding, community action groups, feasibility studies and environmental-impact reports--none predominant until the mid-1970s--would be major obstacles.

“These days, the people in the Valley don’t want anything, not even parks or swimming pools or even cultural centers,” said City Councilwoman Joy Picus.

In the past few years, Valley residents have joined forces to defeat heavy-duty proposals to build sports complexes in the 2,148-acre Sepulveda Basin. The Coalition to Save the Sepulveda Basin, consisting of about 17 homeowners’ associations, led the fight against Hollywood Park’s attempt to move to the basin in 1980 and forced the city to abandon its plans to build permanent swimming and rowing facilities there for the 1984 Olympics.

“The people of the Valley made it clear,” said coalition president David P. Lewis of Sherman Oaks, “that they didn’t want stadiums, big-time events, traffic congestion and parking in the basin. The people want their open spaces.”

Lewis bases his opinions on eight polls taken before the Olympics. The polls, which showed that Valley opposition to Olympic facilities ranged from 57% to a high of 85%, forced Mayor Tom Bradley and Peter Ueberroth, then head of the U.S. Olympic Organizing Committee, to look elsewhere for Olympic venues.

Not everybody, however, is convinced that the polls accurately reflected the feelings of the majority. “The thrust of all the questions was on the negative aspects of crowds and congestion associated with having a major spectator attraction in the Sepulveda Basin,” said Joe Breitbart, assistant general manager of planning and development for the Parks and Recreation Department, which oversees use of the basin.

“People weren’t asked, ‘Would you endure one week of inconvenience in order to have a facility that will last 50 years and benefit everybody?’ ” Had the questions been slanted that way, Breitbart believes, the majority of Valley residents would have seen the potential benefits of the complex and would have wanted it.

Keith Jackson agrees. Jackson, an ABC-TV broadcaster who lives in the Valley, blames the defeat of the Olympic facility on “little pressure groups that the Mayor and Pete got sick and tired of messing with,” he said. “The pressure groups weren’t big but they were loud, and the general population of the Valley did not respond. That not only cost us a great facility, but it cost us millions of dollars in income from the Olympics.”

Valley residents do not seem in the mood for any intrusion on their life styles, as Picus said. Warner Center is facing stiff homeowner opposition to its plans for two theaters on a 20-acre field in Woodland Hills. If Valley residents are opposed to something as dignified as a place for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to perform, they would probably regard a football stadium with the same contempt as the proposal for a jail in Saugus.

Any proposal to build a major league facility in the basin “would result in great public outcry and substantial opposition,” said Lewis, the homeowners’ coalition spokesman. But there is really no other place to go in the San Fernando Valley. Amid the subdivisions, apartment complexes and shopping centers in the Valley area, the only large parcels of land that could accommodate a big-time facility are in the Santa Clarita Valley, Simi Valley and the eastern fringes of Ventura County, according to Bob Chillingworth, an authority on Valley real estate at Coldwell Banker.

If a developer somehow found a parcel of open land in the Valley area, won approval from the residents and miraculously emerged unscathed from City Council meetings, how much would a stadium or arena cost? Presume the mythical stadium would be similar to Dodger Stadium, which is on 315 acres that includes parking lots; the mythical arena would be similar to Westdome, a proposed facility in Santa Ana that is running into homeowner opposition.

In the heart of the San Fernando Valley, according to Chillingworth, land alone for a stadium on 300 acres would cost $150 million to $400 million; for an arena on 20 acres, $9 million to $25 million. In outlying areas like the Santa Clarita Valley, land for a stadium would cost an estimated $100 million; for an arena, $7 million.

And then there’s the cost of building the stadium. The range nowadays is from $500 to $1,000 a seat. Not counting land, a 70,000-seat stadium might cost as much as $70 million. Westdome, depending on acreage, is slated to cost $47 million to $74 million.

Despite the odds and the expense, there are people who think it is feasible to put a major league facility in the Valley area. Within 15 miles of the basin are more people than live in most major league cities, including San Francisco and San Diego. “I don’t know how well a team out there would attract people, but it would be a terrific idea,” said Elgin Baylor, general manager of the Clippers.

Some people even think it would be a gold mine. “You better have a winning team with it,” said Ron Weinstein, vice president of the Lazers, a Major Indoor Soccer League team that plays at the Forum, “but the first kid on the block with a pro franchise in the Valley is going to reap the harvest. The Valley is starving for something to call its own.”

There is no doubt that the Valley has its share of the kind of fans who have the money to attend a lot of games: the median household income is $22,000, and 54% of the homeowners live in residences worth $100,000 or more, according to the 1980 census.

The Lazers, who play their games in the Forum and had their business office in Sherman Oaks until June, attract about a third of their fans from the Valley area, Weinstein said. Most other professional teams in the area, excluding the Rams and Angels in Orange County, also have a strong Valley following. Of the Raiders’ 49,000 season-ticket holders, as many as 20% come from the Valley. The Dodgers, said a spokesman, sell 23% of their 27,000 season tickets to Valley-area and Glendale residents. According to a 1981 survey, nearly 18% of the 17,505 fans who attend Lakers games live in the Valley.

“When Jerry Buss and I created the Lazers,” Weinstein said, “we asked the question, ‘Can we pick up the Forum and move it to the Valley?’ It’s an extremely lucrative and untapped market.”

The Lazers once looked into building an indoor practice facility in the Valley, examining sites in North Hollywood and Encino, but the $2-million cost, primarily for the land, was prohibitive, Weinstein said.

Costs don’t seem to be deterring Norman Hertz of Thousand Oaks. Hertz said Azarak Corp., which he owns, has spent about $3 million trying to get support--financial and political--for a $5.6-billion sports complex in Ventura County. Originally, Hertz envisioned the complex on 10,000 acres in Simi Valley, but recently moved the proposed site to 4,000 acres near the Santa Paula-Fillmore area in Ventura County.

The complex, Hertz said, would include a domed stadium seating 150,000, a 47,000-seat domed arena, a horse-racing track, a hospital, marina, 5,300-room hotel, 150-mile monorail system and a business center with 1,000 executive suites. Hertz, who said that 60% of the people in that area approve the plan, has begun preliminary soil testing and hopes to break ground in five years and finish by 1998.

“By the year 2000,” he said, “there will be 3 million people within a two-hour drive of the complex.”

Major league teams and fans also need a major airport, which doesn’t exist in Ventura County. Although Hertz said he has heard “rumors” about Camarillo Airport expanding into a facility similar to Burbank and John Wayne airports, a spokesman for the airport said expansion isn’t likely.

Hertz wants to be the developer, not the operator of the sports complex, in hopes of creating jobs in the area. “It’ll have the same effect as the B-1 bomber and the space program--it’ll put a lot of people to work,” he said. As for raising the billions, Hertz wants to set up a Ventura County Sports Authority, which would issue five-year limited bonds to preclude a long-term debt.

“People used to think we were crazy,” he said, “but now they’re not so sure.”

Hertz is modeling his plans after the New Jersey Meadowlands, a 750-acre complex that includes a stadium (home to the New York Giants and Jets of the National Football League and the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League), a world-class race track and an arena (home of the New Jersey Nets of the National Basketball Assn. and the New Jersey Devils of the National Hockey League). The Meadowlands was created by an act of the New Jersey Legislature in 1971 and was completed in 1976 at a cost of $450 million. The money was raised by selling tax-exempt bonds to private institutions and individuals.

But what the Meadowlands had--and what Hertz’s plan lacks--is the backing of the state government, the involvement of a big-time wheeler-dealer (Sonny Werblin, former owner of the Jets) and the commitment by a major league franchise (the Giants) to move there. It also didn’t hurt that 18 million potential customers live within a 90-minute drive of the Meadowlands.

How successful is the Meadowlands? According to its 1985 financial report, the authority covered its annual debt service of $30 million and declared an additional $2 million surplus.

Aside from Hertz, there are other people in the area with hopes of building facilities and luring major league teams to the Valley. When the United States Football League’s L.A. Express played a game at Pierce College in 1985, it filled only half of the stadium’s 16,000 seats (including 10,000 temporary bleachers), but gave Bob O’Connor big ideas.

O’Connor, who resigned recently as the school’s athletic director, and businessman Dick Bird are trying to generate interest in a three-stage plan that would create a huge sports facility on the sprawling campus--primarily on the athletic fields at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Winnetka Avenue. First, they foresee an indoor soccer arena, then a 6,000-seat, lighted track stadium and, finally, a 76,000-seat football stadium and a 20,000-seat basketball pavilion, all built through private financing.

But the plan is in the “extreme early stages,” emphasized Pierce College President David Wolf, who has met only once with Bird.

Public opposition to sports facilities will be hard to avoid, as the California League’s Ventura County Gulls have learned. The Gulls, who played only day games at unlighted Ventura College, had planned to move to Freedom Park in Camarillo but ran into problems with the park’s commission, which balked at spending taxpayers’ money--an estimated $60,000--to refurbish the field. So instead of moving to Camarillo, the Gulls are expected soon to announce plans to move to San Bernardino.

At the moment, the largest outdoor facilities in the Valley area are 11,000-seat Tom Bradley Stadium at Birmingham High, home to the Kickers of the professional Western Soccer Alliance, and at College of the Canyons, with 7,000 seats. Cal State Northridge is planning to build a new 17,500-seat football stadium on its North Campus.

There is also a bicycling velodrome in Encino, with bleachers holding fewer than 1,000, and the Saugus Speedway, an auto-racing facility seating 5,000.

As for indoor facilities other than high school gyms, the Pickwick Ice Arena in Burbank seats only a few hundred, and the Country Club in Reseda can accommodate about 1,000 for boxing.

The city master plan for the Sepulveda Basin includes a tennis center with 16 to 20 courts and a 50-meter swimming pool--but neither will have permanent seating for spectators. And about 18 months ago, there was talk of a Mission Viejo-like swimming and diving complex in Westlake Village, but nothing has happened with the project since, and the Valley area remains devoid of major sports facilities.

“When you think about it,” said Keith Jackson, “it’s absurd.”

VALLEY WITHOUT A FRANCHISE

Largest Existing Facilities

College of the Canyons: 7,000 seats for football.

Saugus Speedway: 5,000 seats for auto racing.

Cal State Northridge (PROPOSED): 17,500 seats for football.

Tom Bradley Stadium at Birmingham High: 11,000 seats for football.

Bicycling Velodrome in Encino: bleacher seats for under 1,000.

Proposed Facilities

VENTURA COUNTY SPORTS COMPLEX: 150,000-seat domed stadium; 47,000-seat domed arena; horse racing track.

PIERCE COLLEGE: 76,000-seat football stadium; 20,000-seat basketball pavilion; 6,000-seat, lighted track stadium; indoor soccer arena.

SEPULVEDA BASIN: Olympic-size pool; 2,200-meter rowing channel proposed for 1984 Olympics (turned down by city of Los Angeles).

SEPULVEDA BASIN: Relocation of Hollywood Park (opposed by Valley homeowners association and turned down by city of Los Angeles in 1980).

SEPULVEDA BASIN: Tennis center with 16-20 courts; 50-meter swimming pool; no permanent seating.