San Diego Will Make Bid for Super Bowl XXV in ’91

San Diego, which is a year away from presenting its first Super Bowl, is making a bid for the 25th Anniversary Super Bowl in 1991.

The city, through its San Diego Super Bowl Task Force, is submiting a written proposal to the National Football League in New York that is due Thursday. Next week, a contingent of six task force members will travel to the East Coast and make a formal presentation to the NFL, along with 13 other cities who are also bidding for Super Bowl XXV.

Among the cities going after the professional football championship is Los Angeles, which wants the game played in the Coliseum, the site of the first Super Bowl in 1966.

“The bottom line is we want the game to return here in the future and we’d like to have this one,” said Les Land, the San Diego Super Bowl host committee’s executive director. The decision to pursue a bid was made by the host committee after it made an on-site inspection at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena of preparations for the Super Bowl played two weeks ago.

Details of San Diego’s bid will be very similar to the one the city made to the NFL in 1984, when it was selected as the location for the 1988 Super Bowl, according to Land. For example, the city guarantees that the stadium will be temporarily increased in size from its present 60,000-person capacity to more than 74,000.

As for whether the NFL will be willing to award San Diego a second Super Bowl when the city hasn’t yet even hosted its first, Land said: “The NFL retains so much flexibility . . . and with the (NFL) owners, you never know. I think we should be in pretty good shape compared with those other cities.”

It’s expected that among the 14 cities bidding for the 1991 Super Bowl will be some cities without NFL teams, such as Phoenix and Jacksonville, Fla., Land said.

Among the host committee members going to New York are Bob Payne, developer of the Doubletree Inn now under construction in Mission Valley and chairman of Grossmont Bank; Leon Parma, head of Coast Distributing; Herb Klein, Copley Newspapers’ editor-in-chief; Jack Teele, a San Diego Chargers executive; Jack McGrory, deputy city manager, and Dal Watkins of the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

The NFL is expected to select finalists at its March meeting in Hawaii. The location of the 25th Anniversary Super Bowl will be made in May, when the owners gather at the Hotel del Coronado.