A Stadium? Davis Calls It ’90 Certainty : Raiders’ Coliseum Lease Runs Through ’91 Season

Al Davis’ search for a simple place to plant in perpetuity the flag with the helmeted pirate has led to a village of 1,040 in the San Gabriel Valley with the announcement that the Raiders are Irwindale-bound just as soon as financial, construction and lease problems can be worked out.

Davis said the architect who designed Texas Stadium is the front-runner to design what he intends to call Raider Stadium.

“They said the Raiders were using us as leverage on the Coliseum,” said Irwindale spokesman Xavier Hermosillo during Friday’s press conference at the Raider practice facility in El Segundo.

“They said, ‘Watch your back, Al Davis this, Al Davis that, the Raiders were a renegade team.’ Well, if they’re a renegade team, we’re a renegade city. They’re the best, and we’re the best.”

For signing a memorandum of agreement, Davis got an advance, non-refundable payment of $10 million, or $9.5 million more than he gave Bo Jackson as a signing bonus.

The Raiders will get another $10 million if Irwindale voters approve a bond issue in November, plus a loan of $115 million with which to build the stadium, plus 180 acres of land at no cost.

Hermosillo said that a poll--not the hardest task imaginable with 1,040 possible respondents--showed 94% of the citizens were in favor, so he’s optimistic.

When?

“We’re told if we can get started right away, there’s a possibility of (the stadium being completed in) ‘89,” Davis said. “A possibility. Because we’ve done a lot of pre-work. A possibility of ‘89, a certainty of ’90.”

The Raiders, however, are bound by lease to the Coliseum for five more years, through the 1991 season. The Raiders reportedly intend to sue for breach of contract and hope to escape before then.

Davis repeated the Raider position Friday, saying: “I think the breach has damaged the Raiders severely.” But he wouldn’t say if they’d sue. “I think the intelligent thing is not to bring it up here.”

Will the Raiders build a practice facility in Irwindale?

Five years later, the move from Oakland still stretches the organization. Davis lives in a condominium in Marina del Rey, and his wife, Carolee, stays up north in their East Bay home. Executive assistant Al LoCasale lives in a hotel near the El Segundo facility. Coach Tom Flores recently moved into a new home in Manhattan Beach, about 10 minutes from the team’s headquarters.

A switch in training facilities would oblige the players and employees who relocated in and around the South Bay before the 1983 season to consider moving again.

Davis says maybe.

“We are tremendously proud of the work we have done in El Segundo,” Davis said. “We’re happy here. I think they’re happy with us--I hope so. . . . There will be land (in Irwindale) to build a (Raider) Hall of Fame, to build offices, to build a practice facility if we so desire. These are things we will work with down the road and make our determination at a later time.”

Shifting of the practice site could be of concern to the players, tight end Todd Christensen said at the team’s training camp in Oxnard.

He lives in El Segundo--”seven-tenths of a mile from practice”--and two of his three sons are in school there.

The players and coaches must go to practice every day. They go to a home game only eight times during the league season.

“Almost every one that has bought or leased has done so close to El Segundo, not the Coliseum,” Flores said.

Others indicated, however, that changing the practice facility wouldn’t bother them.

Defensive end Howie Long, a resident of Redondo Beach, said: “It won’t affect where I live.”

Linebacker Matt Millen: “Where we play or practice is the least of my concerns.”

Cornerback Lester Hayes said: “In 1991, if Coach Davis decides to make that move, that’s my destiny.”

Then Hayes, an avid ocean fisherman, asked: “Is Irwindale near the Horseshoe Kelp? I’m baffled.”

Negotiations with Irwindale began after the planned renovation of the Coliseum was halted and talks between the Raiders and the Coliseum commission broke down. The Raiders seemed to have been squeezing an offer from Hollywood Park to build a stadium for them and make it an Inglewood sports complex. Davis wouldn’t say Friday if he had ever gotten a firm offer.

He got one from the Irwindale 1,040, though, and took it.

Not that it was love at first sight.

“I was, from the beginning, suspicious, to be quite frank with you,” Davis said. “When John (Herrera, the Raider official in charge of negotiations) would report back, I wasn’t sure we weren’t wasting our time. . . . John kept coming back to me and saying, ‘This is do-able, this thing is a reality.’

“They were able to act. They backed up 95% of what they said they’d do.

“I wanted to get it done, to get this organization--at least myself--back into football. . . . I have to admit, for many reasons during the past seven-eight years, we haven’t been totally focused in on what we’re here for, and that’s to win on the playing field.

“We play in the Western Division of the AFC. You go up to Seattle and you can’t hear. They’ve got 65,000 people on top of the playing field, they’re sold out, they’ve got luxury boxes and all the amenities you need to compete. You go to Denver and it’s sold out, 75,000, all the boxes and the amenities. Kansas City still has that architect’s delight.”

If everything goes as Davis and Irwindale plan, they’ll have their own stadium of 62,000-65,000 seats, with their own luxury boxes and amenities.

“One thing I hope we’ll never lose,” Davis said. “We have a tremendous following of, uh, different-type fans. I didn’t expect we’d meet that type of fans when we came down here. Everyone said, ‘You’re going to have more sophisticated-type fans. Oakland is a thing of the past.’ But there is a group out there that really loves the Raiders, that dies with the Raiders.

“In our planning, we’ve got to take them into consideration. They may not be able to buy season tickets but they’re there every week. Because they don’t get paid where they can buy season tickets.”

If any of those live in Irwindale, they’re in luck. Hermosillo said the city is going to buy everyone in town a season ticket. Honest.

Times staff writer Rich Roberts in Oxnard contributed to this story.