Losses at Coliseum Leave Penalty Flags at Many Feet

Why has the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum been such a loser, unable to hang on to major teams over the years and now faced with losing the Raiders?

The answers given by Coliseum officials and those who have dealt with them range from political divisions among Coliseum Commission members and the commission’s inefficiency to the aging stadium complex’s lack of financial resources and the “white flight” to suburbia.

Over the last 20 years, when teams--the Rams, the Kings, the Lakers and UCLA--have moved from either the Coliseum or the adjacent jointly administered Sports Arena, the blame usually has centered on how the commission is organized and how it does business.

The consensus is that the commission moves slowly, fractiously and inconsistently.

This was the case all last spring, during the Raider dispute, according to labor leader William Robertson, the man who led the effort to bring the Raiders to Los Angeles from Oakland in 1979-80.

Robertson said he watched in agony as promises he and others had made to the team about renovating the Coliseum were ignored by a new Coliseum Commission majority, which he said had absolutely no interest in honoring the commitments.

“That’s why the Al Davises of this world don’t like to deal with politicians,” said Robertson, who made the key initial contacts and masterminded the original negotiations with Raiders owner Davis.

“When an election comes along, the new officials conveniently forget what the old officials said. They just ignore what’s been promised.”

Robertson warned repeatedly but to no avail that the Raiders would move unless they got the retractable, close-in seating they had been promised.

Saturday, with Davis apparently on his way to Irwindale, Robertson--still a commissioner but now part of a powerless minority--declared of the body:

“It’s unworkable. My experience on that board is it just doesn’t function with any efficiency.”

Mayor’s Viewpoint

Robertson was with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley Friday as the mayor told a news conference that the commission--rather than continuing to be a political hodgepodge made up of three appointees each from the city, the county and the state--should be placed under the control of a single entity.

“The city of Los Angeles could do a much better job,” Bradley asserted.

Meanwhile, a potential Bradley rival in the next mayoral election, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, said he believes the commission is “an anachronism” that should be “looked at critically and fundamentally changed.” Its structure “is not responsive to deadlines and to crises,” he added.

But, according to others, disunity and lack of continuity within the commission are by no means the only reason the Coliseum and the Sports Arena have lost so many tenants.

The current commission president, Alexander Haagen, who now is catching considerable blame for stonewalling Davis last spring, took the position throughout the Raider dispute that the aging Coliseum complex simply did not have the financial resources to meet Davis’ renovation demands.

Move by Rosenbloom

That position was similar in some respects to reasons commission leaders gave in the 1970s for not meeting persistent renovation requests by Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom, who ultimately decided to move.

(But a complicating factor then was the prospect of the 1984 Olympics. Rosenbloom wanted to lower the stadium’s seating capacity to make it a better place to watch football but that would have prevented building a quality track and drawing crowds of 90,000 plus to Olympic events. The seating capacity problem also was a major issue between Davis and the commission.)

Haagen said in March that as far as Davis and the Raiders were concerned he was simply “the messenger who has been bringing the bad news.

“We’re broke,” he said. “We have no taxing authority. We have had to defer maintenance. We’re not even able to pay the principal on our outstanding bonds (a little over $4 million.) And we have not been able to arrange bank financing.”

Even one of Haagen’s sharpest critics on the commission, Richard Riordan, said after the Raiders’ announcement last week that there was no way the Coliseum Commission could possibly have matched Irwindale’s offer to Davis--a $115-million loan, a $10-million cash advance, free land, low taxes and very easy repayment terms.

‘Corruption by Money’

The Irwindale offer was “pure, utter corruption by money,” said Riordan bitterly, and the “bottom line” of the commission’s failure to block the deal was simply that it was “outbid.”

The Coliseum’s new general manager, Joel Ralph, made much the same point, calling the Irwindale offer “unbelievable.”

“I don’t blame the guy (Davis) for taking it, I’ll be quite candid,” he said.

Similar assessments were made in 1978 when the Rams announced that they would move to Anaheim. Officials there promised Rosenbloom development rights in the Anaheim Stadium parking lot that seemed to be worth scores of millions of dollars, and later, when litigation developed that has blocked the development, Rams officials acknowledged that the team would never have made the move without the promised side benefits.

“There is no way we can compete with offers of that sort,” Ralph commented.

Rosenbloom, when he announced the Rams move, also made the offhand remark at one point that he would feel more “comfortable” in Anaheim.

Viewed as a Code

It appeared to some critics at the time that Rosenbloom’s remark was a code for saying that Anaheim was predominantly white and relatively crime-free, while the Coliseum was situated in a minority area with a high crime rate.

There also were hints of “white flight” considerations when UCLA announced in 1982 that it was moving its home football games to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. UCLA officials insisted that the real reason was that they did not like Coliseum plans to let the Raiders build luxury boxes that would take away more than 1,000 prime regular seats used by UCLA’s fans.

Now, Coliseum officials are scrambling to develop plans to keep the stadium complex financially afloat when and if the Irwindale deal goes through and the Raiders leave.

There may be an early stroke of good fortune if, as Coliseum officials expect, the Coliseum Commission finally gets a $21-million damage award from the National Football League for its efforts to block the Raider move here. If the U.S. Supreme Court decides not to hear an appeal of that award, the money would probably come in by the end of the year.

Chance for Improvements

That might permit the Coliseum Commission to undertake renovations that, at least, would keep the USC football team as a tenant and conceivably might even entice UCLA back.

Ralph said last week that even without the damage award--and without the Raiders--he believes the stadium can remain solvent. He cited a stepped-up campaign to secure one-time events such as the forthcoming U-2 concert, expected to bring the stadium about $500,000.

Although there already has been some talk about seeking another professional football team to replace the Raiders, chances that the Los Angeles metropolitan area could have three NFL teams are not regarded as good. Davis reportedly found in recent months when he explored the possibility of moving to the New York area that there was great resistance to having three franchises there.

If the Coliseum complex is to be a successful post-Raider facility, some commissioners, such as Robertson, feel the commission must be more receptive than it has been in the past to the wishes of its tenants.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, USC officials appealed rather plaintively one afternoon to Haagen at a commission meeting to promise them that the Sports Arena would try to avoid bumping the USC basketball team for other events, such as the circus. Every time the team has to move a home game, it costs the university several thousand dollars, they said.

Haagen responded brusquely that the circus receipts were more than the USC receipts and it was just too bad if USC, a Coliseum tenant for more than 60 years, had to be bumped. USC Athletic Director Mike McGee and Senior Vice President Anthony Lazzaro went away from the meeting visibly angered.