City Officials Hopeful of Landing ’93 Super Bowl : Pro football: San Diego representatives return from meeting with NFL officials confident. Call bidding for 1993 game a two-city race.

San Diego officials have returned from a meeting with National Football League officials confident that bidding to host the 1993 Super Bowl will come down to a two-city contest between San Diego and Pasadena.

“I really think it is going to be between the Rose Bowl and us,” said Deputy City Manager Jack McGrory, who was part of a five-member San Diego delegation that attended the meeting in New York Tuesday.

Phoenix is the other city still in the running for the game to be played Jan. 31, 1993, but both McGrory and Bob Payne, chairman of the San Diego Super Bowl Task Force, said that because Phoenix has not staged a Super Bowl and the city has been in the NFL for only two seasons, its chances were lessened.

San Francisco had been in the running but withdrew its bid, Payne said, because of a disagreement over whether to stage the game at Stanford Stadium or Candlestick Park.

The site for the 1993 Super Bowl will be decided by a vote of the 28 NFL owners on March 13 at the league’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Payne said most of the questions from the NFL staff and the three-member NFL owners site selection committee concerned the size of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. The stadium has a permanent capacity of 60,750 for football and the city plans to temporarily expand it to seat 73,477 for the 1993 game, as was done for the 1988 Super Bowl. Payne said that while the league said the expanded stadium is large enough for a Super Bowl, its capacity is well short of the Rose Bowl’s 104,091.

“As (Philadelphia owner and committee chairman) Norman Braman said, ‘The only thing wrong with San Diego is about 25,000 seats,’ ” Payne said.

Braman could not be reached for comment.

Payne said the Rose Bowl’s larger capacity could mean a $4 million difference in ticket revenue. He said San Diego was trying to counter the difference in potential ticket revenue by special fund-raising events and financial concessions that could could improve the competitiveness of San Diego’s bid. He also said San Diego is emphasizing the advantages of the more compact nature of the city compared to the size of the greater Los Angeles area.

But San Diego officials also expressed concern because the most recent of the four Super Bowls played at the Rose Bowl was in 1987 so NFL officials might want the game to return there before San Diego.

“We will have another Super Bowl in San Diego,” McGrory said. “The question is whether we have that Super Bowl in 1993.”

If the city fails to receive the 1993 game, its next opportunity to bid would be for the 1995 game. The 1994 game is scheduled to be played in an Eastern city.