Bradley Holds Out Hope That the Raiders Will Stay

Even as Los Angeles Coliseum commissioners and some City Hall officials vowed Tuesday to launch a search for a new professional football team, Mayor Tom Bradley said he hasn’t given up hope that the Raiders will stay in Los Angeles after all.

“We want and need an NFL team in Los Angeles, and I’m still hopeful that that team will be the Raiders,” Bradley said in an interview with The Times in Orlando, Fla. “Based on a conversation I had with (team owner Al Davis) this afternoon, I’m sure there’s reason for hope.

“When most people said we didn’t have a chance to get the Raiders (in the early 1980s), I was always optimistic,” Bradley said. “It seemed such a good thing for them, and for us, that I thought it could be done.

“And I still feel that way. I’m still optimistic. Keep in mind, the Raiders haven’t signed that contract with Oakland yet.”

Bradley was attending a meeting of National Football League owners in Orlando, where he lobbied unsuccessfully to bring the 1993 Super Bowl to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The bid was awarded to Phoenix.

Davis, who also was in Orlando on Tuesday, said in a brief interview that Bradley had often been right in the past about what the Raiders would do.

“We’ll see if (Bradley’s right) this time,” Davis said. “Tom is a dreamer, and so am I.”

On Monday, Davis categorically assured Oakland officials that he would move his team back to the Bay Area city if the Oakland City Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors approved the $660-million Oakland deal and the final documents were executed.

By midnight Monday, the councilmen and supervisors had voted their approval. Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson said it would take only 10 to 14 days to prepare the papers, and he said Davis would appear with city officials then at a formal signing.

Bradley, however, said Tuesday that, to his way of thinking, the only thing keeping the Raiders from staying in Los Angeles is approving a lease giving the Coliseum’s private managers, Spectacor Management Group and MCA Inc., control for 15 years of the Coliseum facility and grounds.

He expressed confidence that the Coliseum Commission, in a special meeting called for Thursday, will approve this, and then a fresh approach can be made to the Raiders on a Coliseum renovation concept already approved by the commission.

As the mayor was making his surprising statements in Orlando, other Los Angeles officials were trying to sort out their next moves in the wake of Davis’ announced intention to return the Raiders to Oakland.

They said a search for a new pro football team was likely to be long and difficult, complicated by the prospect that no team would be willing to come without Coliseum renovation, and yet, no renovation could be financed without a commitment from a team.

There were even suggestions Tuesday that perhaps the Raiders and the Coliseum Commission will agree to terminate the team’s playing contract in Los Angeles earlier than its 1992 expiration date, and let the Raiders go to Oakland this season or next.

Commissioner Richard Riordan, for example, noted that lame duck teams traditionally fare terribly at the gate. “If the Raiders are going to lose their shirt and draw only 15,000 or 20,000 a game, what good does it do the city or the team for them to stay?” he asked.

“I haven’t met anybody yet who’s sorry that they’re leaving,” Riordan added.

In Oakland Tuesday, officials said the Raiders could begin playing there early, even though it might complicate construction schedules for the planned $53.5-million expansion of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

Oakland officials emphasized, however, that that city is doing nothing to tamper with the Raider-Los Angeles Coliseum contract. It is exclusively up to talks between the Raiders and the Coliseum Commission whether the Raiders buy themselves out of their lease early, Oakland aides said.

Coliseum Commission President Matthew Grossman, meanwhile, said it may be difficult to negotiate an early termination of the Raiders’ lease in Los Angeles, given the $57-million lawsuit that the commissioners filed in 1987 against the team for breach of contract.

Grossman, who had not heard of Bradley’s remarks when interviewed, said that when the commission meets Thursday, it would be to discuss terms of a new agreement with the Coliseum’s lead private manager, Spectacor. Spectacor would continue to spearhead planning for a privately financed Coliseum renovation “sufficient to attract a professional football team and to satisfy the needs of USC,” Grossman said.

Grossman said the commission will want to go forward with an environmental impact report, which it has already taken steps to initiate, on alternatives for improving the Coliseum.

As officials took the opening steps to recruit a new pro team, the man who was instrumental in bringing the Raiders to Los Angeles a decade ago, labor leader William Robertson, said he is not very optimistic about the prospects.

“We have two options, to try for an existing franchise or to seek an expansion franchise,” he said.

“Going off the track record of this Coliseum Commission in dealing with its tenants, I think any operator of an existing pro team would take a dim view of the prospects of moving to the Coliseum. And, as far as an expansion franchise, we have to remember the National Football League is not friendly to L.A. After all, we joined with the Raiders on the antitrust suit against the league and cost them millions.”

In Oakland on Tuesday, city aides were still marveling over the impassioned five-hour public hearing held the night before preceding the vote by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and the Oakland City Council on the Raider deal.

The hearing divided mainly along economic and geographic lines. Hundreds of Raider supporters--mostly white working men and young people from blue-collar neighborhoods outside Oakland--were confronted by Oakland residents opposing the deal. The opposition came from both black inner-city residents and white residents of the city’s hillside neighborhoods.

The Oakland Tribune found in a recent poll that 59% of those surveyed in the city of Oakland thought it was “not important” to solicit the Raiders to return, and roughly half of the 140 speakers at the public hearing Monday night took that position. The Raider supporters generally came from Alameda, San Leandro and Hayward.

Oates reported from Orlando and Reich from Los Angeles.

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