Watch Out for That Cuddly Davis

Like the joke says, there is good news and bad news in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission’s decision to hand management of the venerable stadium to MCA/Spectacor. The good news it that it finally gets the commission away from day-to-day management of the facility, something it has never done well. The bad news is that the deal is designed to keep Raiders owner Al Davis, who has never been a model tenant, in the Coliseum.

Getting the commission out of the way is good, and should have been done long ago. It’s a three-headed (state, county and city) monster that is a model of bad bureaucracy--both in its occasional infighting and its more normal inertia. With better management, the Coliseum might never have lost the Rams to Anaheim Stadium and UCLA to the Rose Bowl.

That said, we’re still among that vast majority of Angelenos (if public-opinion polls and lagging ticket sales are valid indicators) who are less-than-enthralled with Davis and his band of football-playing gypsies. And we can’t shake the suspicion that Davis’ flirtation with the Coliseum, two weeks after publicly announcing that he will return to Oakland in 1992, is nothing more than a poker player’s ploy to firm up his deal in Northern California. There is, after all, a taxpayers revolt brewing in Oakland over the money that seriously strapped city will have to pay out in order to win the Raiders’ hand again.

So before everyone signs off on this deal, here are some questions that have to be answered: What are Spectacor’s plans for remodeling the stadium? Can it be modernized in such a way as to preserve its architectural uniqueness and historic integrity? And what’s this about changing the facility’s name? Some reports indicate the agreement would allow Spectacor to, in effect, sell the stadium’s name to a commercial sponsor. Could a memorial originally dedicated to U.S. war veterans be renamed the--gulp--Budweiser Coliseum?

We’ve argued many times before for upgrading the Coliseum and surrounding Exposition Park, but let’s not rush headlong into anything--especially into the open arms of cuddly Al Davis.