Al Davis: O’Malley for the ‘90s

With the start of a new football season, here’s a letter to some of those who are trying to understand Raider owner Al Davis:

Dear Bashers:

It can be safely speculated today that many of you have never met him. In the main, your perceptions could have been formed only by his critics.

For the Davis case is even stranger than it seems. Much of reality differs from much of the common understanding.

To judge him fairly, as he searches for a new home for his football team, requires a context of two truths in particular:

--The first is that Davis represents Los Angeles’ best chance, perhaps its only chance, to get the modernized Coliseum the community needs. Until the Coliseum is expensively improved, no other NFL tenant will consider it, and indeed it’s likely that, next time, even the Olympics would reject it.

Even an expansion team is out. If the Raiders leave Los Angeles, the NFL, coveting Washington support for its views on antitrust policy, won’t antagonize Congress by placing a fifth pro club in California when Tennessee, Alabama, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon and so many other states have none.

--The second truth about Al Davis is that, contrary to repeated public allusions, it isn’t greed that drives him, but need. The general impression is that he is a highwayman holding up Oakland or Los Angeles or both for personal gain. The actuality is simply that his football team needs a more competitive stadium.

The condition of the Raiders today is almost identical to that of the Dodgers in Brooklyn 33 years ago, when that club’s owner, Walter O’Malley, couldn’t generate enough revenue in an inadequate stadium to compete satisfactorily against the dominant teams of his day.

The 1950s Dodgers, like the Raiders in Oakland a quarter-century later, tried to interest the politicians around them in their predicament. But when O’Malley spoke to Brooklyn and New York, only Los Angeles listened.

And when the taxpayers of Los Angeles joined their 1950s leaders in agreeing to invest in a place for O’Malley to play, militant New Yorkers condemned not them but him, using the same word that so many are applying to Davis: greed.

It seems instructive that the Dodgers have lived happily here ever after.

For Davis, a principal financial problem is that the Coliseum lacks the sky-box revenue that many of his NFL competitors enjoy. Under league policies, sky-box revenue isn’t shared by visiting teams, but it can be used by the home team for any purpose, including paying players.

There is otherwise little basis in fact for the perception that Davis has set out avariciously to get his--and get as much as he can--at the expense of the people of Oakland or Los Angeles or both.

The Davis book:

--Ten years ago in Oakland, stadium improvements he wanted would have cost the city about $6 million. Private parties had agreed to ante up the rest.

Before the deal could be implemented, Oakland’s authorities changed their minds and invalidated the offer. According to the court’s finding at the Raider-NFL trial, high-ranking NFL leaders advised Oakland to save its money because the league wouldn’t permit a Raider move.

The league discovered, however, that it couldn’t block the move. And after the Raiders had gone south, Oakland, angling to get them back, found it necessary to raise its offer from $6 million to $600 million during heated bidding in the late 1980s against Sacramento and other California cities.

--Three years ago in Los Angeles, stadium improvements Davis wanted would have cost the Coliseum Commission well under the $29 million it won when it joined him in a major lawsuit against the NFL.

In effect, the Coliseum could then have been modernized for free.

Commission membership, however, changes periodically, and at that time a new group of Coliseum commissioners decided to use the money for other purposes.

They so decided although Davis, as promised, had contracted to build the Coliseum’s sky boxes at Raider expense. He was, in fact, even financing a new press box--for this site of two Olympic Games--also at Raider expense, an out-of-pocket cost of $2.5 million.

All the same, as a new decade starts, much of the local focus remains on Davis’ inadequacies rather than the best interests of Los Angeles. It’s a focus that places people here in double jeopardy:

They’re facing the loss of the only NFL team Los Angeles has--at least in the heavily populated regions north of Orange County--and they’re facing a future without a renovated, world-class Coliseum.

It doesn’t make much sense.