Commentary : San Diego Doesn’t Deserve Super Bowl : Race relations: Past snubs of Martin Luther King Jr. have made America’s Finest City morally ineligible to take the sporting event away from Arizona.

Less than two weeks ago, the best way to define the Yiddish word chutzpah was to tell the story about the child who did away with his parents, then appealed for leniency because he was an orphan.

But on Nov. 7, the kid was outdone by San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor, San Diego Chargers owner Alex Spanos and the entire San Diego Super Bowl Task Force.

When the National Football League moved to shift the 1993 Super Bowl out of Phoenix after Arizona voters rejected a referendum establishing a state holiday on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, San Diego leaders, ignoring our city’s shameful behavior concerning the slain civil rights leader, appealed to the NFL to award the big game to San Diego.

Now, that’s chutzpah.

Let’s examine the track record of America’s Finest City over the last several years, beginning in 1986 when the San Diego City Council, in a highly controversial move, changed the name of Market Street to Martin Luther King Way. Almost immediately, a coalition arose to reverse the decision.

In November, 1987, San Diegans voted overwhelmingly to strip King’s name off the downtown thoroughfare and return the original name.

The council then revived the issue by announcing that it was looking for another way to honor King. It voted to name the city’s new waterfront convention center for him and called on the Port Commission to agree.

The move seemed assured because the city’s three appointees to the commission, plus National City’s representative, said publicly that they would comply.

But Dan Larsen, one of San Diego’s three appointees, changed his mind and switched his vote, scuttling another tribute to King.

The bitter feelings about the whole ugly incident had subsided until two days before Election Day, when a television sportscaster told the world that Super Bowl XXVII might be moved to another site unless Arizonans voted in favor of the King holiday referendum.

The threat revived the possibility that San Diego, a loser in the bidding for the 1993 Super Bowl, might get another shot at the game and affected the Arizona election, some believe.

“Until that moment,” said Bill Shover, a leading supporter of the King measure, “we had a 14% to 18% lead. But then came that CBS report and people here felt threatened. There’s a lot of Barry Goldwater attitude in this state. Independence. Frontier independence.”

Terry Hudgins, president of the Martin Luther King Better America Committee, added, “I think Sunday’s report held a gun to the collective head of the Arizona electorate, which turned around and told them what to do with the Super Bowl.”

The day after the polls closed and the “nays” won by less than 1% of the 1.1 million votes cast, the San Diego appeal, in the form of a letter from O’Connor, was sent to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

San Diego isn’t alone. The Rose Bowl, another runner-up to Phoenix in the competition for Super Bowl XXVII, also wants to host the game. But as far as I know, Pasadena hasn’t insulted King’s memory the way San Diego has.

So far, there’s no telling how this will end or where the January, 1993, game will eventually be played.

What does matter is that San Diego was hypocritical enough to even suggest that this particular game be moved here.

I’m a loyal San Diegan and Charger fan. The money and national exposure that the game would bring--Super Bowl XXII generated $125 million here in 1988--would be good for the city. I would love nothing more than to see another Super Bowl game played here.

But not this game. San Diego doesn’t deserve The Chutzpah Bowl any more than the newly orphaned child deserved leniency.

Like Tagliabue and Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Assn., I don’t believe that the Super Bowl should be played in a state that has formally rejected naming a holiday for King.

And in much the same way, football would be making a horrible mistake if it awards the 1993 game to a city that has consistently bent over backward not to honor this man who sought to achieve full civil rights for all.