Coliseum Deserves a Face Lift

It is the most venerable such edifice in America. Where else would you find a structure that has played host to (1) a World Series, (2) two Super Bowls, including the first one, (3) two Olympic Games, (4) a heavyweight title fight, (5) President Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech, (6) countless of the nation’s most historic football games and Heisman Trophy players by the gross?

Everything but the Christians vs. the lions.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is the most recognizable and long-standing civic structure in the City of the Angels. What the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, Big Ben to London, the woods to Vienna, the Speedway to Indy, it is to us. It is us. It’s our Acropolis. Our signature.

Is it worth saving? Well, is the Empire State Building? Mt. Vernon? The Liberty Bell? Lincoln’s log cabin?

We are a throwaway nation. We despise the old. We want the latest jargon, the latest jokes, the latest fashion. Once we are through with a thing, out with it. Call Goodwill. Haul it away. Yesterday’s roses. History bores us. We defy tradition. We haven’t got any. The world began yesterday.

Los Angeles is the worst offender. It is a city that sweeps away its past. The baby out with the water. It changes for the sake of change. Who among us has not gone away from the city for a vacation, a business trip or a sabbatical, only to come home to find a landmark grocery store where we traded for decades gone overnight? Who has not lost a bank or laundry or even a restaurant to “progress?” If Rip Van Winkle had dozed off in the 1920s and came back to 1991 Los Angeles, would he not be horrified at what he would find? What once were redolent orange groves are now wall-to-wall housing tracts. Even hills have been leveled. Not only is the landscape altered, so is the horizon. The bulldozer is the worst invention of man since gunpowder.

So, what do we do with the Coliseum? Turn it into the world’s biggest flowerpot? Rope it off and take tours through it and point and say, “Here’s where O.J. Simpson ran for 77 yards against UCLA; here’s where Anthony Davis scored the first of his six touchdowns against Notre Dame; here’s where Babe Didriksen broke all those records”?

Or do we start to preserve our heritage?

The Coliseum is not old by European standards. Nor even measured against Faneuil Hall or the Alamo or Grant’s Tomb. I mean, George Washington never slept here.

But it was built in 1923. By Los Angeles standards, that’s antiquity.

The proposition before the house was whether to keep it as a ruin or to restore it as a gathering place for the city’s sporting life.

There were cogent arguments for both points of view; L.A. is not a city that venerates its past. We didn’t even save most of our priceless silent movies. It is a community that adores the new. Even if it’s shoddier. It’s a city that won’t even wear ties. Or socks.

It would probably flock to some new papier-mache ballpark built on the fringes. Trouble is, where? Simi Valley? Outskirts of Bakersfield? Santa Barbara?

The good news is, a decision has been reached to save the Coliseum. Make it a source of civic pride again well into the 21st Century.

It’s a hardy old customer, anyway. As tough to kill off as Rasputin.

For many years, it has existed as an abused child of a succession of foster fathers, politician rulers who were coming into temporary custody.

Years ago, it was a sports magnet. Community-built for the Olympics, it came to be coveted by professional teams locked into non-expanding markets in the Northeast. The Cleveland Rams were the first to bite the bullet and bring their franchise here in 1946.

Incredibly, they ran into opposition. The Coliseum was run by a consortium of politicos from three jurisdictions in those days, and they reveled in their power to control, in effect, parts of our national sports scene. It was pretty heady stuff. There is very little doubt the Dodgers saved baseball by moving West--they drew 3 million people in a day when no one had ever drawn more than 2 million. The Rams made pro football. Before them, pro football was the Bears vs. the Giants.

But the record of the Coliseum Commission as a landlord was not as happy.

A stadium is no good without a tenant. The community doesn’t need a 100,000-seat artifact. But the Coliseum Commission first lost the Lakers, then the Kings (from its Sports Arena). Then UCLA. Then the Rams. They were on a roll.

When they were about to lose the Raiders, who had come here with flags flying and bands playing and Al Davis coming into the town he had always wanted to be in, like some Caesar returning from a triumph in Gaul, it occurred to the community that something was dreadfully amiss.

A crew of professionals, Spectacor Management Group, which has managed, renovated, even built sports facilities around the world, has been handed the task of making sense out of the Coliseum muddle.

They have already mollified the Raiders, which was Job One. But it is a different sports world they are asked to deal with today. The paying customer is no longer the linchpin of this complicated machinery. TV pays whopping fees for league rights, which are shared in pro football and partly spread around in baseball, fees that the stadia do not participate in. Additionally, franchises want luxury boxes sold to corporate buyers, in which they keep the lion’s share of the revenue. Pay-per-view television is hanging on the horizon. Those are hardly stadium revenues. You can rent a studio for events such as those.

So, how do you pay off bonds out of gate revenues in this new age of the couch-potato fan?

Well, the ancient Romans had a philosophy of government for keeping the natives from getting mutinous and restless--bread and circuses. Feed ‘em and fete ‘em. Trot out the lions. Hook up the chariots. Bring out the gladiators with the brass knuckles.

Every game was a sellout. Nero had the luxury box.

It is as true today as it was then. People want to go where the action is. We are, after all, a herd. To be seen at a major sporting event is as socially desirable as being in the Social Register. So far as the everyday fan goes, it’s no fun cheering for the home team alone in your living room. And who wants hot dogs that are really hot or beer that’s really cold?

It is a fact of life that the National Football League has been selling its Super Bowl seats for years at 10 cents on the dollar. So has the World Series. They charged, say, $30 a seat, list price--whereupon the scalpers sold them for $300. Or $500.

Ticket speculators, tour directors and PR executives have been reaping the harvest of underpriced tickets for premium sporting events. A Super Bowl that grossed $30 million on the books probably brought in 10 times that amount on the black market. Sportswriters and league officials have been offered new cars for aid in securing tickets. Bear in mind that 1,000 seats sold to have-to-have customers is a million dollars. Communities vie for major events. A seat is a throne.

The proposition becomes, can a stadium get in on this sports bonanza? Can a stadium be run properly and judiciously and get its fair share of the profit, redeem the investment, pay off the bondholders, provide the populace with the bread and circuses--and make money? Does it have to be the loss leader in the equation?

It’s an audacious undertaking for Spectacor. If they can restore the grande dame of Figueroa Street to something like her former glory, give her not only a face lift but a new look and give L.A. 50 more years like the 50 she has already given them, they will have won whatever Heisman they give for modernizing and holding onto a priceless heritage. As near as I can tell, that will be an L.A. first.