Is L.A. Too Wimpy to Build New Stadium?

I’m worried about L.A.

Oh, no, it’s not the earthquakes, the floods, the droughts, the fires, the riots. It’s its soul I’m concerned about. It has lost it.

You know what kind of town this used to be? It was a shoot-the-moon town. Bet the ace. Call for cards. You’re faded, buddy. Who says it can’t be done? Get him outta here!

That’s the way it was. You know, this is the town that built the Coliseum, the Rose Bowl, the first freeways, the movie business. This was the town that brought the Olympics to America in an era of worldwide Depression, when the whole world was broke.

This is a place that got things done. This is the place that, so to speak, made pro football, saved major league baseball, put pro golf on the map when it comes to that.

It had its naysayers, but L.A. laughed at them. Told them to shut up and deal. If they didn’t want to sit in, drop out. Fold. We’re busy here, don’t interrupt.

In 1984, when the rest of the world found the Olympics too expensive and the Games were in danger of extinction, L.A. picked them up, dusted them off and took them again.

City Hall shook in its boots. So did all the wimpy politicians. They got hysterical and passed legislation that banned the expenditure of even one dollar to accommodate the Games. So, Peter Ueberroth said OK and rolled up his sleeves--and made $200 million on the Games and turned a lot of it over to the city.

We got the Rams here over the combined opposition of the colleges, the community penny-pinchers and, in some cases, pro football itself. They still thought this was Fort Apache out here. Only Charlie Chaplin and a few palm trees.

We went after the Dodgers over opposition just as furious--so furious they put a referendum on the ballot forbidding it.

We had guts, we had drive, we had vision. L.A. always just did it. They brought the water here in the early part of the century or L.A. wouldn’t even be here. But nowadays some guy reviles the man who brought it here in print and film--as he sits by his swimming pool and turns his sprinklers on.

We’re in an era of headlong wimpdom today--sometimes referred to as “political correctness” but more like political ineptness. Good Lord, even Christopher Columbus gets dumped on--by people who would be stomping grapes or picking tarantulas off banana bunches if he didn’t have the guts to sail off to the end of the world in the first place.

We’re scared to death of our lawyers and witless activists who know how to manipulate the system to promote their own agenda, which is frequently such a paranoid suspicion of the Establishment that it’s a wonder they don’t put a straitjacket on government altogether. We are afflicted with what I think of as a kind of “soup kitchen mentality.”

Look, we need a stadium. That rotting pile of urine-stenched old stones out in Exposition Park has gotten hardening of the arteries. It’s a municipal disgrace.

Don’t take my word for it. The teams we lured to L.A. in the first place are now packing to leave. The best guess is, either the Rams or the Raiders will decamp shortly. Take their football and move to a place where the ballpark is new and state of the art and the revenue is a guaranteed sellout for 15 years no matter what kind of team you put on the field. The prospects are unlimited. L.A. is now in danger of becoming that municipal horror, a nice place to be from .

Now, I’m not advocating putting the taxpayers into hopeless hock to put up a place to play. On the other hand, how did they manage to build two stadiums (Coliseum and Rose Bowl) in the ‘20s? And what have they meant to L.A.? Two Olympics, World Series, Super Bowls, World Cup. Visit from the Pope. Title fights. USC-Notre Dame games.

You think the politicians who pushed those edifices through have to apologize to anybody? The only thing they did wrong was leave the running of them to bureaucrats and politicians.

I am sure there are entrepreneurs out there who are willing and able to do what their predecessors did 70-odd years ago--get a community center. Get a heart to Los Angeles.

But in an age full of people who might have gotten a restraining order against Columbus leaving Genoa, who’s going to stick his neck out?

He would need civic cooperation. Remember the city deeded over some hundreds of acres of Chavez Ravine to the Dodgers’ Walter O’Malley in an admittedly one-sided exchange for Wrigley Field. But the cynics prophesied he would soon convert the land instead to more-profitable uses, condos and hotels. Well, Dodger Stadium is still there and the guess here is that if the stadium deal had been blocked, there would be gambling casinos there today.

I remember, in a hotel in Moscow in 1980, I was with John Argue, one of the moving forces in getting the ’84 Olympics here, and John asked me what I thought the outlook was. I remember saying, “John, if L.A. can’t put on a track meet, we are in a whole bunch of trouble.”

We’re getting so we can’t put on a track meet. If pro football reverses the trend of past decades and goes out of L.A., it’s not because pro football has changed, it’s because L.A. has. We don’t have any fun anymore. We’re in thrall to a lot of guys who, if they were around to prevail in the ‘20s, the Dodgers would still be in Brooklyn, the Rams in Cleveland and the Olympic Games in bankruptcy.

The common plea in these parts used to be, “O give us men to match our mountains!” Now, we got men to match our geraniums.