Budweiser Backs Out of Latino Soccer Tourney : Recreation: Loss of corporate sponsorships is a financial blow to several struggling but active community organizations.

For the county’s Latino soccer leagues, the World Cup was a blessing and a curse. The high visibility granted to Latin America’s No. 1 sport had offered the struggling leagues hope they might inch their way into the mainstream and improve the dusty fields they play on.

But it also means that Budweiser won’t be sponsoring Orange County’s annual four-month tournament of Latino leagues as it did in 1993.

Last year, the brewery’s Orange County wholesaler contributed about $80,000 to the event, $18,000 of it in prize money, and Anheuser Busch Inc., Budweiser’s parent company, matched the final game admission earnings to generate thousands of dollars in scholarships for local Latino youth.

This year, though, the marketing drain of the international championship left the company with little to spend on community events.

“The World Cup was here, and we spent millions of dollars just to advertise. All our dollars went into that,” said Fred Arriaga, special markets manager for Straub Distributing Co., Budweiser’s wholesaler here. He estimated that Budweiser paid $10 million alone just to capture the designation as the official World Cup beer.

The World Cup’s drain on corporate coffers complicates an increasingly grim situation for Latino community events in Orange County. A weak economy, coupled with the fear that Latino street fairs could spawn the kind of melee that marred a Los Angeles Cinco de Mayo festival, is prompting big corporate sponsors to bow out of showcase celebrations they have backed for years.

“Everybody’s cutting back,” said Arriaga, who helps decide which community events Budweiser sponsors here. “The economy is bad. The more cases of beer we sell, the more money we put aside for events, and sales are down.”

The dearth of key financing is leaving local organizers scrounging for new backers and small-business donations.

Two months ago, in an action that shocked downtown Santa Ana merchants, Hispanic America Advertising backed out of a five-year contract to promote 4th Street’s Sept. 16 celebration. Three-fourths of the corporate sponsors that supported the event last year had failed to come through.

The parade, street fair and entertainment extravaganza commemorating Mexican Independence Day have attracted more than a million people over the past two years. Last year, Hispanic America reeled in big money from 42 corporate sponsors, including R.J. Reynolds, Pepsi and Kimberly Clark, said President Ray Garza, who hopes to regain the contract next year.

The event has even been beamed to 200 million television viewers around the world by Televisa.

But this year, a majority of the sponsors decided to step aside, opting to put their dollars instead into retail sales promotions, and citing a disturbance at Los Angeles’ Fiesta Broadway Cinco de Mayo celebration as a reason to bow out, Garza said.

At that May 1 event, at least 18 people were injured, none seriously, after youths started throwing rocks and bottles.

“In very diplomatic words, (the sponsors) wanted to see how other events would be handled. With half a million people attending, something could happen,” Garza said, even as he stressed that Santa Ana’s Sept. 16 events have always been family oriented and have never generated any trouble.

The Fiesta Broadway fracas also prompted the cancellation of the Orange County Mariachi Festival and Fair a bit later; after learning of the problems in Los Angeles, some corporate sponsors of the mariachi festival backed out at the last minute, organizers said.

“I think this has been the toughest year yet,” Garza said of corporate involvement in community events.

Regardless of the blows, business leaders are still struggling to hold the events. But the last-minute scramble has not been easy.

The Downtown Santa Ana Business Assn. has hired Sergio Velasquez, the publisher of Santa Ana’s Spanish-language weekly Miniondas , to take over Hispanic America’s role in promoting the Sept. 16 event. Velasquez is also working to find promoters for the soccer tournament, held by an association of 14 of the county’s Latino leagues.

But Velasquez says he is facing troubles of his own.

“Even for my own business, it’s a setback. There were a lot of advertisements for the World Cup before. Now I need to find some other kind of sponsorship,” Velasquez said. “For everyone, the World Cup absorbed a lot of money. All the big corporations, they want a break.”

Velasquez and downtown businessman Luis Mendoza said they still have a few corporate sponsors up their sleeves for the Sept. 16 event, but declined to name them because none have committed yet.

But downtown organizers concede that this year’s event will be smaller in scope, if it happens at all.

“If we get sponsors, we’ll probably just have enough money to put our booths together,” said Teresa Saldivar, vice president of the downtown association.

The association plans to meet Wednesday with Velasquez and Roger Kooi, Santa Ana’s director of downtown development, to determine whether it has enough commitments to start planning or if must cancel the event.

Kooi said the merchants must come up with at least $50,000 in commitments by Wednesday. He estimated it would cost about $100,000 for a basic two-day street fair with booths, music, a carnival and parade--a marked contrast to the $500,000 Garza’s company spent last year.

Kooi said his efforts to find last-minute sponsors for the soccer tournament have also fallen flat.

Two years ago, the tournament’s final game packed the 8,000-seat Santa Ana Stadium and last year’s event drew about 5,200 spectators, Arriaga said. Together, the two games generated about $15,000 for scholarships awarded by the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

Arriaga said a secondary factor in the company’s decision to withdraw its sponsorship was a concern that the association of soccer leagues was not well organized, but he emphasized that the main reasons were Budweiser’s enormous expenditures on the World Cup and a general economic downturn.

Tournament organizers are now making a desperate plea for support for the games, which usually begin in June.

“It’s a big operation and it costs money, and it’s money that we don’t have,” said Humberto Lopez, president of the Santa Ana-based Restaurant and Hotel Workers Soccer League and a tournament organizer. “It’s hard to ask friends for $40,000.”

Velasquez is more circumspect. For now, the soccer association will have to piece together the games on its own, he said, and concentrate on presenting a good proposal to the corporate giants to convince them to participate next year.

“We are looking now only for sponsors for the uniforms and small things,” he said. “We’ll make small prizes this year, just to keep it together.”