ANALYSIS : Orange County Gets Lost in NFL Shuffle

Disband the newly formed NFL Booster Club. Go ahead and schedule the monster truck races and tractor pulls into the next decade at Anaheim Stadium. Make plans for a Sunday drive to Hollywood Park.

There will be no professional football--no NFL replacement in Orange County--to fill the void left by the Rams.

NFL owners delivered that message of no hope to the county Wednesday after two days of meetings to discuss the Raiders and their stadium travails in Los Angeles. Commissioned to keeping Al Davis and the Raiders in L.A., NFL owners opted to go for two points: Make the Hollywood Park deal work for the Raiders, and make the Hollywood Park deal work for a second NFL team.

“Obviously that isn’t the kind of news we like to hear around here,” said Jack Lindquist, former president of Disney and a leader in the move to bring pro football back to Anaheim. “But on the other hand, it’s not a done deal yet.

“If the Hollywood deal falls apart, then everyone is back to Square 1, and we’re right back in the picture.”

And if quarterback Chris Miller doesn’t get hurt this year, the Rams might go to the Super Bowl.

There’s no hope, and there never was for Orange County.

In the eyes of NFL owners, the county’s failure to stage a fiery fight to keep the Rams doomed it to wasteland status. As sports agent Leigh Steinberg admitted recently, the NFL looked upon the campaign to Save The Rams as being unprofessional and ineffective.

“I know there are people in the league who feel that way,” Lindquist said. “One of the problems is that Orange County lacks an identity. When I was back at one of those NFL meetings, I was talking to an NFL owner about Anaheim, and he didn’t know it was in Orange County. ‘What’s Orange County?’ he wanted to know.

“I asked him if he accompanied his team to Ram games. He said he did, but he said he stayed in Newport Beach when he was here and not Orange County.

“I think sports, tourism and the attractions here have got to come together and sell this area and create an identity and an image of Orange County as an entity.”

Too late. The NFL has relocation in mind for 1998, because it must have an NFC identity in the Los Angeles area when it begins negotiating a new television contract following the 1997 season. Expansion probably will not be considered before 2000.

“I wouldn’t presume for a moment that they will be able to get two teams to play in the Inglewood area,” said Anaheim Councilman Bob Zemel, who joined Mayor Tom Daly in lobbying NFL owners in March to bring a pro team to Anaheim. “We have such a nicer area for a fan to come visit.”

NFL statistics indicate that fewer fans came to Anaheim Stadium in 1994 than to any other stadium in the league. Blame it on the Rams, but when it comes to touting Orange County, it’s going to take more than ambience to win the vote of 23 of 30 owners and gain another football team.

The area presently has nothing to offer. In addition to its well-publicized bankruptcy, there is the doomed Save The Rams campaign to remind NFL owners of what can go wrong here. Save The Rams made the mistake of pushing a renovated Anaheim Stadium--which is woefully lacking in the luxury boxes and premium seating that NFL owners covet--when team officials made it known they wanted only one thing: Lots and lots of money, which would be generated from a state-of-the-art facility.

“We talked about a new stadium when the Rams were still here,” Lindquist counters.

But such discussions came only after the team had its bags packed, and only after making the miscalculation that its committee could bypass Ram President John Shaw and get to owner Georgia Frontiere. Shaw, Frontiere’s confidant and the driving force behind the move to St. Louis, remains a power in inner league circles and a constant reminder to his peers of all that went wrong in Orange County.

“I still think the consensus out here is if you had a choice, you’d really rather do a complete study on a major overhaul and upgrade of Anaheim Stadium to see if that could work,” Lindquist said. “If you could get a football-only stadium for less money, why build a new one?”

Orange County still just doesn’t get it. St. Louis not only offered the Rams a new stadium, it offered everything not attached to the Gateway Arch. Baltimore is still trying to give away $160 million in public funds raised for the construction of a stadium that will cost a pro football team $1 a game to rent. Memphis has been lobbying for professional football for decades and has powerful Federal Express in residence and willing to buy into the game. San Antonio is making noise, and Toronto approached the Rams.

Publicly, the NFL will not close the door on Orange County because of its interest in public relations. But there is no compelling reason to include it as a venue of choice when making plans to add another team.

Unless, of course, Disney. . . . but hasn’t that been Orange County’s biggest mistake?

“I know Disney had lots and lots of talk with the Rams before they moved,” said an NFL official. “But Disney is a value hunter, and right now the NFL is in the position of getting what it wants while giving away very little.”

Wasn’t it popular opinion at one time that Disney was going to save the Rams by buying out Frontiere? Disney has agreed to purchase 25% of the Angels, but it still must assume control of the team and involve itself with stadium concerns. Is it prepared to make a concerted effort to bring football to Orange County?

No way can you keep everyone in the Magic Kingdom happy if Disney is party to moving a football team from Cleveland or Cincinnati to Anaheim. So Disney becomes a player only if the NFL expands, and it just did that with no plans to do so again at this time.

And still there are some here who think Disney is this area’s best hope for football again. There were reports recently that Michael Eisner had written a letter to the NFL, and immediately things looked bright once again in Orange County. No clue what was in that letter, but things looked bright once again in Orange County.

The NFL’s reaction to that letter: Let’s put two teams in Los Angeles at Hollywood Park.

“In my opinion they are making a big mistake where they are putting that stadium,” Lindquist said. “I’d want a stadium in the middle of something; they have a stadium with three sides--the fourth being the ocean and the airport. It doesn’t have direct freeway access, and they have some of the location problems associated with the Coliseum.”

What’s the NFL’s alternative? They must find a way to keep the Raiders in Los Angeles, and by providing Super Bowl enticements and the promise of a second team they hope to gain the cooperation of R.D. Hubbard, Hollywood Park’s chief executive officer.

If Hollywood Park gets two teams, does anyone really believe expansion will result in a third team being given to Disney at some point?

Tony Tavares, president of Disney Sports Enterprises, said Wednesday that Disney had expressed an interest in becoming involved in the NFL “a long time ago,” but he said there are no active discussions.

“I don’t know how to read it,” Tavares said after the NFL made its pitch to Hollywood Park. “I don’t know what the motivation is with the second team.

“It bucks the current trends in baseball, football, hockey, basketball. The trend is to separate, not join. The Giants and the Jets are the only two [NFL] teams sharing one stadium. . . . My view is it’s still just a negotiation. I honestly don’t know what they intend to do. What is the real agenda [for Al Davis and the NFL owners]?”

Whatever, it doesn’t appear it will include Orange County.

“I think Orange County could support its own team no matter how many teams Los Angeles has,” Daly said. “When you look at the concentration of teams in the New York area and Philadelphia, sure we could do it.”

Yeah, yeah, but in the meantime, there are the monster trucks, and unlike the Rams, they don’t figure to run out of gas each Sunday.

* Times staff writer Martin Miller contributed to this story.