Davis Agrees to Return the Raiders to Oakland : Sports: If OKd as expected, move would leave L.A. without pro football. But another team is likely to fill void.

After 13 years in Los Angeles during which he was courted by suitors from Irwindale to Baltimore, Raider owner Al Davis has agreed to return the pro football team to Oakland.

Davis signed a letter of intent Friday morning to take his team back to its original home, where it played from its inception in 1960 as a member of the now-defunct American Football League until 1982, when the club moved to the Los Angeles Coliseum.

The move, which comes less than three months after the Rams left Anaheim for a new stadium in St. Louis, would leave Los Angeles without a pro football team next season. But the National Football League is not expected to leave the nation’s second-largest television market without a team for long.

The Arizona Cardinals have already indicated some interest in moving to Los Angeles and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Cleveland Browns are also possible candidates for a franchise shift that could come as early as 1996. League sources say the NFL ideally wants two teams in this area, which undoubtedly means one of them will be an expansion club and at least one will very likely play in Orange County.

The Raiders’ decision scuttles plans for a proposed $250-million stadium to be built adjacent to Hollywood Park in Inglewood. That alternative is expected to be considered as one of many for a replacement to the aging Coliseum.

Davis has agreed to a 16-year lease to play in a renovated Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the team’s home in the glory years from 1966 through 1981. Plans call for the stadium to undergo $85 million in improvements by July, 1996, to be financed through city and county bonds that will be repaid from revenue from Raider games. Stadium operators hope to generate $100 million over the next two years through a personal-seat licensing plan, increased capacity, added luxury boxes and club seats.

The Raiders must still receive league approval or risk another lengthy, expensive court battle similar to the one they endured in the 1980s when they moved to Los Angeles without NFL permission.

This time, the Raiders are expected to get the league’s blessing. A special owners meeting has been tentatively scheduled for July 14 in Chicago. Sources say the Raiders will get the required 23 of 30 votes because owners believe Davis could no longer succeed in Los Angeles.

But the team may also be asked to pay a heavy relocation fee because the San Francisco 49ers have threatened legal action unless they are compensated for the Raiders’ return to the Bay Area.

Also at that Chicago meeting, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue may take up a timetable for putting an expansion team in Los Angeles and might also open discussions on a new stadium for the city.

But while the future of pro football in Los Angeles is now in limbo, the sport is again alive and well in Oakland.

“Nothing can capture the emotion and spirit of this day,” said Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris. “This is truly a historic day. For the first time, a team that has left town has come home. And that team is the Oakland Raiders. The words Oakland and Raiders are synonymous.

“It choked many people’s throats to have to put Los Angeles and the Raiders together. And it wasn’t just the smog that made that happen.”

Friday’s letter of intent did not officially seal the deal. Both the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and the Oakland City Council must still approve the transaction. The City Council is expected to take up the matter at its next meeting, on Tuesday, but the entire legislative process will not be completed until mid-July.

Although various political figures at a celebratory news conference held at the Oakland Coliseum on Friday said the remaining legislative steps were a mere formality, Deputy City Manager Ezra Rapport offered a word of caution.

“In a democracy,” he said, “nothing is ever unanimous. Especially in Oakland.”

Under the terms of the deal:

* Capacity for football in the Oakland Coliseum will be increased from 54,500 to 65,000. Capacity for the baseball A’s will be 48,000 with the extra seats on movable platforms. The number of luxury boxes will go up from 57 to 175.

* The Raiders will receive a $31.9-million loan for relocation and operating expenses and up to an additional $10 million for the construction of training facilities.

* The Raiders will receive up to $22 million in stadium revenue, all of the revenues from luxury suites in the first 10 years, half of club membership fees, concessions and parking, all of the football advertising and half of any fee received from a sponsor that pays to have its name on the stadium.

* The Raiders will be charged $500,000 annually in rent. The team paid $800,000 in rent to the Coliseum in 1993, but played there rent free in 1994 because of the uncertainty over earthquake repairs.

* Personal-seat licenses, which will guarantee fans the right to purchase season tickets for 10 years, will be sold at prices ranging from $500 to $16,000.

* A $1 surcharge on all tickets will go to support projects in the Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Human Services Department.

Because both sides came down this same precarious path in 1990 only to have a Raider return foiled by engineering problems and a threatened voter referendum, safeguards have been built into the deal.

If a league injunction should prevent the Raiders from moving, the loan money must be returned by the team.

If a referendum goes on the ballot, the Raiders will move, but play rent-free until the referendum is voted on.

And, if there is both a league injunction and a referendum, the entire agreement can be withdrawn.

League owners never envisioned such an agreement being drawn up when they left Jacksonville, Fla., last month with what they thought was a solid deal to keep the Raiders in Los Angeles. The owners had passed a resolution to generate the funds needed to build the Hollywood Park stadium. The plan included two Super Bowls, marketing rights to as many as 10,000 Super Bowl tickets for each game and the possibility of putting a second NFL tenant into the facility in 1998, a year after the scheduled opening.

Davis had long ago decided that the Los Angeles Coliseum was not fit for his football team and Tagliabue began to agree with him publicly last fall while trying to aid Davis behind the scenes in the Raider owner’s bid to build a new state-of-the-art facility.

It appeared that the Jacksonville resolution would make Davis’ dream of a Raider stadium in Los Angeles a reality.

But Davis’ dream was mixed with nightmares. He had doubts that the stadium would be ready by 1997. He had fears of being stuck in the Los Angeles Coliseum, a stadium he had come to abhor. And he had the idea that he was costing his team four to six points a game by continuing to play in the half-empty Coliseum.

So he kept listening to the overtures from Oakland. He kept thinking about his years on the East Bay where the fans covered themselves in silver and black and spilled their emotion onto the field, creating a true home-field advantage.

And finally, Wednesday morning, Davis ended his months of agonizing and deliberating. He was going home.

At 10:40 Friday morning, a letter of intent, approved just minutes earlier by the board of directors of the Oakland Coliseum and signed by Coliseum President George Vukasin, was faxed to Davis in Los Angeles.

Forty-six minutes later, in the midst of the Oakland Coliseum press conference, the fax came back and was handed to Vukasin.

He held it up, displaying the signature of Al Davis. That drew cheers and applause from city officials gathered for the occasion.

“There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in that signature line,” said Rapport.

It was a truly emotional day for Oakland, a city that never got over its love affair with the Raiders, a team which, even in its absence, seemed to have a hold on the sports fans of this area that the baseball A’s and basketball Warriors could never match.

The simmering fires of passion for the club began to again reach full flame early Friday.

Outside the Coliseum, a group of fans appeared waving a silver-and-black flag with the Raider logo.

At the top of the front page of Friday’s Oakland Tribune was just one word: “Yesssssss!”

Jim Otto, a former Raider in the Oakland days and the only member of the organization on hand Friday, told reporters, “Al always wanted to come back. He never wanted to leave.”

And in another corner of the Coliseum, long-time Raider fan Charles Santana Jr., beamed. It was his late father, a former member of the Board of Supervisors, who had started the failed bid in 1990 to get the Raiders back.

“When that didn’t happen, it helped kill him,” said Santana of his father. “To me, Al Davis is a hero. He brought this team back.”