Aging Rose Bowl Faces Thorny Dilemmas : Sports: Boosters seek a rehab and NFL team. Neighbors dread crowds.

It is an image synonymous with sunny Southern California, a New Year’s Day regular on TVs around the globe. Its edifice--the buff-colored walls, the scripted name, the rose--is so gracious from ground level that it seems more a resort than a stadium.

Everyone who is anyone has played to its roaring crowds, from O.J. Simpson to the Rolling Stones. But after 73 years of pomp and pageantry, the Rose Bowl has come face to face with the future, and it is not a rosy sight.

Deal makers are talking state-of-the-art “sports complexes” across town. UCLA is fed up with the bowl’s antiquated accouterments. There are serious rumblings about a national college football playoff that could effectively steal the thunder of the big annual Rose Bowl game--the so-called “granddaddy of them all”--right out of those storied oval walls.

The locals, meanwhile, are at odds about the bowl, in a debate that has swelled beyond civic pastime to embody many of the same conflicting forces that are whipsawing Southern California as a whole. Boosters want to rehab, court the National Football League and, theoretically, rake in big bucks. Immigrants dream of a professional soccer team and, with a little luck, another World Cup.

Neighbors--who have resigned themselves over the years to blocked driveways and littered lawns--pine for the old days, when the Rose Bowl’s sole purpose was to help host Pasadena’s wonderfully chaotic New Year’s Day blowout, and then rest more or less in peace for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, scores of others--from golfers to hikers to model airplane enthusiasts--worry that the fuss over the bowl will spill onto the exquisite parkland surrounding it.

“Everyone has a stake,” sighed Jack Mehl, the bowl’s outgoing business and marketing manager. “The neighbors have a stake. UCLA has a stake. The local politician who wants to get his name in the paper has a stake. You and I who want to see a concert have a stake. The kid riding his bicycle has a stake. The complexity of these issues is staggering.

“This just isn’t some concrete slab with aluminum seats where fun and games happen to go on,” Mehl said. “This is the Rose Bowl. A national historic monument.”

And yet, said Alfred F. Moses, president of the Rose Bowl Operating Co. board, it has become “crucial” that some consensus be reached--and soon. UCLA’s 14-year-old contract with the stadium expires next year, at least two other local stadiums are negotiating with the owners of Los Angeles’ new soccer franchise, and the NFL is under pressure to quickly replace at least one of the Southland’s two departed pro football teams--and to find them an acceptable place to play.

As early as next month, the Pasadena City Council is expected to vote on a $20-million bond sale to pay for an initial round of renovations that could help determine the course of the aging grande dame.

“Either we go forward,” Moses said, “or we don’t--and become a museum.”

Hanging in the balance is the fate of one of Southern California’s best known landmarks, a monument to tradition and civic prosperity. For generations now, it has stood its ground in the rough-and-tumble business of mass entertainment and big-time sports.

But at a time when the stadium game is dominated by corporate marketing strategies and private megabucks, fans ask, will the publicly owned jewel of Pasadena become a white elephant?

Or is there the chance that the Rose Bowl could stay in the game?

The questions are touchy ones for the citizens of Pasadena, who are protective of their city-owned bowl and the pristine Arroyo Seco in which it sits.

But they also drive home a sore point about Los Angeles at large: How can the second-largest media market and largest metropolis in the nation find itself bereft of a professional football team and a satisfactory venue for it to call home?

The Rose Bowl’s story has had as much to do with Pasadena history as with the growth of big-time sports. Founded as a showcase for Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses football game, the bowl--like the city--has grown from a charming point of interest to a place of international renown.

It isn’t easy, however, to live in the shadow of a landmark--especially a landmark that rakes in millions of dollars a year. And in recent years, the Rose Bowl has been at the center of one of Pasadena’s most persistent land-use debates, pitting the city--which depends on the money the bowl generates--against the neighbors, some of whom own million-dollar homes.

In the midst of this parochial debate, larger forces have raised the stakes for the venerable bowl. The fundamental economics of the stadium business, for example, have shifted seismically.

Cities want major league teams as proof of their first-rank status, but it is hard to hold onto big-time teams, particularly those in the NFL, without a state-of-the-art stadium. That is because the NFL is structured so that the only way for a single team to get an economic edge on the others is by maximizing the “revenue streams” that vary from one stadium to the next.

The league’s biggest sources of money--such as its television contracts and profits from official team T-shirts and gear--have to be split equally among its 28 teams. So individual teams and their owners must siphon their extra money from their stadiums--from parking, from concessions and from the rental of luxury suites, those glassed-in boxes with the private bathrooms and comfy seats that can lease for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

It was for lack of a state-of-the-art NFL stadium, in large part, that Southern California lost the Raiders this year. (The Rams also complained about their facilities, but Anaheim Stadium is newer, has luxury boxes and wasn’t really a focal point of the team’s departure.) But even as the region casts about for a new pro football team, at least a dozen proposals for such a stadium are in the works--even in the midst of the worst economic downturn in recent Southern California history. This is because developers realize that Los Angeles is the second-largest media market in the nation, and the NFL is unlikely to leave it without a team for long.

Thus, the Coliseum in Los Angeles is working frantically--if belatedly--to whip itself into shape. There are rumors of an Anaheim sports facility with the Disney imprimatur. And, despite the departure of the Raiders, who were to be a key tenant, officials at the Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood are still talking seriously about constructing a brand new, $200-million sports complex there.

In the midst of all this talk, the Rose Bowl has been conspicuously absent as a source of widespread speculation. This confuses its proponents, who point to its ample size and grand history. They note that, unlike the Coliseum--another old landmark--the Rose Bowl has luxury suites. And, they contend, the Rose Bowl is in a better neighborhood.

But even the bowl’s boosters have to admit it is a far cry from state-of-the-art. The lines at the restrooms are interminable. Ditto for the concession stands. To sit through a game on those bench seats is, well, a pain in the behind. The only way in is through a set of dark, narrow tunnels that are claustrophobic even when they aren’t mobbed. The scoreboard is an antique, fans complain, and the sound system is outmoded too.

When news surfaced that the Hollywood Park stadium might get built, the Rose Bowl’s deficiencies--which were already under study--took on a new urgency. If constructed, the new stadium would probably attract not only a pro football team, but also any Super Bowls and major concerts that came to town--and maybe even UCLA, which has for years been looking for a stadium closer to its campus on the Westside.

Without UCLA, the Rose Bowl would lose $250,000 a year in rental fees and, more important, a key anchor tenant with which to promote its luxury suites. Without the occasional Super Bowl and big concert, the Rose Bowl would be left with only . . . the Rose Bowl game. And even that might not be the draw that it has always been, as calls for a NCAA college playoff system instead of bowl games have grown increasingly serious.

“When the idea of a new stadium came up, we realized that if a new stadium took all our business, we might wind up with nothing,” said James Stivers, a lifelong Pasadenan who represents the Tournament of Roses on the nonprofit Rose Bowl Operating Co., which manages the bowl’s day-to-day affairs. And so, said Stivers, “we have taken the position that everything needs to be explored.”

The first step, Stivers and others say, must be the initial face lift--theater-style seats, more and better restrooms, a modern video scoreboard, improved entryways. That, they believe, would cost about $20 million and could be paid for with the issuance of certificates of participation, a kind of bond issue that could be approved with a council vote.

The bonds, however, would probably have to be repaid from the operating revenues of the bowl and surrounding Brookside Golf Course--and for Pasadenans, that again raises questions of the bowl’s priorities. One plan under study would turn one of Brookside’s two public 18-hole courses into a resort-style course with much higher greens fees. Golfers fear that such a move will become inevitable if major bowl improvements are approved.

And there are some who argue that if the Rose Bowl is out to make money, perhaps the city should overhaul the place and go for an NFL team. Bowl officials say that for an additional investment of $11 million or so, the bowl could double its number of luxury suites, bringing its grand total close to the 100 or so that NFL owners prefer.

“The NFL has a void in the L.A. market,” said Pasadena Councilman Chris Holden. “Everybody is proposing stadiums--well, we have a stadium. The timing is right.”

Which is why the city last month hired a high-powered negotiator to promote the Rose Bowl to the NFL. Ron Olsen--who is Michael Ovitz’s personal lawyer--characterized the talks as “very preliminary.”

However, he added, “when you talk about the second-largest venue in the nation being shut out of NFL football, that can’t go on for long. And when you ask where they can play [immediately], you’re down to two or three choices. And the Rose Bowl is a good one. We would welcome the opportunity to serve, even temporarily.”

Not so fast, the neighbors retort.

“It’s one thing to have the Super Bowl now and then, but the NFL is different,” said Nina Chomsky, president of the Linda Vista-Annandale Assn., which represents the affluent homeowners west of the bowl. When she pictures the NFL, she says, she sees “rich, drunk fans and a big mess every Sunday. We prefer collegiate football. That was more Pasadena-like.”

But that, again, depends on which Pasadena you have in mind. Perhaps, some argue, the Rose Bowl’s fate hangs less on City Council decisions and the machinations of the NFL than on the grand demographic shifts that are transforming Southern California.

Another Pasadena--the city bursting with Latino and Armenian immigrants--thinks soccer when the word football comes up. To that end, Rose Bowl Operating Co. President Moses said the bowl has been negotiating with the owners of Los Angeles’ nascent major league soccer franchise.

“It would be our dream to have a soccer team at the Rose Bowl,” said Jose Ramirez, 26, on a recent Sunday in the shadow of the bowl.

Times staff writer Bill Plaschke contributed to this report.