HEARTS OF THE CITY / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news : The NFL Feeds Its Fetish

It was good enough for two Olympics and two Super Bowls. Good enough for USC. Hey, once upon a time it was good enough for the Pope. And we just spent $115 million in public treasure to haul it into the modern age, make it virtually earthquake-proof and otherwise spiff it up.

So why is the National Football League telling everyone that no future team, expansion or otherwise, will ever occupy the L.A. Memorial Coliseum? They don’t say this officially, of course, but the message is clear: no Coliseum, not ever, no way.

The most recent indication of this message popped up a couple of weeks ago when officials of Football L.A., the mayor’s search committee for a new team, said they were promoting four possible sites to the NFL. The four: El Segundo near LAX, Hollywood Park, a spot Downtown next to the Convention Center, and alongside Dodger Stadium.

See? No Coliseum. All of the sites on the list would require a new stadium. Steve Soboroff, Football L.A.’s vice chairman, was quoted at the time as saying that the Coliseum had been ruled out as a future home for an NFL team largely because it already exists.

Mind you, this exclusion of the Coliseum comes from representatives of the city that owns the Coliseum. The same city that spent two years finagling $90 million from the feds and $10 million from the state for the aforementioned refurbishment.

The money came to us fortuitously, of course, as a result of the earthquake in ’94. But we’ve been told that the $100 million would bring much more to the Coliseum than patching cracks. It also bought a lowered field to provide “ringside” seating, new locker rooms, a new press box, the largest Diamond Vision board in the country, new concession stands and, as they say, much more.

Now, after all that public money has been poured into a public facility, we pretend it doesn’t exist. An embarrassment, like an elderly uncle who’s taken to drooling. We hope that no one notices until we can lead him away to a quiet room.

Somewhere, a wrong judgment has been made. Either we made a terrible mistake and threw $100 million down a rat hole. Or, we are now buckling under to an NFL that has grown obsessive- compulsive about new stadiums.

Right now, the latter seems more likely. Fred Rosen, chairman of Football L.A., says the city surrendered control over site selection when it decided not to provide funds for a new stadium or a so-called “franchise fee”--otherwise known as a bribe--to attract a team to L.A.

But what is the $100 million, if not the equivalent of an updated facility? So, whence comes this non-negotiable need for a new stadium when a city can offer a classic, upgraded stadium surrounded by 160 acres of park?

The obsessive-compulsives at the NFL give two answers to that question. First, old stadiums don’t have the sky boxes and hospitality suites that sweeten profits. Second, old stadiums tend to be located in bad neighborhoods.

As to the first, the Coliseum already has contracted for 41 suites to be completed in 1996 and could build 108 more should a new team so desire. It also could add a “club” restaurant and 300 “club” seats. That should be enough to hold the high-rollers.

According to the Coliseum commish, all this plus a new, 2,000-car parking garage, additional elevators and expanded concessions could be added for about $89 million. As opposed to a new stadium with the same capacity that would cost between $200 million and $300 million.

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And with the Coliseum you got no need for an environmental impact report, no homeowner groups bird-dogging your every move, and a much shorter time to start up.

As for the bad neighborhood rap, the Coliseum is guilty. The neighborhood sucks. But that sad condition leads us to the most intriguing conundrum of the NFL affair. Namely, what gives the NFL owners the right to tell Los Angeles which parts of the city to abandon and which to support? Does the prospective team owner plan to live in the neighborhood where the stadium sits?

Look: As everyone is fond of saying when it comes to pro sports, it’s all about money. And in this particular case, we are blessed. The NFL probably needs L.A. more than L.A. needs the NFL. That’s because, as another old saying goes, the NFL is not a sports league so much as it is a TV show. And the TV show starts to wither on the West Coast when L.A. doesn’t have a team on the tube.

In fact, recent Nielsens suggest that the withering already has begun. Football ratings have dropped in the huge L.A. market only halfway into our first season without a team.

On the other hand, has life gone utterly drab here in Paradise without the Raiders or the Rams? Have we found it hard to drag ourselves to work without a team to fill the empty space between the Dodgers and the Lakers?

See what I mean? L.A. is not a Tampa Bay or a Nashville. It doesn’t have to play the game the way those cities do. L.A. has a little leverage of its own. Maybe not all the leverage. But a little.

And we don’t have to roll over, expose our soft parts, and abandon the Coliseum and $100 million of our money because the NFL wants to feed its new-stadium fetish. With a little backbone, we just might set a new trend in the now pathetic spectacle surrounding the acquisition of sports teams.

And we would get to watch our new team in the same Coliseum where Babe Didrikson won two gold medals in the ’32 Olympics, where the Dodgers played their first World Series in L.A., where the ivy covered the walls before anyone had heard of the Rams. Tradition. Hey, it’s what L.A. is all about.