PERSPECTIVE ON FOOTBALL : Can Behring Walk on Quicksand? : It takes more than money to buy a city’s loyalty to a team; it takes true goodwill. Just ask the Raiders’ Gil Hernandez.

Looks like Los Angeles may get another pro football team whether we want it or not.

A lot of legal and political infighting is likely before the planned move of the Seattle Seahawks actually happens. And Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, where Seahawks owner Ken Behring wants his team to play temporarily, and the city of Anaheim, where he wants it to practice, may be dragged into the fray.

But they’ll have the satisfaction of sharing the misery with a group of folks who truly deserve it: the owners of the 28 teams that comprise the National Football League and the league’s befuddled and seemingly powerless leadership.

Behring, a Northern California land developer, announced last week that he was moving his team out of Seattle, the fifth NFL team owner to relocate a franchise in less than a year. In every instance the excuse for fleeing is the same: The team needs a new stadium so that it can increase revenues by leasing luxury boxes and selling not just season tickets but “personal seat licenses” for the right to buy those season tickets.

This insane game of musical stadiums began in Southern California when the Rams left for St. Louis in April, followed by the Raiders returning to Oakland in June. A few months later, the Cleveland Browns announced a move to Baltimore and the Houston Oilers fled to Nashville. And the game isn’t over yet. Teams in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Phoenix and Tampa also are unhappy with their current accommodations.

This turmoil is badly undermining the NFL’s popularity. Heretofore, the league had been so successful that it recently began proclaiming, with characteristic hubris, that pro football is “the new national pastime.”

The former national pastime is still around, of course. But baseball is desperately trying to regain fan loyalty after the bitter 1994 players’ strike. Franchise shuffling in pro football is having the same effect because it sends the same message to the hard-working stiffs who buy most of the tickets: Fan loyalty doesn’t count as much as our bottom line.

That is why the NFL now finds itself being sued by angry fans and cities from Ohio to the Pacific Northwest. And why, in Greater Los Angeles, Behring has been greeted by a skeptical, even suspicious, community.

Behring says he will approach the Los Angeles market like the owner of an expansion franchise, with a completely fresh start, including a new team name. The Seahawk name, logo and even the team colors will remain in Seattle, presumably to be assumed someday by some other team.

If only it were that simple. For in L.A., Behring is venturing into a public relations minefield left behind by the two NFL owners who preceded him, the Rams’ Georgia Frontiere and the Raiders’ Al Davis.

During their last few years in Orange County, the Rams made absolutely no effort at public or community relations. Frontiere even stopped helping a struggling Boys and Girls Club in Lincoln Heights that the Rams had supported since the 1950s.

The Raiders did a little better, but only by comparison to the Rams, and largely because of the unappreciated efforts of one man, their director of marketing and community relations, Gil Hernandez.

If Raiders players couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make it to a public appearance, Hernandez did. If news stories linked the Raiders’ silver-and-black pirate logo to youth gangs, Hernandez wrote letters to the editor pointing out the team’s (actually his) support for anti-gang programs in the community. And when Davis decided to raise ticket prices, Hernandez tried to talk him out of it.

Hernandez understood better than anyone in Raider management the unique dynamics of the Los Angeles market, with its suburban sprawl and many ethnic enclaves. He got Raider games on Spanish-language radio before any other NFL team had thought of it--including the Rams, who had been here 30 years before the Raiders arrived. To me, that remains the single most important symbol of Hernandez’s efforts to promote the Raiders among the millions of Latinos who are the blue-collar backbone of this region’s economy.

Considering how lackluster the Raiders played toward the end of their stay here, Hernandez may have been the best thing Davis had going for him in Los Angeles. And now Hernandez is not sure he will move north when the team’s administrative offices are transferred to Oakland later this year.

“Al [Davis] has always been supportive of me,” the El Paso native says, “but L.A.’s my adopted home, and I’m really torn about leaving.”

In a meeting this week with Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, Behring said that he wants “to earn the respect and support of the community” with his new team, whatever it winds up being called and wherever it winds up playing its games. Fine words. But given all that has gone before, harder than Behring realizes.

Mr. Behring, meet Mr. Hernandez.