Soccer Surprise Stokes Debate on Rose Bowl
Why, in retrospect, anyone expected such a modest turnout for the world’s most popular sport--well, that’s for the Monday-morning goalkeepers to decide. At the Rose Bowl, all they can say for sure is that they held a professional soccer match thinking only about 15,000 people would show and the thing outdrew opening day at Dodger Stadium.
Now last weekend’s unexpected success of the Los Angeles Galaxy has set off a debate in the city that governs the team’s home field: How is the Rose Bowl, with its famously fussy neighbors, going to accommodate all those soccer fans?
Five days after the debut of Major League Soccer here, Pasadena is still reeling from the inaugural game. So many people showed up at the Rose Bowl that the gridlock shut down an offramp on the Foothill Freeway. Nearly 70,000 tickets were sold, an unprecedented 30,000 of them on game day at the gate. In the stands, people of what appeared to be every conceivable race, color and national origin jostled haunch to haunch on the bowl’s legendary cramped bench seats.
Despite the mob scene, police made only six arrests; stadium officials said decorum was exemplary. But the big game that experts are now citing as a harbinger of Southland life to come has also become a flash point for Pasadena’s ongoing argument over how much activity the stadium and its neighbors can sustain.
The issue, which has prompted a meeting tonight between city officials and neighborhood leaders, centers on a long-standing city ordinance limiting the Rose Bowl to a dozen events of Saturday night’s magnitude each year. Stadium officials said no one expected the Galaxy’s home games to meet the ordinance’s 20,000-fan threshold when they were scheduled last year.
If attendance holds, the Galaxy alone could use up the bowl’s allotment of “major” events. The team is scheduled to play 16 home games and three nonleague matches at the Rose Bowl this year, including a June 16 double-header that is expected to sell out the stadium with a face-off between the American and Mexican national teams.
These games, neighbors note, are in addition to the Rose Bowl’s existing roster of major events, which includes five UCLA home football games, the Tournament of Roses football game, the occasional concert and, possibly, the home-game schedule of any professional football franchise that needs an interim home in the Los Angeles area.
The City Council can waive the ordinance on a case-by-case basis, and has: Last year there were more than 20 major events. But to neighbors who watched, spellbound, on Saturday night as traffic backed up to the horizon and carloads of excited ticket-buyers blocked driveways and littered lawns, the specter of Big Soccer, international-style, is looking increasingly like the last straw.
“There is a crossroads coming--a day of reckoning for the Rose Bowl,” warned Nina Chomsky, past president of the Linda Vista/Annandale Assn., one of the more vocal neighborhood groups. “[We] supported soccer--but not this.”
Rose Bowl boosters, meanwhile, were too jubilant to worry much about legal obstacles.
“Ordinance? What ordinance?” crowed Mayor Bill Paparian, who had the honor of kicking out Saturday night’s first ball.
Marc Rapaport, the Galaxy’s chairman and principal owner, said that before Saturday, the team had anticipated a season-long average attendance of about 15,000. The World Cup had shown that soccer has an audience here, but boosters were cautious because the sport had been tried before with a professional league and had fizzled.
Only about 13,000 tickets had been sold by the Wednesday before the Galaxy game; by Thursday, sales stood at 18,000 or so. But most of those were via Ticketmaster, Galaxy officials said, and Ticketmaster wasn’t the only box office in town.
“Tickets were also being sold at little mom-and-pop markets in the Latino neighborhoods,” said Galaxy spokesman Pancho Lozano. “And from tracking of those sales, our experts told us [at the last minute] not to be surprised if 50,000 people showed up. Then we opened the gates on Saturday, and 30,000 people were standing there waiting to buy tickets. . . . We all just stood there, shaking our heads.”
Even in the aftermath of the game, its success has been hard to quantify. Galaxy officials reported that 69,255 tickets were sold, but preliminary turnstile figures at the stadium show that only about 55,000 people got in. Rose Bowl General Manager Dave Jacobs speculated that some fans may have arrived late, only to end up being shut out of their seats when overwhelmed stadium security cut off access to the bowl about half an hour into the game. Fans also reported confusion and delays at the will-call window for those who had already purchased seats.
The crowd was what you’d expect from a team whose roster includes players from Mexico to “Melrose Place.” About 65% of the fans were Latino, officials said, but overall the audience was wildly ecumenical--wealthy suburban soccer parents and extended Armenian American families, British expatriates, an entire cheering section from El Salvador, exchange students from Nigeria, and Guatemala-born factory workers hoisting their children high in the air.
The event--part homecoming for die-hard soccer fans, part coming-out for newcomers to the sport--dramatically underscored the new face of Los Angeles, experts later said. In Pasadena, however, demographics meant dollar signs: Under its contract with Major League Soccer, the city gets 7% of all ticket sales from Galaxy games, plus a surcharge of $1.25 per ticket that doubles after the first 20,000 tickets are sold.
“We only expected to make $300,000 off the entire season,” City Manager Ed Sotelo said. The city’s share of the gross from Saturday’s game alone exceeded $150,000--conservatively.
Beyond City Hall, Pasadena’s ethnic neighborhoods reported that, for perhaps the first time in city history, they felt they had a stake in the landmark stadium. But in the old neighborhoods surrounding the Rose Bowl, the reaction was decidedly mixed.
On one hand, it wasn’t the residents’ worst nightmare--a stadium full of L.A. Raiders fans. But the traffic and noise were terrible. Carloads of Galaxy fans, some of them making their first trip ever to the bowl, crawled bumper to bumper along the winding, tree-lined streets, searching fruitlessly for a place to park. Golfers at Brookside Golf Course adjacent to the bowl complained that a couple of cars, desperate for a spot, strayed from the fairways--where the city allows bowl patrons to park--onto the fragile and finely manicured greens.
David Withers, who lives west of the bowl, said he ventured out an hour after the game began and encountered “traffic that didn’t move for 20 minutes.”
Meanwhile, east of the stadium, homeowner Jim Behm was incensed at the littering: “I picked up about 16 beer bottles on our corner,” he griped.
The aftermath has left the city scrambling for a more workable plan, both short-term and long-term, neighbors and city officials said. In the short term, officials are talking about possible shuttle parking for overflow crowds, and putting the word out through the Spanish-language media that fans should arrive at least an hour before the game when the Galaxy next plays at home April 28.
In the long run, however, all sides acknowledge that the ordinance governing the bowl will almost certainly be reworked. “We may well have to come to a place where 12 events in 365 days is not enough,” said Pasadena Councilman William E. Thomson, who also sits on the board of the operating company that manages the Rose Bowl.
Some residents, such as Erin Kelly, president of the East Arroyo Neighborhood Assn., are open to the idea of a more active stadium. “The Rose Bowl has to make money,” Kelly said. “It cannot sit down there collecting moss.”
Others, such as Chomsky, say they won’t back down without a fight--or at the very least, a full report on the environmental impact of additional big events. “I will seek an injunction to stop activity at the bowl if the city is not in full environmental compliance,” she vowed.
