Time to Look at Big Picture in Grounds-to-Heir Skirmish

There are two ways to live by the rule of “do unto others”--the way it’s taught in Sunday school, and the way it’s often interpreted in the business world, where the doers prosper and the done-untos are done for.

How a Los Angeles businessman named Harry Shuster defines and applies those three words will, it now appears, determine whether seeing stars under the stars remains a part of Orange County’s entertainment culture.

In the course of doing unto his business enemies, Shuster has won the right to bulldoze Irvine Meadows, the 15,416-capacity outdoor concert bowl that has staged rock shows and symphonic series since 1981. The courts have already ruled that Shuster, the Irvine Meadows landlord who at the end of this month will become Irvine Meadows’ ex-landlord, can legally carry out a lease provision that allows him to return the property the way he found it: vacant.

That quirky bit of fine print has become Shuster’s doomsday weapon in the latest round of his long-running feud with the county’s biggest developer. Shuster leased 300 acres from the Irvine Co. 29 years ago; Irvine Meadows was among the fruits of his efforts to make money there, as he brought in tenants who built and paid for the amphitheater. The Irvine Co. gets back the land--and a cut of Irvine Meadows’ income--as soon as Shuster is out of the picture.

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Shuster is threatening to punctuate his departure with a roar of ‘dozers and dynamite unless the Irvine Co. coughs up a goodly sum. (A jury in 1993 awarded Shuster $42 million in damages after agreeing with him that the Irvine Co. had unjustly thwarted his efforts to do business on the property, but a judge overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial, leaving further rounds to come.)

So far, the Irvine Co. has not flinched. If Feb. 28 arrives with no resolution, Shuster will have 90 days to wreck the two popular and profitable attractions on the property--Irvine Meadows, where annual attendance has ranged between 300,000 and 500,000, and the Wild Rivers water park.

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It would be a dramatic, memorable, amazing and economically absurd act of vengeance--the business-world equivalent of Captain Ahab’s consummating his self-destructive hatred for his nemesis, Moby Dick. Livid that the Irvine Co. has cost him an arm and a leg, our Ahab--who relies on the public’s continued goodwill to keep afloat other businesses that include restaurants and children’s day camps and play centers--would be going to epic lengths to gore the great white whale of Orange County entrepreneurship.

Let’s hope that Shuster first pauses to recognize the “others” he will be doing unto if he destroys Irvine Meadows.

Yes, they include the Irvine Co., which a jury of his peers found had wronged him royally.

But those others also include the kid who, if Irvine Meadows survives, will see KISS or the Offspring this season and start washing cars the next morning so he can save for his first guitar. They include the aspiring singer-songwriter who will see Neil Young or Jackson Browne and be inspired to set her own artistic standards high.

The “others” include the shy teenager with a crush who will be able to conquer his reticence because he knows that special girl will say “yes” if he asks her to go to Lollapalooza with him. They include the former college buddies, out of touch for years, who will run into each other at a Meadows show and start a new chapter in an old friendship. They include the strangers who will become friends after one overhears the other complaining about an off-base concert review by the know-it-all who pontificates on pop for the Times Orange County.

Yes, if Shuster holds sacred the art and warfare of the deal, if he sees Irvine Meadows simply as a profit center, he just might scuttle it rather than see it fall into enemy hands. No rival would ever dare call his bluff again, and he might even wind up with a slice of immortality, as a case study at the Harvard School of Business.

But his remarkable furthering of his private interests and obsessions will have robbed the community of something valuable and good. Orange County’s music fans will get by without Irvine Meadows, but Shuster will have blown up a chunk of the social mortar that draws many of us together.

So tell us, Harry: What does “do unto others” mean to you?