The Man Who Can Bring Pro Football Back to L.A.

What you most miss in the continuing debate over bringing football back to Los Angeles is any hint that anyone, apart from potential investors, really cares whether it returns.

To return pro football to Los Angeles, and make it stay here, you need more than glib accounting. You need someone with the kind of charisma and drive Walter O’Malley brought to the Dodgers. You need someone who’ll say that bringing Los Angeles “an NFL team would be the culmination of all my childhood dreams.” That’s not what we’ve heard so far from oil baron Phil Anschutz. Or infotainment mogul Rupert Murdoch.

But that’s how Danny Villanueva Sr. once described his own ambition for an NFL franchise. The name of the onetime Rams-placekicker-turned-multimillion-aire-venture-capitalist hasn’t been heard much in the ensuing debate. But, then, the recent contention hasn’t been much towrite home about.

Overnight, the primary issue has shrunk from the question of exactly who will replace the Raiders to one of which NFL team might install itself in the Memorial Coliseum. So far, there have been no takers. And the NFL itself isn’t very encouraging.

The Coliseum is a national landmark whose history includes the Dodgers, the Rams, the Raiders, two Olympics and Billy Graham’s national debut. It’s easy to get to. It isn’t far from the site of the new Staples arena, while it’s adjacent to the neglected Sports Arena. It can hold 100,000 people.

But while the NFL’s disdain for the site may have as much to do with the stadium’s South Los Angeles location as its reputed obsolescence, it turns out to be easier to castigate league management than to change its collective, Manhattan-based mind. That the argument is stuck on this detail by itself flaunts the lack of a key leadership figure on this end of the football dialogue.

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who represents much of African American L.A., loves the Coliseum site. He’s committed to putting football back where it has fled twice in a generation. But this is a very tough sell for one local politician who’ll be term-limited out in 2001. It’s also fair to say that Ridley-Thomas is less interested in having football in Los Angeles than having it where he wants it.

Otherwise, local support for the NFL in the Coliseum is of variable depth. The chief boosters, Arena entrepreneurs Anschutz and Ed Roski, have compiled a promotional venture called New Coliseum. Their proposal would surmount the old arena with a paradisacal superstructure of elite seats and luxury boxes.

Most of the City Council remain uncommitted, however, and Mayor Richard Riordan has suggested his own sanction might slacken if the NFL vetoes the Coliseum. But even if the Coliseum is chosen, it’s also widely assumed that the city would have to invest millions in its renovation. This could put the proposal at the mercy of Councilman Joel Wachs’ arena-born initiative requiring voter approval of any use of public funds for private sports facilities.

The major site alternative, a football doppelganger for Dodger Stadium, has support from the Dodgers’ apparent new owner, Murdoch, and the united opposition of the surrounding neighborhoods. New stadium proposals for sites near Hollywood Park and the Convention Center are on the back burner. Meanwhile, since the NFL will be announcing its expansion plans in the coming year, local indecision could cost us a team.

What L.A. pro football needs most right now is a take-charge guy. Someone who has not just the money and expressed inclination to obtain or, more likely, nurture an NFL franchise team, but who also has the stature, in the community and the world of sports, to make the thing happen. Someone with true-believer qualifications like Villanueva’s.

First, Villanueva believes that football’s absence from this city is an urban disgrace. Second, he’s an NFL insider, with an acclaimed career with the Rams and the Dallas Cowboys. Third, he can afford to make it happen.

And, of course, Villanueva represents the region’s fastest-growing population segment. Villanueva was L.A’s first Chicano pro football star. He went on to become, at KMEX, the state’s outstanding Spanish-language sportscaster. Then he managed and partly owned KMEX’s parent corporation before selling his interest and forming his own investment firm, Bastion Capital. Bastion bought Univision’s Spanish-language competitor, Telemundo, which Bastion last November divided with a consortium headed by Sony Corp. The $540-million transaction reportedly left Bastion with majority equity in the company, just as it rocketed Telemundo stock to its 12-month high. It also left Villanueva in a far better position to realize his dream.

“Danny never knew how to lose money,” said Felix Gutierez, a long-time Villanueva-watcher who is vice president of the Freedom Forum, a national news media foundation. “This was something waiting to happen.”

It has been a year since Villanueva announced he was seriously seeking an NFL franchise with an all-pro consortium that includes retired ARCO chief executive Lodwrick Cook, former Cleveland linebacker and ambassador to the Bahamas Sidney Williams, and Green Bay Packers hall-of-famer Willie Davis. This partnership could afford the sticker price of a 1998 pro team.

To sweeten the deal, Villanueva offered to kick in $20 million of his own. “It’s just unbelievable that the second-largest market in the country should be without a major-league team,” he said at the time.

Now that Villanueva has a lot more money to play with, the main question seems to be: When will he re-emerge with his real proposal?

And, for that matter, just where might he want his new team to play?