The NFL Won’t Play Bountiful Uncle

Has the National Football League finally gotten the message that it needs Los Angeles more than we need them?

Some hopeful city and county officials think so and will make a noteworthy gesture of reconciliation Monday to the rich, powerful sports league they have fought to a political standoff--and beaten in court on one occasion.

But while the gesture is both classy and appropriate, local officials should not expect the NFL to offer anything in return, except for more unrealistic demands on the public treasury. Taxpayers should have none of that.

The gesture is the unveiling of a plaque at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum honoring the late NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, to be installed in the stadium’s peristyle. The peristyle is the Coliseum’s most distinctive architectural feature. It includes other bronze plaques commemorating the two Summer Olympics held there, along with other major events, like John F. Kennedy’s speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, and noteworthy people, like Pope John Paul II, who have graced the old stadium.

Rozelle certainly belongs in the Coliseum’s historic honor roll. He was the quintessential local boy who made good. He was born in South Gate and attended Compton Community College before beginning his career as an NFL executive with the then-Los Angeles Rams. Rozelle became the league’s commissioner in 1960 and soon began negotiating the lucrative television contracts that transformed pro football into today’s multibillion-dollar sports enterprise. He retired to Rancho Santa Fe in 1989 and died there three years ago.

But not all of Rozelle’s history with the Coliseum was upbeat. He allowed the Rams to leave for Anaheim in 1980, then fought efforts to bring a new team to the Coliseum. When the Oakland Raiders relocated here, the Coliseum Commission had to join that team’s owner, Al Davis, in suing Rozelle to force the NFL to accept the move. That successful lawsuit opened an era of franchise movement in the NFL, which has seen dozens of teams move or threaten to.

I’ve long suspected that the NFL powers-that-be, which include not only Rozelle’s successors in the league office but 30 team owners, have never forgiven Los Angeles for its role in the Raiders’ lawsuit. Obviously, the Coliseum Commission (an agency operated by the city, county and the state) is hoping a plaque in Rozelle’s memory will ease any lingering resentment.

They also hope that NFL officials who attend the unveiling ceremony will take a look around the Coliseum at Exposition Park, especially its popular new museums and other amenities, and realize the neighborhood is not nearly so bad as the images created by a dozen years of Raiders’ crowds.

If so, the wishful thinking goes, the NFL may finally put a new franchise in the Coliseum to bring balance to the NFL schedule when a new team begins play in Cleveland in 1999.

But such eminently logical thinking does not always apply in the self-delusional world of the NFL. After all, this is an entity that just convinced four television networks to pay a grotesquely inflated price ($17.6 billion) to televise its football games for the next eight years. The resulting hubris does not bode well for rational thinking by NFL owners.

Consider how NFL sources continue to float their own wishful scenario for Los Angeles: that any day now some prosperous and respected local business leader will put together an awesome amount of up-front money as a franchise fee (bidding is likely to start at $400 million) and also come up with the added money (bidding here starts at $350 million) to build a new stadium to replace the Coliseum.

Once upon a time this businessman-on-a-white horse was going to be former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley. Later it was News Corp. magnate Rupert Murdoch. Depending on whom you talk to these days, it will be former MCA chairman Lew Wasserman or Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood superagent and Disney executive who now runs a Toronto-based entertainment company.

But if any of those gentlemen is half as smart as I give them credit for being, none of them is going to spend almost a billion dollars to field a team that will play at most a dozen times a season and build a Taj Mahal that will be used on maybe twice that many dates annually. The economics don’t make sense.

Unless, of course, some suckers are found to help foot the bill. Which is where Los Angeles taxpayers come in.

The NFL does not talk about it as much, or as loudly, as its new TV contracts, but the league is determined to put no team in Los Angeles unless public money is spent on a new stadium. If L.A. continues to hang tough--as we should--and forces the NFL to return with no significant public investment, it would set a precedent that taxpayers from San Diego to New England would note and probably try to replicate.

So don’t count on seeing NFL games at the Coliseum again anytime soon. But do drop by to see the plaque commemorating Pete Rozelle. Just keep your hands on your wallet.