Tackling an Edifice Complex

So it’s Tuesday, a big day for Southern California sports fans, and in Carson, Donna Gaughenbaugh has just come to the door of her double-wide. Up close, what you see are birds twittering around the potted palms and Donna, a housewife, wiping her hands on a tea towel. The longer view includes a scruffy, 157-acre vacant lot that abuts this mobile home park on one side.

You say, Donna--did you know this mobile home park sits right next door to where Michael Ovitz wants to build a football stadium? Did you know that, as we speak, he’s pitching the NFL on a $300-million, 78,000-seat “mission-style” extravaganza? Did you know he wants to put it right there, on the other side of that storm drain and chain-link fence? Imagine the noise, the crowds, the traffic. Were you aware of this, Donna?

“Oh, yes.”

Well? Bet you’re thinking petitions and clipboards. Bet you’re thinking lawsuits. Bet you’re thinking pickets that say Not in My Back Yard. . . .

“Oh, I don’t know. Who cares? The more the merrier.”

Pardon?

“Hey, Carson might as well be famous for something. It’s better ‘n bingo, I suppose.”

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You know the topic is Professional Football in Southern California when even the suburbanites who stand to be stuck next door to it can barely muster a shrug. It’s hard to overstate the fiery nonchalance that has characterized this latest round of alleged “NFL fever.” Picture 15 million smiling sports fans going, “Hey, either way. Whatever, dude.”

Almost four years after the departure of the Rams and the Raiders, the pain of losing pro football here has, for everyone but a few millionaires, clearly faded to an occasional twinge. Talk to a Southern Californian on the subject of getting a new franchise and you feel like you’re talking to an old divorcee on the subject of remarriage: They tend to smile a melancholy little smile and say things like, “Ah, never say never. Still, life is good as it is.”

The hype this week, as the NFL heard competing pitches in Kansas City from the Coliseum and Ovitz, was that we’re all just slavering for a football team. But the reality is more like, if it happens, it happens. Que sera, sera.

The football fans would be glad to see it, but they also have USC and UCLA and umpteen TV channels. The non-fans could do without it, but far be it from them to begrudge their neighbor his mass leisure event. The civic boosters say pro football would be nice, but it’s hardly key to the ol’ image. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan didn’t even accompany the Coliseum people to the NFL meeting; he stayed home to hold a press conference urging parents to read to their kids.

Not even the bizarro architecture of the proposed stadium in Carson has managed to generate any heat. Which is odd, considering that the thing is basically a roiling nest of sports and commerce built in the shape of a church.

But nope. No takers. Good grief, sports fans! Are we laid back, or what?

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Actually, the correct answer here is, Or what. There are some sports about which we are anything but laid back. When the Arcadia City Council recently took up the shortage of athletic fields for youth soccer, the meeting was so overrun with impassioned suburbanites that they had to set up lawn chairs outside City Hall.

Part of the apathy about pro football surely stems from the wealth of entertainment choices here. But part, too, has to do with what professional sports--and sports arenas--have become. To attend a big-league ballgame in a modern stadium now is to know without a doubt that you are a mere pawn in the marketing campaign of life. It would be going too far to say the commercialism ruins the fun, but it does remind you that this home field isn’t your home.

Add to that a sport in which the stars look more like pumped-up robots than fellow humans and a home team that was as domestically abusive as the Raiders were, and it’s hard to wax too nostalgic. Especially four years down the line. Still, it’s also hard to be bitter when you’re the world’s capital of entertainment. Hey, the show must go on.

And if it’s not your show, if it’s mostly just a show for the millionaires and their friends, who are you to begrudge some corporate guy the chance to make a halftime toast to the corporate guys in the next box? The more the merrier, as they say. Better ‘n bingo, I suppose.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.