The Right Play Could Win NFL Back

At its March Madness soiree in Phoenix, the National Football League performed what it hopes is a shotgun wedding between Michael Ovitz and Ed Roski. Get a unified, workable bid in place by Sept. 15, Los Angeles was told, and franchise No. 32 is yours. If not, Houston’s complete package is its destination.

At the same time, Al Davis has been crooning, “Please release me, let me go . . . “ to Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. The Los Angeles City Council voted that they’d rather buy bus tickets for aspiring fire ants and killer bees than welcome back the Raiders. But Inglewood, long since jilted by the NFL, only has eyes for Al.

If Ovitz and Roski can do a deal presenting Ovitz (the league’s favorite ownership candidate) and decent financing at the Coliseum site, the case is closed. And if the Happy Wanderer, Davis, manages to schlepp the Raiders down here again, No. 32 goes to Houston.

There is, however, a respectable chance that neither will happen. If not, even at this late date, there’s a reasonable shot for Orange County (the city of Anaheim) to snatch No. 32. Here’s how.

When the NFL awarded No. 31 to Cleveland, there was no ownership in place. The league conducted what amounted to an auction to determine it.

Anaheim obviously can’t put together an ownership and stadium deal in six months. But it could offer a good site and something just as important to the NFL: public money. Houston has $200 million of it. Public money means commitment, with no looming political landmines.

Anaheim has supplied public funding--some $30 million--to Disney for the refurbishing of Edison International Field. It has also considered building a football stadium in its Sportstown development, so the site is there. The city’s geographic location is nearly as good as downtown L.A.--and much more palatable to the league. The only question is the city’s resolve to scrape together, say, half of Houston’s commitment.

By about mid-July, the NFL will begin to get a case of the whips and the jingles at the prospect of facing the TV networks at the next contract negotiations wearing tatters. League owners, the vast majority of whom want No. 32 in the Los Angeles area, might then be willing to consider a variation of the Cleveland model.

The NFL would necessarily commit, with the aid of the city, to the construction of a $450-million, 80,000-seat, Super Bowl-ready stadium. Anaheim would be head and shoulders above local rivals.

One obstacle for Anaheim is that an Orange County proposal to the NFL already went down in flames. That was the Millennium Plan for El Toro. Building a football stadium on the periphery of an expansive metropolitan area, as the plan envisioned, is the summit of folly.

If the NFL can be convinced that Anaheim is not El Toro, which shouldn’t take more than a map, there could be a team here early in the next century. It would probably be called “Los Angeles,” however.

James F. Grier is an arbitrator and mediator in Santa Ana.

The correct address for the Southern California Youth Entrepreneurship Initiative Inc., which Don Herman wrote about on March 21, is P.O. Box 2364, Newport Beach CA 92659.