L.A. Scores a Touchdown for Good Sense

It was supposed to be a classic contest.

Texas versus Tinseltown.

Houston energy executive Robert McNair versus Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz.

At stake: the 32nd franchise in the National Football League.

But it turned out to be as over-hyped as the average Super Bowl, the boringly one-sided game in which the NFL crowns its “world” champion each year.

Houston won easily. And L.A.’s team of superstars (which included no less than Tom Cruise in a supporting role, and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle as Mr. Deep Pockets) withdrew in presumably ignominious defeat.

I write “presumably” because I don’t know anyone here who really considers the outcome a setback for Los Angeles. Indeed, most Angelenos are utterly unfazed by it all.

For their part, the football-mad citizens of Houston may yet rue the day they let McNair wow the NFL with a $1-billon offer: $700 million as his franchise fee and another $300 million to build a new football stadium.

To begin with, the estimated cost of a new Houston stadium includes about $200 million in local tax revenues. I don’t know any public works project, in Texas or anywhere else, that ever comes in at the original cost, so Houstonians should keep their wallets handy while they’re in such a generous mood.

And a hefty tax bill is only the start of what the good burghers of Texas’ bayou country will pay for the right to root for a new football team to replace their Oilers, who now play in Nashville and call themselves the Titans.

Houston fans also will have to ante up Personal Seat License fees. That is upfront money, anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, which NFL owners charge fans for the right to buy season tickets. And once they’ve got those suck . . . --er--those fans at the game, they charge even more for parking, food and other concessions, and all those geegaws in the new team’s official colors. All this for a franchise that, if the lackluster performance of Cleveland’s new team is any indication, will lose games for many years to come.

Pretty nice racket the NFL has got going, eh?

So you can understand why I was starting to worry when it looked like the NFL was going to give Ovitz and Co. the right to foist yet another pro football team on Los Angeles, to replace our long-departed, and unlamented, Rams and Raiders. And why it’s hard to mourn a “defeat” that has saved lots of folks here (besides Ovitz and his partners) a whole lot of money.

Spare me any lamentations for the “average fan” in Los Angeles who is now relegated to watching pro football on television. They’ve never had it so good. With no home team here whose games the TV networks are obligated to broadcast, we now get the best games of the week. (It also helps that the networks are desperate to keep their steadily declining ratings for TV football at least respectable.)

And there is no need to worry about the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the historic stadium that both the Rams and Raiders played in--and abandoned--in different eras. Freed of a pro football tenant, that venerable facility truly has begun a new era.

Retrofitted after the Northridge earthquake, it looks as good as ever and is turning a tidy profit as the site of college football and international soccer matches--some of which draw bigger (and better-behaved) crowds than the Rams or Raiders did.

And the Exposition Park area around the Coliseum looks better than it has since the 1984 Olympics. A new science museum draws record crowds, particularly families with small children. So a new generation of Angelenos is being raised with fond memories of the Coliseum area--memories that don’t include pro football.

In 1995, when the Rams and Raiders left town, I was the first journalist to write that the NFL needs Los Angeles more than we need them. It’s still true. And it must remain L.A.’s rallying cry even as other civic leaders may try to pick up where Ovitz left off. They are surely well-intentioned but also misguided--as Ovitz’s sad experience should make clear.

By expressing even the slightest interest in an NFL team, Angelenos only give greedy NFL owners leverage to use against cities that fear losing their home team. The current candidates for this cynical shell game include Minneapolis, Buffalo and Phoenix.

This sham must be stopped. Which is why City Councilman Joel Wachs, who did such an admirable job protecting taxpayers’ interests when the new Staples Center was proposed, must follow through on his promise to put an initiative on the local ballot that would make it illegal to spend tax revenues to bring pro football back to Los Angeles.

That might not stop NFL owners from flirting with L.A. to extort money from other cities. But it would make it clear to everyone that if some fat cat wants to move his football team here, he’ll foot the bill himself and not get a cent from us.