Making a New Pitch
On a day heavy on hyperbole, it was left to Alexi Lalas to deliver some light relief.
“I can’t feel anything below my waist right now after that ride,” the Galaxy defender said after he and Pete Sampras stepped down from a bulldozer that had jostled and bumped them across a short stretch of the campus at Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Tuesday’s occasion was the groundbreaking ceremony for the Anschutz Entertainment Group’s $120-million sports complex that will begin rising today from the dirt clods of what were once the flower fields of Carson.
It was a hot morning, and while Sampras sported a golf--sorry, tennis--shirt and slacks, Lalas was uncomfortably warm in a suit.
“I want to thank my new friend, Pete Sampras,” Lalas said. “I called him last night and said, ‘Hey, is this like a really formal gig?’ He said, ‘Oh, everyone’s gonna be there; you’ve gotta wear a suit and tie.’ He’s got a really good sense of humor.”
While civic, university and sports leaders praised the project and its anticipated benefits, it was Don Garber, Major League Soccer’s commissioner, who provided the only real news of the day.
The Galaxy, he said, will host the MLS championship game in 2003 and the league’s All-Star game in 2004 at its new 27,000-seat stadium, the centerpiece of the 85-acre sports complex.
The stadium will take 15 months to complete and is scheduled to open on June 1, 2003, according to Tim Leiweke, AEG’s president.
“The Galaxy will become much more of an international team now,” he said. “We’re going to bring in world-class teams to play against the Galaxy and, in turn, get the Galaxy out on the road to play against them. So the branding of the Galaxy is going to be more international.”
Adjacent to the soccer stadium will be a 13,000-seat tennis stadium. Scheduled to open July 1, 2003, this will be the home of the Pete Sampras Tennis Academy and, possibly, the site of several significant tournaments.
“Maybe one day we can get a pro tournament here,” Sampras said. “I see Bob Kramer over there [in the audience], who runs the [men’s tournament] at UCLA. Maybe one day we can get the tournament here.”
Or perhaps an even bigger one.
“I really hope so,” Sampras said. “The players love playing in L.A., I can tell you that, talking to all the top players in the world. It would be a shame not to get a big tournament here.”
Sampras said he had moved from California to Florida as a teenager simply to find a better training facility and stronger practice opponents. Future players won’t have to do that, he said.
“When this thing gets built, people will see a see a lot of pros they can practice against,” he said. “People on the West Coast are going to come here. Once you have the environment, we’ll have a central thing here in L.A.
“I look forward to spending a lot of time here and helping the young guys play the sport.”
A new Olympic velodrome for cycling and a track and field facility also will be built, but it is soccer that is the main focus of the sports complex.
The site will serve as the national training center for nine of U.S. Soccer’s 10 national teams, starting in August 2003.
The defending world champion women’s national team probably will train and play games in Carson before leaving for the fourth Women’s World Cup, in China in September 2003.
Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer’s secretary general, said the only exception for now will be the under-17 men’s national team, which will remain in residency camp in Bradenton, Fla., until expiration of the USSF’s current contract with that facility.
Leiweke said the nation’s second soccer-specific stadium, after the one built by Lamar Hunt in Columbus, Ohio, “will put soccer in this country on the map.”
The fact that AEG is in talks with “a few” NFL teams, including the San Diego Chargers, interested in using the site for their summer training camp, will not shift the focus of the complex, Leiweke said.
“At the end of the day, this is about soccer,” he said. “We have never had a world-class [soccer] facility in this country and, no offense against Columbus, but we needed to get a true European-style stadium here where the fans can be intimately involved in the game, with a roof to keep the noise in.
“That’s why soccer does so well [in Europe], because fans do make a difference in this game.... We’ve never had that here. We’re going to have that now. Instead of playing to 80,000 empty seats, we’re going to have a packed house almost every night and it’s going to be a wonderful environment.”
Staff Writer Lisa Dillman contributed to this report.
