Bringing NFL Back to L.A. Is a Lose-Lose Proposition

The next year or so should be a lot of fun, with the good citizens of Los Angeles and San Diego meeting in a match race to see who will emerge as the more miserable.

They’re just entering the starting gate, but San Diego has a considerable advantage because it has already sat across the negotiating table from Alex and Dean Spanos, the Donald Sterling-like owners of the Chargers, and has been ripped off.

*

SAN DIEGO will emerge more miserable if it loses its team, because that will mean the big city up the road got it, and the small-town citizens will hang their heads, believing everyone around the country will think less of San Diego for not having an NFL team.

Los Angeles will emerge more miserable if it gets the team, which means it will have endured the exhausting, frustrating process of pleasing the Spanos Goofs and the Anschutz Empire at the same time.

Along the way, there will be some satisfaction knowing the Chargers and the Anschutz Empire will also be miserable--haggling with each other.

The Anschutz Empire has already made a number of changes to a plan for a sports complex at Cal State Dominguez Hills so it can accommodate a new training camp for the Chargers.

But now the Chargers want to sign only a one-year lease beginning next summer, unless they are assured a hotel will be built nearby to house their players. They get that, and the Chargers will demand mints on every pillow every night.

*

AS YOU know, there’s talk of building a new playpen for a football team in Los Angeles and filling it with a crummy team that is essentially unloved elsewhere.

That would be the Chargers, who have gone 23-57 over the last five years. They have won six games, total, the last two seasons and at quarterback have Tom Thumb, who is hard to see from the upper deck of Qualcomm Stadium.

San Diego guaranteed Charger sellouts when the team insisted on a renovated stadium, so the city has had to dip into the general tax fund to buy millions of dollars’ worth of unsold tickets. This has generated tremendous animosity in the community.

Now the Chargers are turning their back on San Diego. They ushered the media out of their office space, because who needs good press when the city guarantees sellouts.

The team’s general manager doesn’t return phone calls to the beat reporter of the city’s biggest paper, which makes him a Mike Garrett copycat.

The Chargers close practices, I presume because the guys just lie around and do nothing. That would explain how this team has lost five consecutive games in each of the last five seasons. That’s hard to do in this age of NFL parity. And these guys could be all ours in a couple of years.

*

THE SPANOS Goofs have an escape clause in their rip-off deal with San Diego to leave after 2003 if they can persuade another city of dummies to make them richer. It doesn’t appear that L.A. qualifies as a city of dummies just now, but history is on the Chargers’ side, because every city that has lost an NFL team eventually goes stir crazy and surrenders everything to get one back.

In fact, it was Alex Spanos who said, after L.A. had lost pro football, that all the NFL had to do was wait 10 years, and like Baltimore and St. Louis, who had said good riddance, only to come back and do whatever the NFL wanted, L.A. would come begging.

L.A. will shortly begin season No. 8 without the NFL, and soon a budding group of beggars, led by Anschutz Empire point man Tim Leiweke, will go to New York to curry NFL favor. I believe Michael Ovitz made 23 of those trips the last time around.

The NFL is very good at welcoming all suckers and making them feel as if they are just a blown-up football away from having a team.

That’s how they get you hooked before talks begin to drive up the price. By the time Houston’s Bob McNair bid on an expansion franchise, the NFL had him overpaying by more than $100 million.

*

NOW YOU might have read in the newspaper last week that Leiweke said we could have a team by 2003, which made it clear Leiweke has no idea what he’s talking about. The Chargers aren’t available until after 2003, and only if they satisfy a list of items allowing them out of their lease, and only if the city of San Diego decides not to match any offer made to the team to move.

This is why you have to understand that Leiweke’s greatest strengths are Anschutz’s wealth, Anschutz’s unwillingness to speak and Leiweke’s own naivete.

Anschutz can get the NFL’s attention, but how far will he go with Leiweke? Leiweke has no worry about being second-guessed, because Anschutz runs from the media.

We do know, however, he has yet to approve the plan to go after a team, right now allowing Leiweke to pursue the idea only to see how far he can get.

He did the same thing with Ed Roski six years ago, telling Roski he didn’t think Roski could bring football to L.A., but in repayment for Roski’s making the Staples Center deal happen downtown when Anschutz didn’t think it would, he lent his name to the project. A short time later, he pulled out.

Leiweke, meanwhile, thinks he can walk on water these days. That’s frozen water, of course, because he’s the Kings’ president, and there might be a message there about missed expectations.

Leiweke expects to announce soon that he has a team and will be building a football stadium; he also expected to make that announcement while the Kings were playing in the Stanley Cup finals.

As a spectator, of course, I don’t want to see Leiweke scratched before the race begins, because I think it would be fun to have Shaq and Tom Thumb playing in the same town.

*

T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com.