Pro Football in L.A. Back in the Spotlight

Billionaires have tried and failed. So have political heavyweights, business visionaries, entertainers such as Tom Cruise and Garth Brooks. For eight years, with no luck, people have been trying to bring a professional football team back to Los Angeles.

Today, owners of the National Football League are expected to begin trying again, weighing competing proposals to relocate an NFL team at either the Rose Bowl in Pasadena or at a new stadium that the league would build in Carson. Proponents of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum -- former home to the Rams and Raiders -- will try to buttonhole owners to make their own pitch.

This time, some NFL insiders insist, it will happen: Somehow, they will bridge the gap that has separated the nation’s most popular sports league from its No. 2 television market.

“It is definitely going to happen. The question is, who and when?” said Minnesota Vikings owner Red McCombs, who is attending the meeting in Philadelphia. The stadium proposals are not on the agenda but expected to be discussed. “It would be unrealistic to think that with the NFL being the unquestionable hottest entertainment property in the United States ... [it] wouldn’t have a place in the greatest market in the United States,” McCombs said.

Then again, much about L.A.’s relationship with the NFL in recent years has seemed either unrealistic or improbable, since losing the Rams to Anaheim and then to St. Louis and the Raiders back home to Oakland.

Today, there appears to be no shortage of franchises interested in moving to the Los Angeles area. The three front-runners, at least according to media speculation, are the San Diego Chargers, the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. NFL owners say there is little chance that an expansion team will be created.

The NFL’s desire to have a team in the region has been frustrated chiefly by two cross-cutting factors: the ambivalence of Southern Californians, who have been insistent that they don’t want public funds expended on a professional football team, and the intense competition among backers of rival stadiums.

The league’s history of leveraging one site against another was part of the reason a coalition of local businessmen decided in June to pull the plug on their plans to build a 64,000-seat football stadium next to Staples Center, according to one partner in the effort.

“It’s unfortunate, but all the competition means we’re further and further away from trying to find the right solution,” said Tim Leiweke, president of Anschutz Entertainment Group.

The competition arises partly because the Los Angeles area has two large, historic stadiums, the Rose Bowl, which is pushing 81and the 80-year-old Coliseum. Although both have powerful champions, neither has the modern amenities the NFL demands, giving rise to proposals over the years for new stadiums at Hollywood Park, in Carson, Irvine and Irwindale, not to mention the Staples-adjacent site in downtown Los Angeles. There was even a suggestion that Dodger Stadium be moved and a football stadium built in Chavez Ravine. Lately, there has been some discussion of Anaheim as a potential site.

Of these, it is the idea of a Carson stadium that is ascendant at the moment.

A new stadium could deal a death blow to the Rose Bowl, the Coliseum or both. The Rose Bowl’s position is especially perilous because it almost certainly would lose UCLA football to a new stadium, whereas the Coliseum probably would keep USC.

Calling it a fight for survival, Rose Bowl officials began their quest for an NFL team last year. They engaged investment banker John Moag, who has successfully completed several high-profile sports deals, including moving the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore.

NFL officials and many owners appear to like the Rose Bowl, site of five of the 37 Super Bowls. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue attended his first Rose Bowl game this year and referred to the stadium as “an institution.”

That said, in order to bring a team to Pasadena, Moag must work within confining parameters. Not only is he asking the league to pay for the stadium to be rebuilt, he has proposed that Pasadena control the venue and charge rent. The city would ask for eight Super Bowls over 30 years, an unprecedented commitment by the league.

Meanwhile, Moag is straddling two worlds, trying to please preservationists and an exacting community by keeping the low-slung bowl design, while also trying to meet the needs of the NFL, which favors putting fans closer to the field with a more vertical seating arrangement.

There have been rumblings of opposition from some Arroyo Seco residents, who worry that NFL fans would intensify traffic and congestion in the surrounding neighborhoods during game days.

“The NFL crowd isn’t like the UCLA crowd,” complained resident Bo Goldsen. “They’re rough, rowdy, drunk.”

On Monday night, the Pasadena City Council heard comments from residents who appeared evenly divided between those who opposed the plan and those who saw it as a financial opportunity. The council was expected to vote late Monday on the proposal.

Another challenge the Rose Bowl faces, Leiweke said, is scheduling enough major events to make the project financially feasible. Moag’s plan calls for no more than 25 events a year that draw 20,000 or more people: 13 NFL games, seven UCLA football games, the Rose Bowl game, as well as concerts and soccer games. Leiweke said the downtown proposal factored in 40 to 50 events a year.

Moag said his Rose Bowl numbers add up, adding that his estimates are conservative.

For Moag and the Rose Bowl backers, the biggest unknown sits 25 miles down the Harbor Freeway. The Carson site, where Michael Ovitz once dreamed of putting a Spanish-style stadium called the Hacienda, has reemerged as a place of great interest. Ovitz, the Hollywood deal-maker, extolled the virtues of the Carson site in a presentation this spring to a group of NFL owners at league meetings in Palm Beach, Fla. He was invited to the meeting, as was the Rose Bowl group.

A source familiar with the Carson deal said the developer of the site would be GMS Realty of San Diego. The company’s chief executive, William Gerrity, could not be reached for comment.

If the NFL were to build in Carson, the stadium would be located on landfill near the newly constructed Home Depot Center, the Anschutz group’s massive soccer and tennis facility, which also will serve as the summer training-camp home for the Chargers.

For the NFL to build a stadium on its own when a city doesn’t even have a team would be unorthodox but not unprecedented. The league broke ground on Cleveland Browns Stadium in 1997, a year before the expansion team had an owner and two years before its inaugural kickoff.

Carson city officials, residents and business leaders said they had heard little about the revived stadium proposal. “I doubt whether it’s serious,” said City Councilman Jim Dear.

The council is scheduled to discuss the matter tonight in closed session.

Supporters of the idea say a stadium would boost Carson’s sagging retail-tax base as well as its civic self-esteem. The largely industrial city of 90,000 has been plagued by corruption scandals, including Mayor Daryl Sweeney’s recent indictment on federal charges.

“I’m all for it because I’m a big football fan,” said Bill Schwerin, who manages a mobile home park next to the proposed site. He was sitting in his office beneath a Los Angeles Rams clock. “It also would definitely bring more money to the city. They’d have concerts there, all that good stuff.”

Stadium opponents say it would bring too much traffic and pollution, and inevitably cost the city millions of dollars in redevelopment money. They said the San Diego and Harbor freeways, not to mention local streets, will be burdened enough when the 27,000-seat soccer stadium and Olympic training center opens in June at Cal State Dominguez Hills, near the proposed NFL site.

“It’s not the best use of taxpayer money,” said Carson activist and former Councilwoman Vera DeWitt, who also opposed Ovitz’s first project. “The only people who make out are the team owners. The city ends up with virtually nothing, except the glory of having a stadium.”

If proponents of the various Southern California sites agree on anything, it’s that the process of getting something built is so difficult that the plan must be innovative and enlightened. With that in mind, the Coliseum Commission offered last week to remove itself from all but policy matters if an NFL team returns to its stadium. The commission has been criticized in the past and partly blamed for the departure of the Rams and Raiders.

“It’s a major step for us,” Coliseum General Manager Pat Lynch said. “With the right open-mindedness and creativity, someone could really make something out of this. Hopefully, that’s the NFL.”

League officials have long been wary of the Coliseum, in part because of its location. Local officials have said some of those reservations stem from outdated stereotypes about the Exposition Park area.

“There is a subtext for why people have said the Coliseum is off the table,” said Los Angeles Councilman Eric Garcetti last week. “It has to do with the perception of what South Los Angeles is.”

Councilman Bernard C. Parks, whose district includes Exposition Park, said he would fly to Philadelphia to meet informally with team owners and show them that Los Angeles is serious about attracting a team to the Coliseum.

Last week, the L.A. City Council endorsed a proposed renovation of the Coliseum to make it NFL-ready. The project would cost an estimated $350 million to $400 million, but council members pledged that no public money would be spent on the plan.

The lone dissenter, Councilman Jack Weiss, charged that NFL team owners have a history of fleecing cities. “There’s no need to appear overeager. I don’t think that’s the way to negotiate with the league.”

Times staff writers Tina Daunt in Pasadena, Jessica Garrison and Mitchell Landsberg in Los Angeles, Paul Pringle in Carson and Kimi Yoshino in Orange County contributed to this report.

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Three stadium plans

National Football League owners are meeting in Philadelphia today and are expected to discuss competing proposals to relocate an NFL team at either the Rose Bowl in Pasadena or a new stadium in Carson. Proponents of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum want the NFL to also consider the former home of the Raiders and Rams.

The locations:

Rose Bowl, Pasadena

* Pros: A stylish redesign of a facility of historical significance. Proximity to a bustling business district. Experienced hand running the project in John Moag, who worked with the league to bring the Cleveland Browns franchise to a new stadium in Baltimore.

* Cons: Seating capacity (65,000) is on the low side, and cuts existing capacity by about 20,000. Proposed deal calling for a commitment of eight Super Bowls in 30 years, the team to pay rent and league to build a practice facility in Pasadena is steep.

The Coliseum, Los Angeles

* Pros: Politically favorable. Return of NFL could help revitalize Figueroa Corridor. Coliseum Commission is willing to turn stadium operation over to NFL tenant, allowing it to control revenue streams. No known overriding neighborhood opposition.

* Cons: Bad experiences with losing Rams and Raiders. Questions about available parking. Coliseum has offered no new proposals or financing plans since the bid for an expansion team in 1999.

Carson site

* Pros: Freeway access. NFL could develop its own stadium on the land and control revenue streams from the outset. Proximity to Home Depot Center, summer training camp of the San Diego Chargers. Neighborhood opposition is less structured than that for Rose Bowl.

* Cons: Land is on a former toxic dump site. Lack of an existing structure leaves open questions of municipal responsibilities. Lost out to Coliseum in 1999 when NFL considered both sites for an expansion franchise.

Source: Times staff research