NFL in L.A.? Nothing Turning to Something

After 10 years of waiting, the temptation is to offer a Randy Moss-like gesture to our acquaintances in the NFL. That, of course, would be crude. They, of course, deserve it.

For no other reason than it is the week of Super Bowl XXXIX, which is also the Xth anniversary of the last time we did official business with these people, the subject of the NFL in Los Angeles -- Whither goest? When goest? Why goest? -- is worth placekicking around one more time.

The best guess is that sometime in the next three years, an NFL boot will actually sail through our goalposts. Yes, Virginia, there is pro football in our future.

This conclusion does not come easily -- not after 10 years of listening to pipe dreams and chewing on baloney. It comes despite a long-developed callus of cynicism, made nearly impenetrable by selfish agendas, incredible greed and thousands of lies, neither white nor little. Think of the NFL as a musician and Los Angeles as its accordion.

To capture the magnitude of all that has been said and written about the NFL in Los Angeles in the last 10 years, one needs only to summon clippings from the newspaper library. When the pickup truck arrives and unloads, the overwhelming impression is one of vast forests being leveled in the pursuit of reporting and documenting nothing. It is like reading 10 years of Seinfeld episodes. Lots of activity and laughs, leading nowhere.

There is one thread that runs through all these stories -- a phrase uttered by many in the NFL: “We need to keep our options open.”

To be sure, our city has contributed its share of potholes to the road leading back to the NFL.

An early contender to fill our pro football void was Peter O’Malley, then the Dodger owner. He had the land at Chavez Ravine, the vision of how this could be done, the money to invest several million in the foreplay the NFL calls due diligence, and an agenda that was actually driven more by a sense of community than an urge for obscene profit.

That, of course, ended when then-Mayor Richard Riordan, not understanding the magnitude of the moment or the depth of feeling with which it would be received, asked O’Malley to back off so that the political agenda of downtown and Coliseum interests could be served first. Not only did O’Malley back off, in both anger and dismay, but he also sold the Dodgers to Fox.

It has been argued that one O’Malley action had nothing to do with the other. Maybe.

It has been argued that, although Riordan was at fault for not having a feel for the moment, O’Malley was equally at fault for not suggesting where Riordan could put his request. Probably.

It has also been argued that O’Malley was L.A.’s best shot because he had that owner pedigree the NFL loves, that he was somebody they’d welcome into their club, and that that intangible would have carried his bid a long way. Absolutely.

There was another decent shot a couple of years ago, when the Staples Center people, Phil Anschutz and lieutenant Tim Leiweke, joined with young Casey Wasserman to put forth a plan for a downtown football stadium. They had options on enough land to do it, they had visions of a further energized downtown and they certainly had the money, Anschutz already having been responsible for revitalizing the area around his Staples Center by building it. Anschutz had also taken one of the early stabs at an NFL franchise, partnering with Ed Roski.

But quicker than you could say Mayor Riordan, the Coliseum interests weighed in and the Anschutz group backed out.

The prevailing theory is that Leiweke floated the trial balloon for Anschutz, who never really has embraced the NFL idea, and when the Coliseum interests balked at being left out, Anschutz balked at getting into a civic catfight.

Now, the options on the land for that stadium have been sold and the only place left with sufficient downtown land is, of course, the Coliseum.

The closest call was the Coliseum’s near miss in October 1999. The NFL had made an expansion franchise, the 32nd in the NFL, L.A.’s to lose. In a move that surprised even the NFL -- and set back the Los Angeles effort to this day -- Houston billionaire Robert McNair walked into an NFL meeting, where it had been established that the going price for a franchise fee would be about $600 million ... and offered $700 million.

The NFL, being the NFL, took the money and ran. Los Angeles, being Los Angeles, went to the beach.

In 10 years, there have been so many other stops and starts. Lots of players, some real and some pretend. Great lines, moments and laughs.

The late Marvin Davis kicked lots of tires but never let his hand reach all the way to his wallet. Eli Broad kicked some too and appeared to be poised to ride in on a white horse, then eventually rode off into the sunset.

Roski was around, quietly, always trying. Gray Davis got excited and unexcited, all in about one week, and eventually sent in Bill Chadwick, who didn’t get much done but is still around trying, now as president of the Coliseum Commission.

The cloud of Al Davis and another lawsuit hung around and still does, and his buddy, Councilman Nate Holden, long on enthusiasm and short on reality, even called a news conference to proclaim, with no equivocation, that Al and the Raiders were heading back to L.A.

Anaheim has teased and been teased back by the league. Same thing in Pasadena, where a veteran to these wars, John Moag, who paved the way for the Cleveland Browns’ move to Baltimore, has led the effort at the Rose Bowl and has ended up mostly frustrated.

The NFL held fast to its own feelings about the Coliseum, its owners apparently unable to erase memories of Raider games there, where visiting fans risked life and limb in pregame walks through parking lot pickup games that matched Hell’s Angels West versus Hell’s Angels East, only to arrive for further muggings in the stands.

Longtime former owner Art Modell, he who moved the Browns to Baltimore, is credited with the marquee quote about the Coliseum, one that has set the NFL tone for a decade.

“Trying to put a new dress on an old hooker is not the way I want to go dancing,” Modell said.

Los Angeles answered symbolically when one of the many stadium models set before the NFL fell and landed on the foot of Roger Goodell, league vice president of football operations. The injury required stitches.

And then there was Michael Ovitz, who played perfectly to the elements of rube among the NFL royalty and had a large segment of the owners convinced that a return to L.A. was a visa to Hollywood. He made Carson sound like Palos Verdes.

In the art of persuasion and selling, Ovitz missed no detail. Invited to bring his group of backers to The Times to showcase his Carson bid, in an attempt to get the paper’s editorial page endorsement, Ovitz had actor Tom Cruise sit next to The Times’ sports editor, a Notre Dame graduate. Cruise wore a Fighting Irish cap.

Of all the people in all these years involved in attempts to get the NFL back, perhaps the most perceptive was Fred Rosen, former chief executive of Ticketmaster and onetime chairman of Riordan’s appointed group called Football LA. After dealing with the NFL for a while, Rosen was quoted, in September 1999, as saying, “In business, if you can’t get to the end of the deal, it becomes time to say goodbye.... If the league doesn’t understand the city of L.A., then we have to walk.”

Los Angeles has never quite done that. And now may be the last chance for the NFL before the City of Angels adopts, as its favorite sports play, the corner kick.

It will happen this time because:

* Commissioner Paul Tagliabue is getting near the end of his reign and is known to view the lack of a franchise in Los Angeles as unfinished business.

* After years of not quite believing our Wall-of-China stand against dolling out public money for the betterment of sports millionaires -- READ OUR LIPS: NO PUBLIC MONEY -- the NFL is now poised to build a stadium itself and figure out ways to get paid back by the eventual tenant.

* The NFL is fully aware it has lost a generation of children growing up to be pro football fans, to buy tickets and T-shirts and feel some sort of local affinity for the game.

* There will be, in the not-too-distant future, a pay-per-view element in NFL television, and doing that without an engaged Los Angeles audience is not good business.

* The NFL has leveraged just about every ounce it can out of Los Angeles. Every team that wanted something hinted that it could go to L.A. if it didn’t get it, and, invariably, local fathers, horrified at the thought of losing their community ego to La-La Land, coughed it up. Now, just about all the toys and trinkets and new stadiums have been dished out, and the NFL knows you can only squeeze an orange so much.

* Finally, there is a wild card, a newcomer, on the scene.

His name is David Israel, a former sportswriter, who plied his considerable skills during the wonderful old days of journalism-by-the-seat-of-their-pants at the L.A. Herald Examiner. He went on to fame and fortune as a Hollywood writer and producer and is now a member of the Coliseum Commission, which is poised to deal, once again, with the NFL.

Israel is tough, smart and Hollywood, but in the best sense. He is newspaper cynical and just impatient enough to keep the proceedings on point. He has no agenda, other than to get something done. He has no relatives running for office or illusions of big jobs at the end of the deal. He knows the foibles and the fools, and tends to tolerate neither.

He is the new guy in town on this issue, and this issue needs a new guy.

So, if L.A. fails this time, we can just blame the sportswriter, a daily occurrence anyway. And we can also start planning our responsive gesture to the league.

Even if it is crude, the NFL will deserve it.