The NFL's Search for El Dorado

League Is Driven To Fill Hole in L.A. But Is It Fool's Gold?

Paul Tagliabue, then commissioner, announced the NFL's intention to give Los Angeles an expansion team at a 1999 news conference at Memorial Stadium. The team went to Houston, which offered $195 million for a new stadium, and Bob McNair, who bid $700 million. (By Victoria Arocho -- Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES -- On a perfect day without a car in the parking lot, there is a crowd inside the Sports Arena, a dilapidated circle of a building that once housed many of Los Angeles's sports teams. You can see it through a tunnel outside the office of Pat Lynch, who runs Memorial Coliseum across the street.

The crowd does not scream, does not talk, does not stir. It simply sits, a mass lost in rapture, until you walk through the tunnel, into the lights and realize this is not a crowd at all but thousands of inflatable mannequins placed here for the filming of a Will Ferrell movie on figure skating.

"Pretty creepy, huh?" says one of Lynch's assistants, walking down the silent concourse.

These days, aside from USC football across the street and the stray religious revival in the Sports Arena, Lynch is in charge of one of the largest movie lots in Southern California. The Ferrell film is only the latest to be shot in the arena, while this year several commercials have been set in the coliseum, starring everyone from Kenny Mayne to Dr. Drew.

Still, as the man who runs the most obvious site for an NFL team in Los Angeles, Lynch isn't here to be in the movie business. To prove it, he walks to the back of his office, where a pile of oversize cardboard photographs is stacked against the wall. Each is a different plan for the coliseum's future glory, presented on an easel at a news conference only to disappear because of a lack of funds, political squabbles or the NFL's lack of interest.

"We understand it's the NFL's game, we know it's their call," Lynch says with almost a bemused sigh. "This has been so long."

The most obvious relationship has been the most elusive pursuit. Eleven years have passed since the Raiders left the coliseum and the Rams abandoned Anaheim, leaving the nation's second-largest television market without a football team. The league, with a new commissioner, Roger Goodell, would like to change this, feeling Los Angeles is too rich to ignore. But there is also reason to think they are no closer. Mainly because Los Angeles has done the thing Washington wouldn't when confronted with a sports monster roaring at its door.

It wouldn't give public money simply to build a new stadium.

A Tab the City Won't Pay

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The coliseum is crumbling. As a modern NFL stadium it lacks plentiful restrooms, abundant concessions and seats close to the field. There is no other suitable option, which means a remodeled coliseum or a new stadium. Currently the league is considering two possibilities -- gutting the coliseum or starting from scratch on a plot of land in Anaheim. Both stadiums will cost roughly $800 million and somebody is going to have to pay for it.

And that somebody won't be the taxpayers.

"It's impossible," said Bernard Parks, the city's former police chief who is now a City Council member representing the 8th District, which includes Memorial Coliseum. "There is no stomach here to change and cave on public funds."

But it's not just Los Angeles. Ever since state Proposition 13 passed in 1978, changing how taxpayer money is spent, California cities have regularly rejected attempts to extract public funds for new stadiums, which is why three of what are widely considered to be the worst stadiums in the NFL are in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland.