| Page 2 of 5 < > |
The NFL's Search for El Dorado
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)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
"The voters have made it clear they are very suspicious of how public officials spend their money," Parks said.
Perhaps the NFL did not understand this when it began the process of first trying to keep the Rams and Raiders in the area and then set about bringing a new team to town when the others departed. After all, the league had become accustomed to extracting public funds from each municipality it touched. Jacksonville, Fla., gave freely when it was awarded an expansion team, while St. Louis, Baltimore and Cleveland anted up for the right to make themselves truly big league and get an NFL team to return to their town.
But in 1999, when the league was ready to award an expansion franchise, with a stated preference that that city be Los Angeles, L.A. offered infrastructure improvements around the coliseum while Houston stormed in with $195 million for a new retractable-roof stadium. It didn't hurt that Houston businessman Bob McNair said he would give the league $700 million for the team while two groups of competing bidders in Los Angeles offered just $500 million each for the franchise.
Such has been the problem with Los Angeles and the NFL. The more the NFL demands, the less the city will bend.
"It's not give and take with the NFL, it's been give and give," says Zev Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles County supervisor who approves of remodeling Memorial Coliseum but not at any cost.
Real estate investor Bill Chadwick, an assistant labor secretary in the Ford administration and a member of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission -- a once-politically fractured board that oversees the downtown stadium -- has taped on his mirror at home a single question:
"Can you explain it to a mother in Fresno?"
He used this as a guide in 1999, when as a negotiator representing the governor at the time, Gray Davis, he spent six weeks trying to hammer out a deal with Goodell, then the league's point man on Southern California.
Today, a few more cities are taking similar stances, forcing owners to find other ways to fund their new stadiums. He wonders if this is perhaps yet another trend Los Angeles is famous for starting, like fashion and music.
A Fractured and Embittered Base
The mass of freeways around this area carries cars through a complex web of communities that weave in and out of the city map, making it difficult to know exactly where you are when stuck in the bottleneck. Politically the area is just as clogged. City governments conflict with county governments, which fight with the state. A consensus on anything is hard to come by.
Asked what harms the NFL's return to Los Angeles, David Carter, a Southern California-based sports business consultant who also teaches at USC, names four things:
ยท The political factionalism of the region.
