The NFL's Search for El Dorado
League Is Driven To Fill Hole in L.A. But Is It Fool's Gold?

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 7, 2006

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

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.

"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:

· The political factionalism of the region.

· A sense that the NFL is disingenuous in its dealings with the region's various cities.

· Fan apathy.

· A soft corporate base that has already spread its money around six other professional sports teams and two major colleges and might not be willing to spend big on luxury suites and season tickets for a football team.

The NFL has considered sites all over this region called the Southland and it has never suffered each one's shortcomings for long. A major complaint among everyone in Los Angeles who has done business with the league is that it has often secretly turned its attention to a different site while still smiling at the one it had been negotiating with. For instance, even as the NFL worked deals to finalize a lease with the coliseum and a possible land purchase agreement with Anaheim this spring, it had talks with Dodgers owner Frank McCourt about building a football field next to Dodger Stadium atop Chavez Ravine, a hillside near downtown.

"I've never been involved in a deal like this," said Mark Ridley-Thomas, a member of the state assembly from Los Angeles who used to represent Parks's district and is a longtime advocate of bringing football back to the coliseum. "Periodically they create competition -- Carson one day and Pasadena the next. They tell us Carson is the first choice and then it's Pasadena, They're constantly moving the ball on us. They're always trying to leverage one venue against the next. There's something about Los Angeles that makes them drive up the price and that impedes the deal."

Then again, with so many political entities, there's a lot about Los Angeles that makes cutting a deal with one place very difficult.

As Neil Glat, the league's vice president for strategic planning and its point man on Los Angeles, says: "The reality is when you are dealing with a project of this scale you have to wade through a lot of complications. I think we're at a point where we understand how difficult it is" to build a stadium in Southern California.

A Very Expensive Lure

So what's in this for the NFL?

To buy a franchise in Los Angeles or Anaheim will cost a potential owner at least $1.5 billion. That's $800 million for the stadium -- which the league will pay for until it is bought back by the new owner -- and $700 million for the franchise. Both might be conservative figures. Construction costs have a way of climbing, and $700 million was what McNair paid seven years ago for the Texans. With five teams already worth more than $1 billion, according to the latest Forbes magazine estimates, who's to say the team's price this time, should it be an expansion team or otherwise, might not be more like $900 million?

Added to the stadium costs, it could become a $2 billion purchase.

And is anything -- even a state-of-the art stadium in Los Angeles or Anaheim -- worth that kind of money?

Apparently so, because there seem to be several willing buyers, among them the billionaire Larry Ellison or Philip Anschutz, who owns pieces of several sports teams including Major League Soccer's D.C. United and the Staples Center in Los Angeles, or Casey Wasserman, the grandson of the late movie mogul Lew Wasserman. And all of them understand the stakes are very different this time than in 1999 when they were outbid by McNair and Houston. For the league, this could be a perfect storm. It got an unexpected windfall from Houston's overwhelming bid seven years ago and still gets to put the Los Angeles market up for auction with a beautiful new stadium as the bait.

Then there is also Matt Leinart. The former USC star and Heisman Trophy winner grew up in nearby Santa Ana and admitted, after playing his first exhibition game with the Arizona Cardinals, that it was the first NFL game he had ever been to. He was the first of an era of kids since the Rams arrived in 1946 who had grown up in Los Angeles without a local pro football team.

"It's probably why I didn't like football much when I was a kid," he says.

As a child, he'd watch an occasional game, but often with disinterest, professing to like the Raiders but really having no passion for any team. It wasn't until he went to high school and became a football star that the game held any appeal to him .

This is something the league worries about. It's something a lot of people who care about the NFL in Los Angeles worry about.

"You've lost a generation," said Chadwick, of the coliseum commission.

But at what price? Yaroslavsky, the county supervisor with 2 million people in his district, says he receives "zero letters saying 'get us an NFL team.' "

"I was a season ticket holder for the Raiders. I was a nut, but I don't miss it," he adds. "First of all I get an extra game on television every Sunday. This isn't Charlotte where it's the only game in town or Green Bay or Lincoln, Nebraska. There are a lot of options here where an Angeleno can spend his sports dollar."

This has kind of been the dirty secret of Los Angeles. While many have worked tirelessly to bring football back here, there is a sense that many people simply don't care if it ever returns.

"We lived without a team for 10 years and we signed a new deal [with the NFL] that's a six-year deal. [A team in L.A.] certainly wasn't critical enough for us," says Ed Goren, the president of Fox Sports, which is based in Los Angeles.

'The Bar Is Higher in L.A.'

The NFL remains unsure what it wants to do. Memorial Coliseum could house a team in the middle of Los Angeles with close access to Hollywood and movie stars. But renovating the coliseum is tricky and costs could soar well past the supposed $800 million. It also means diving into the muddled political system of Los Angeles.

Anaheim gives the league something it craves -- control. The city will sell a plot of land near the Angels' stadium at a relatively low price for California real estate and the NFL can build its own stadium from the ground up.

This would be appealing. But does the NFL really want to make its splash in Orange County? It's the very subject the owners are weighing.

For now the league has committed $5 million to the study of each site, sending out teams of engineers and business analysts to see if it can get a decent read of what it can expect to spend and if there are enough corporations that will buy luxury suites and seats to make the deal worth their time.

"The bar is higher in L.A. to be successful," says Glat, the NFL's point man in Los Angeles. "It's not easy to put these deals together. And where it's an important market demographically, it's also a discerning market. You have to put a first-class facility out there and you have to put a first-class product on the field."

Which makes for a lot of risks when you're spending $2 billion and the city is paying almost nothing.

And some wonder if the league is simply dragging its feet.

"I don't think they want to do either of those sites," Yaroslavsky says.

Already the whispers are drifting around Los Angeles that the league remains infatuated with Dodger Stadium. And in many ways it might be the perfect place -- on private land, next to a successful baseball stadium, on top of a hill above downtown, away from all the hassles and infighting.

The league says it remains focused on the coliseum and Anaheim and has dedicated considerable time in its October meeting in New Orleans to a discussion about Los Angeles. The Chargers, Saints and Bills are all potential candidates to someday move and maybe fill the void. There has even been talk of two teams in the market, though Glat says it is unlikely they will both come at once. Perhaps a decision could come from there and another engagement between the NFL and Los Angeles could be announced and a team ready to play in 2010.

Or 2011.

Or 2012.

The script has yet to be written.