An uphill climb that just might land the NFL back in L.A.

CITY OF INDUSTRY, CALIF. -- On the side of the freeway to Pomona is a hill covered with grass and weeds. It is an unlikely place, one of the few left unblemished by a bulldozer's blade in this valley of one-story office parks and distribution centers east of downtown Los Angeles. Yet it is here where a billionaire developer named Ed Roski can see a football stadium of 75,000 seats and luxury suites.

To those who have followed the 14-year saga of the efforts to bring a National Football League franchise back to Los Angeles, this must be something of a joke. After all the bickering and cajoling and trying to find the perfect location close to Hollywood's glow, the best solution has come to be a city of fewer than 1,000 residents, where curbs are painted no-parking red to give a clear path to the armada of semis rumbling past its warehouses and manufacturing operations.

In fact, for the longest time it was a joke. No way, people in Southern California felt, would the NFL want to play in Industry, 30 miles from the ocean's edge. And yet while everybody chuckled and scoffed at the hill of brush that Roski's Majestic Realty rented for a different project years ago from Industry, he quietly steered his privately financed stadium through all the minefields that have blown up proposals in more desirable places such as the Los Angeles Coliseum, and the parking lots of Angel or Dodger stadiums. Suddenly he seems to have not just the best proposal for building a stadium in Los Angeles, but the only proposal for building a stadium in Los Angeles.

"He has the land and he has the complete clearance and the green light to move his stadium forward. No one else has that," said David Carter, the executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California, who has consulted on several of the Los Angeles NFL stadium proposals, including this one. "They've been doing this methodically, methodically and then one day you wake up and they're lining the field."

Ever since the Rams and Raiders moved away following the 1994 season, citing inferior stadiums as the cause, bringing a football team to this area has been an obsession for the men who run the NFL. The failure to place a club here has often been said to be the greatest negative of former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's tenure. Not having a team in the country's second-largest metropolitan area since 1994, or a Super Bowl in the city since 1993, means the NFL has not been getting the maximum amount of exposure possible in a region of nearly 18 million people for almost two decades.

Which is why the NFL, while being cautious, is not laughing at Roski's stadium project. Especially with as many as seven franchises currently in insufficient stadiums or severe financial difficulty or rumored to be for sale. The time to bring a team back to Los Angeles might never be better.

"At this stage it is clear he has a project that can be built. The trick now is to be able to do it in a sound financial way," Commissioner Roger Goodell said Oct. 13 at the NFL owners' meeting in Boston.

'I'm telling you it's done'

The final roadblock disappeared in September when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signed a bill allowing Roski to waive the traditional environmental impact review for the stadium, mainly because Roski already had such a study done for a previous project.

This is not a small thing. Completing an EIR in California is a long and complicated process that can take years. Among the long-considered sites in the city, only the Coliseum has one finished, and the Coliseum has long been officially declared dead as a potential home for a new NFL team.

In theory, they could start building tomorrow.

"It's done, I'm telling you it's done," said John Semcken, a vice president at Majestic who helped Roski and businessman Phillip Anschutz build the Staples Center a decade ago and is the point man on the Roski stadium project.

"By next week we will work with the league to find a team and move it to Los Angeles," Semcken said in his office not far from the stadium site, a few days before Schwarzenegger's announcement.