L.A. the Loser in a Lame Game

The Anschutz alliance is grumbling.

The Coliseum cronies are squawking.

Who says Los Angeles doesn’t have NFL games?

You thought this saga was over, that everything changed two months ago when Anschutz Entertainment Group President Tim Leiweke and a coalition of L.A. power brokers decided to walk away from plans to build a football stadium next to Staples Center. Part of the reason they backed out was that Coliseum officials announced their readiness to spend as much as $1 million to promote their own stadium as an NFL site.

That made headlines for a few days but, as most news stories do, eventually blipped off the radar screen. Things heated up again last week when Leiweke, being honored at a KFWB breakfast, was asked about the Coliseum. He essentially said the aging venue doesn’t have a Hail Mary’s chance of luring an NFL team.

That didn’t go over big with the Coliseum folks, who say Leiweke is shooting off his mouth because, a) his ego is bruised, and/or b) he’s waiting for the Coliseum to do a face plant so he and the coalition can step back in and save the day.

“For whatever reason, since June, Tim has felt it necessary to play the blame game,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the County Board of Supervisors and a member of the Coliseum Commission. “That’s unnecessary and uncalled for. But it’s his choice. He’s a big boy. Maybe there’s internal pressure in his company to blame somebody else.”

Leiweke says he likes Yaroslavsky and respects him as a civic leader. He also says Yaroslavsky is dead wrong. The way Leiweke sees it, Coliseum backers barged in when the Anschutz group was making serious headway with the NFL and left the L.A. picture hopelessly clouded. Again. Just like what happened in the late 1990s, when then-mayor Richard Riordan urged Peter O’Malley to drop his push for an NFL venue next to Dodger Stadium so the city could cast its lot with the Coliseum.

“Once again, a stadium that would be privately financed got pushed aside,” Leiweke said. “That’s fine. We’re big boys. We’ve gotten on with our lives, and I don’t care about the Coliseum. But what they also need to understand is, this is not the blame game. There’s a pattern here. And it ain’t us. It’s them.”

Us, them, whatever. Point is, L.A. has not had an NFL team since the Raiders and Rams left after the 1994 season, and there is nothing to indicate the situation will change in the near future. The NFL has made it clear it has no plans to return to the Coliseum. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said it is not an option (even though he stood on the stadium’s steps in 1999 and gave it his blessing) and Baltimore Raven owner Art Modell said earlier this year, “Putting a new dress on an old hooker is not the way I want to go dancing.” Other team owners said the same things, although not quite so colorfully.

Pat Lynch, general manager of the Coliseum, isn’t worried. He has seen the NFL reverse its field before. He figures his stadium is miles ahead of the Anschutz proposal, if only because the place actually exists. “If an NFL team comes to L.A. and starts knocking on doors, we have a door,” he said. “They don’t.”

That’s not to say the Anschutz group is done. Yaroslavsky and others believe that coalition is biding its time and plans to resurface when the mood is right. It’s possible the NFL could tell Coliseum officials they will get no “G-3” loan, a $150-million cornerstone essential to any stadium financing plan.

It’s perfectly believable the Anschutz group could burst back onto the scene. The group spent “multiple millions” of dollars on drawings, models, real estate and legal work, according to coalition member Casey Wasserman. Much of that material is gathering dust on a desk in his Beverly Hills office.

“That was private money,” he said. “I haven’t seen any reimbursement checks from the city.”

And what of the $1 million set aside by the Coliseum? Stadium officials insist that isn’t public money but cash they raised and can spend as they choose. It’s a confusing argument, though, because the Coliseum is a public entity.

Regardless, Coliseum officials are in no big hurry to spend the $1 million, although Lynch said it will be spent over time. So far, he has hired some consultants and number crunchers, as well as a public-relations firm.

The choice of that PR firm, Marathon Communications, has raised some eyebrows around town because it also represents Forest City Enterprises, a national real-estate company thought to be interested in putting housing where an Anschutz football stadium would have stood.

“I don’t think [that’s a conflict of interest],” Yaroslavsky said. “They were contracted to help the Coliseum over a short period, not to torpedo anybody else’s plan.”

Halfway across the country, the expansion Houston Texans are gearing up for their inaugural season. This would have been L.A.’s team had Houston billionaire Bob McNair not written a $700-million check in 1999. Already, fans there are crazy about their team. A recent scrimmage drew a crowd of 35,000, and the Sept. 8 opener against the Cowboys has taken on Super Bowl proportions. There’s even a Texan fight song that plays over and over on country stations.

In L.A., we’ve got our own little ditty. The same old song and dance.