Tagliabue Has Hope for L.A.

SAN DIEGO — Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, while offering a surprising list of positive signs for the NFL’s return to Los Angeles, said Tuesday it would be unlikely for the Kings’ owners to be awarded a team next March and begin play in a new Coliseum in 2000.

“The return of football to Los Angeles in 2001 is more realistic,” Tagliabue said. “I think there is a window of opportunity . . .

“We talked about this today: In 1993, in our 14 AFC markets we reached 27 million households, and now in our 15 AFC markets in 1997 we reach 22 million . . . the same thing in the NFC--31 million in 1993 and 28 now. That’s not positive, and L.A. with its tremendous population, remedies that.”

Tagliabue’s upbeat pronouncement after recent discouraging talk about the prospects for expansion and a less-than-enthusiastic welcome for the Kings’ owners, overshadowed Baltimore Owner Art Modell’s flippant and disparaging comments earlier in the day about the Coliseum neighborhood, which enraged City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Modell, who negotiated secretly with Inglewood-area officials before his controversial move from Cleveland to Baltimore, said, “We used to avoid playing [in the Coliseum] at night during the preseason. I was afraid my players would get hit harder by the crowd than the Rams and Raiders. My team played there during the Watts riots 1965], so I don’t have many great memories of the place.”

Ridley-Thomas, trying to convince NFL owners of the revitalization taking place around the Coliseum, said, “I’m trying to restrain myself,” while calling Modell’s remarks “blatantly irresponsible, gratuitously disparaging, uninformed at best and irresponsible at worst.

“It would be better for him to keep his own counsel than advancing the perspective that is completely incorrect, for one, advancing stereotypic images of an environment and people that will not be tolerated. It doesn’t reflect well on him or this league.”

Tagliabue, while unaware of the sparring between Modell and Ridley-Thomas, said, “I recognize the owners’ [significant sentiment against the Coliseum], but I don’t know that our owners are the world’s greatest experts on that subject. I think most of the owners tend to react what they saw last with their team, and not reacting to what has been proposed.

“Take it in a different context, and if you had gone to Madison Square Garden 10 years ago before the renovation and before they created a business improvement district, you would have said, hey, the Garden’s not for long. In fact there was a proposal to move it over the Hudson River . . . today it’s a new building in a district with a totally different feel.”

Edward Roski Jr., who has expressed a willingness to put up the money for a new Coliseum along with fellow King owner Philip Anschutz, joined Ridley-Thomas Tuesday night at Ted Turner’s TNT party here and began talking to the owners about changes planned around Exposition Park.

“I think the participation in the process by the Kings’ owners helps,” Tagliabue said, “because they have credibility, the financial means and people like the fact they are coming in and saying they want to be a part of the solution to the stadium problem in L.A.”

Tagliabue, while more positive with the Kings’ owners expressed interest than most of the NFL owners, also ultimately lacks the most powerful benefit of all to the Los Angeles cause--a vote when it comes time to muster 23 positive ballots from the league’s 30 owners.

However, he will be instrumental in shaping league policy in the coming months, and he suggested L.A.’s situation has improved because:

* The television networks probably will want to include the possibility of an expansion team in Los Angeles in their upcoming negotiations with the league, and will insist on knowing which conference a potential L.A. franchise will be assigned;

* Los Angeles becomes very important to a network like NBC, which had New York, L.A., New England, Cleveland, Houston and Seattle as their top six markets in 1993, and is coming off turmoil in Cleveland, Houston and Seattle along with a 1-15 team in New York, making it eager to know what’s going to happen in L.A;

* A new television contract, which is projected to substantially increase revenues for league owners, will lessen the owners’ expansion concerns that their profits will be diluted by adding two more teams.

“I don’t think the owners have looked at the facts,” Tagliabue said when asked about the owners’ current strong feelings against expansion. “If you’re an owner and you start looking at expansion in terms of your own economics, the traditional thing is, I don’t want to divide the pie again.”

Tagliabue then wrote on a piece of paper a formula he will show to owners--once TV revenue is known--that he says will show that revenue lost to expansion will become almost negligible.

“I think you can make a financial argument with the owners that it doesn’t matter to them in any meaningful way to expand,” Tagliabue said. “As a league, we have to address everything west of Kansas City--you have 24 teams on one side of the country, six on the other with the state of California having 12% of the population. That’s a lot of people.”

Staff writer Lisa Dillman contributed to this story.