Post by TheShadow on Jun 23, 2005 22:31:12 GMT -5
www.willitsnews.com
By Jerry McDonald
TEN YEARS LATER, Tim Brown sounds as if he still can't believe it.
Rumors about the Raiders returning to Oakland were as prevalent as empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Then the Los Angeles Rams left the area, with the NFL approving a move from Anaheim to St. Louis in April, 1995.
Brown was one of many who made the mistake of linking conventional wisdom with Al Davis.
Davis was frustrated with broken promises dating back to 1982 over luxury boxes and improvements to the Los Angeles Coliseum. He rejected an opportunity at Hollywood Park, believing it was sabotaged by the NFL, and on June 23, 1995, signed a letter-of-intent to return the Raiders to their place of birth.
"I was shocked. We just never thought it would happen after the Rams left," Brown said recently from his home in Dallas. "We thought, 'Hey, look, we're the only football team in town.' Then all of a sudden, a couple months later, we're leaving."
The NFL left the nation's No.2 media market and hasn't returned.
Stadium proposals in Carson and Pasadena have run aground in recent months, leaving Anaheim and even the old standby L.A. Coliseum as potential destinations for an expansion franchise or a team looking for a new home.
The NFL wants the Los Angeles market. The Los Angeles market responds with a collective yawn.
Only hardcore Raiders fans wept when the club left. Casual fans, free of blackout restrictions, reveled in the fact they could see a full slate of NFL games each Sunday.
Carl Guy, a longtime manager at the Stick and Stein sports pub in El Segundo, sees interest in the Silver and Black dwindling every year.
"We have a Raider following, but it's not like it used to be," Guy said. "We have a Raider booster club that meets here about every other month, about 10 or 15 of them. But it's the same old story. The more they're winning, the more you see them."
Life in Los Angeles for the Raiders was much like Phase II in Oakland. They packed the Coliseum with 92,000-plus fans for some playoff games and were a hot ticket when winning. They struggled to draw 40,000 when mediocre.
Brown had a hard time envisioning the Raiders catching on in Los Angeles unless they were consistently dominant, describing a star-driven environment featuring Magic Johnson and Wayne Gretzky.
"We didn't have a chance to draw unless we were a 12-4 team," Brown said. "Nobody was going to see a team that was 8-8."
Tim Truax is a Raiders fan who graduated from San Jose State and left for USC law school the same year the Raiders went from Oakland to Los Angeles. One of his law school classmates was future Raiders CEO Amy Trask.
He settled in El Segundo, within walking distance of the Raiders practice facility. A season ticketholder in Los Angeles, Truax never paid more than $40 per seat per game.
"The same 30,000 to 40,000 fans showed up every Sunday, and beyond that it depended on how much the team was winning and who the opponent was," Truax said. "When they left, that small group was disappointed. Some were devastated. But that's a small fraction of the Los Angeles area. There wasn't a lot of hue and cry."
With the Raiders ranked No.27 in the NFL in terms of franchise value by Forbes Magazine, Davis' critics believe he made a monumental blunder in leaving Los Angeles for Oakland.
The Raiders are valued at $624 million, well behind the No.1 Washington Redskins at $1.1 billion. The franchise value rose only 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 even as the average per franchise was going up 17 percent.
As the theory goes, corporations in Southern California wanting to spend big bucks on luxury boxes and the NFL would have to spend it on the Raiders.
Doug Krikorian, a Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist and local radio talk show host, calls it "the biggest financial miscalculation in the history of sports."
Even Davis admitted when he left L.A. for Oakland that the team was worth more in Los Angeles.
Problem was, the Raiders were unable to successfully navigate the tricky Los Angeles political scene. There were no guarantees a stadium deal would ever get done, and the Raiders left Los Angeles in 1995 ranked in the bottom third in terms of franchise value, according to Forbes.
Their practice facility, embarrassing by today's standards, wasn't even an issue as they struggled with the stadium problem.
Even those with nothing positive to say about Davis concede he got a bum deal in Los Angeles. The Coliseum board, made up of three members from the city, three from the county and three from the state, could seldom agree on anything.
The original deal promising luxury boxes in Los Angeles was worth less than a 2004 personal seat license in Oakland.
In 1987, Davis accepted a non-refundable $10 million deposit from the city of Irwindale as a symbol of good faith that a 65,000-seat stadium would be built 22 miles east of Los Angeles. When the deal fell through, Davis pocketed the money, and other local municipalities were even more wary of dealing with the Raiders.
"That stung for a very long time," said David Carter, a sports marketing consultant in Southern California. "The mantra was, 'We will not be Irwindaled.'"
Mistrust of Davis was compounded by a growing concern over a segment of Raiders fans who earned a reputation in the early 1990s of being increasingly violent instead of merely raucous and colorful.
The Raiders experience, as well as the quirky nature of L.A. politics, continues to make the NFL a difficult sell in the Los Angeles area.
Retired Los Angeles Herald-Examiner sports columnist Melvin Durslag, a former Davis confidant, conceded, "L.A., for all its bluster, isn't the greatest sports town in the world."
Durslag believes the league one day will return, but doesn't think it will happen until a privately financed deal somehow got past those determined to stop it.
"You can't get anything through on a ballot in Los Angeles," Durslag said. "If you put it on a ballot, they'd vote against orange juice."