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FUMBLEROOSKI

Dave WielengaWed. November 21
 

Anyone who thinks an NFL stadium would be a cash machine for Long Beach has played football too long without a helmet

Building a stadium for a National Football League team on the land around the Queen Mary makes sense for all the wrong reasons—not just the insulting ones mentioned in three stories the Press-Telegram devoted last week to promoting the possibility.

“Costs and concerns aside, the idea of an NFL team playing next to the Queen Mary is indeed romantic,” wrote the Press-Telegram editorial board on Nov. 13—adopting the same dreamy, disastrous attitude that it has often employed during the Queen’s 40 unsuccessful years in town. “We can picture the helicopter and blimp shots panning the San Pedro Bay on game day. Downtown bars, hotels and restaurants (maybe even a casino) would brim with fans.”

See, now that’s insulting—even if it is true. And it’s this sort of wishful thinking that makes Long Beach fit the new profile for an NFL applicant—a finally-grown-up small town with a longtime inferiority complex that believes a big-time football team will lift it to the ranks of the truly great cities.

The fit isn’t perfect, however. For one thing, Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster doesn’t sound as though he’s completely on board. “It depends on what’s financially viable—what will work,” Foster says carefully. “We want to meld the interests of the private stakeholders and the public.”

Sports columnist Doug Krikorian bookended the P-T’s editorial with a pair of columns raving about the idea of building an NFL stadium, ridiculing anybody who might be wary and claiming without a shred of evidence that “a football stadium would be a cash machine for downtown Long Beach and, even more importantly, make L.A. terribly jealous.”

That’s insulting, too. Los Angeles might like to have an NFL team—any place might—and stadiums can generate revenue. But except for a smattering of wealthy business opportunists, poor sports nuts and sad old sportswriters, nobody really believes Los Angeles has lost an iota of prestige or importance in the dozen years since the two NFL teams that bore its name—the Raiders and Rams—skipped town. Evidence? Consider the cities those teams now represent—Oakland and St. Louis. Yechh.

Fact is, fewer and fewer of the great cities actually have NFL teams anymore. New York’s two teams play in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The Dallas Cowboys play in Irving, Texas, and in 2009 will move to Arlington. Boston’s team, the New England Patriots, plays in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The Washington Redskins don’t play in D.C., but in Landover, Maryland. Even the Detroit Lions play in the suburb of Pontiac, Michigan.

Instead of promoting Long Beach to an elite metropolis, joining the ranks of new NFL cities would dump it among burgs like Charlotte, North Carolina (home of the Carolina Panthers), or Jacksonville, Florida (home of the Jacksonville Jaguars), or Nashville, Tennessee (home of the Tennessee Titans). Except for the Grand Ole Opry—which was already in Nashville—name a good reason you’d go to any of those places.

If an NFL stadium were really a good investment—a cash machine, if you prefer—the politicians or billionaires of Los Angeles already would have built one. If an NFL team were really the mark of a great city, the citizens of Los Angeles already would have demanded one.

But the elected officials of Los Angeles know that committing vast public money to the NFL would be political suicide. The billionaires of Los Angeles know that spending their money on such a project would be a losing proposition. The people of Los Angeles know that the NFL has achieved its filthy riches from the coffers of the status-hungry cities it pits against one another in bidding wars with taxpayer dollars that ultimately benefit only the NFL.

That sophistication is what has put Los Angeles at the vanguard of a whole new definition of greatness.

And in the face of a flurry of support for building an NFL stadium next to the Queen Mary for all the wrong reasons, that’s the kind of sophistication that Long Beach’s Mayor Foster has been espousing, too. “People get celebrity in their eyes and they don’t see things clearly,” says Foster. “The NFL requires huge subsidies of public money, and I don’t think that’s appropriate. Whatever is done with the land around the Queen Mary must be a world-class project, something durable, with long-term benefits for the city. Every idea ought to be on the table and considered carefully.

“But the idea of using a sports stadium to achieve redevelopment is an old paradigm . . . our own Doug Krikorian notwithstanding.”

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