Ram Backers Huddling for '4th-Down' Try : Sports: Save the Rams group has just three weeks to score and keep the pro football team in Anaheim. A new stadium and ticket-sale guarantees are among options being considered.

By TRACY WEBER

July 31, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Each Tuesday morning since mid-June, a plush conference room in the Anaheim Marriott is transformed into a war room.

Leigh Steinberg, the Newport Beach agent to the stars of professional sports, arrives sleepy-eyed from cross-country deal making. Jack Lindquist, respected former president of Disneyland, joins him at the head of the table.

Developer Ron Lane, who bailed burger magnate Carl Karcher out of financial troubles last year, clears his schedule to make the 7:30 a.m. meetings. As does Bill Taormina, the county’s waste disposal magnate, and a dozen others. Orange County Supervisor William G. Steiner has been coming for five weeks, even though “supervisors rarely go to meetings like this.”

The room crackles with urgency--and power. One thing has united these chiefs of sport, real estate, politics and business: the prospect of losing an NFL football team.

“Nobody remembers that Baltimore, St. Louis and Oakland had the Colts, the Cardinals and the Raiders,” said Roy Englebrecht, 48, a sports promoter and part-owner of a minor league baseball team who is a regular attendee. “These are the cities that lost the Colts, the Cardinals and the Raiders. I don’t want Orange County to have that label for the next 20 years.”

But if the battle to keep the Rams were a football game, this roster of heavy hitters didn’t enter the game until the final quarter. They’ve never played together, and they’ve only got time for a few last-ditch plays.

“It’s like having a fourth down with nine yards to go and needing to score a touchdown to win, not a field goal, a touchdown,” Steiner said.

And Steiner said the group, which calls itself Save the Rams, has just three weeks to score.

But for group members, it’s not as simple as coming up with a state-of-the-art stadium plan and an extra $15 million a year in revenue to match the game plans of rivals St. Louis and Baltimore.

What these men--all powerful deal makers in their own worlds--have to do doesn’t follow the neat rules of football or business. On this they agree: Rams President John Shaw may be the team’s chief negotiator, but owner Georgia Frontiere is its heart--and they’re plotting a quadruple bypass around Shaw to win it.

“That’s our mission in the next three weeks: to present something to make her hesitate and blink and say, ‘Let’s think about this,’ ” Englebrecht said. “Maybe we can get her to say, ‘I didn’t know that many people are interested in the team.’ ”

Group members are coy about their plans for courting Frontiere. But hundreds of postcards have been distributed reading “Dear Georgia, I/We think the Los Angeles Rams should stay in Southern California and P.S. (fill in number) of my friends agree with me.” Thousands of T-shirts reading “We love you Georgia” are being printed. And there’s even talk of making one of Georgia’s pet projects part of any offer: a home for elderly football players.

“We’re going to woo her with respect,” said Taormina, chairman of Taormina Industries Inc., whose father painted “Rams Here in ‘80” on the side of a garbage truck when Anaheim arranged in 1979 to lure the team south.

Admittedly, the group has waited almost until the final buzzer to do it.

St. Louis and Baltimore have been charging down the field since late 1993. Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos made a third trip out to see Shaw this month. In June, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. and St. Louis County Executive George (Buzz) Westfall came to huddle with the Ram executive.

“That’s part of the problem,” said Lane of Newport Beach-based Lane Kuhn Pacific. “The Baltimore mayor comes out here. The mayor of St. Louis comes out here. Orange County is a different animal.”

Most Save the Rams members said they initially thought Shaw was bluffing, or already set on leaving, when rumors of a possible move first surfaced.

“As I watched from the sidelines, I was sort of stunned by the lack of responsiveness, and I was pretty much going to write off the Rams,” Steiner said.

Many of the group’s members joined up after calls from Steinberg and Rams Booster Club President Frank Bryant, who painted a bleak picture of how the loss of the Rams could tarnish the image of Orange County as a vital business and sports area.

“It’s a business that has intangible value to the area. It reinforces a name and an image,” said Wayne Wedin, chairman-elect of the Orange County Chamber of Commerce. “What we’re going to show the league is, of course, we love them. There must be some misunderstanding.”

Some of the group’s members were drawn by the chance to play a part in the future of a professional football franchise--be it helping construct a stadium or buying a piece.

“There are guys who are on it who went to Rams games when they were 9 and are caught up in the emotion of it,” Englebrecht said.

But Lane, often touted as a potential investor, said he would only invest if it made financial sense--and included some say over the running of the team.

Lane, who served as baseball commissioner for the 1984 Summer Olympics exhibition games, said the sense that Frontiere will not surrender some control is “a stumbling block and a problem” for himself and other potential investors.

Johnnie Johnson, the Rams former All-Pro free safety, was the Rams’ first round draft pick in 1980, the year they moved to Anaheim. He joined the effort after a call from Steinberg, and his job is to give the group an inside peek into what the team and Frontiere want.

“I know the right buttons to push,” said Johnson, 37, now an Anaheim real estate agent, adding that most of the players want to stay put. “You ask people throughout the organization if they want to move and there’s only one person that does and that’s John” Shaw.

With the former free safety in the group, Shaw “can’t come back and say you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Johnson said.

He tipped Steiner off to the greatest need of the players--a new training facility. Steiner has since made tentative plans with the Orange Redevelopment Agency to lease 25 acres across the Santa Ana River from the stadium for new practice fields, corporate headquarters and a retail complex.

If all goes according to plan, the group will present Frontiere and Shaw with a plan in mid-August and unveil it publicly Aug. 19 at a monster bash it’s planning for the Rams season kickoff luncheon.

Right now, the front-runner proposal includes a state-of-the-art, $60-million overhaul of Anaheim Stadium for the Rams using revenue bonds, guaranteed season ticket and luxury box sales, and a new $100-million stadium for the Angels to be built with public and private funds.

Englebrecht, who heads the stadium committee, said the group can’t change the way the Rams run the team nor its win-loss record. But a “new” Anaheim stadium might.

“A new house. A new car. It smells good. It feels good. It’s a win-win,” he said.