Richardson the Blocking Back for the NFL in L.A.

It’s not whom you would think, but he’s the most important man in the process, certainly the most passionate, which of course leaves the mayor of Los Angeles out.

Still, he champions Los Angeles’ cause, he may be the only man who can assure the return of the NFL, and he lives thousands of miles away in Charlotte, N.C.

Jerry Richardson, owner of the Carolina Panthers and chairman of the NFL’s expansion committee, has always been the facilitator, the great compromiser in league circles, but in Los Angeles today with 10 other team owners, he’s putting his reputation with his peers on the line.

Planning to tell the league’s expansion committee at an early morning meeting in the Century Plaza Hotel that it must find a way to cement a deal with Los Angeles, Richardson acknowledges, “We have disappointed the National Football League fans in Los Angeles and it’s our responsibility to take the initiative and win their confidence back.�

Richardson will speak later at a news conference today, along with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and Mayor Richard Riordan, officially proclaiming the Coliseum the NFL’s choice of site.

The owners’ personal appearances here, along with plans to announce a design contest for a new-looking football stadium at the Coliseum, have been engineered to kick off an intense five-month push to get an expansion franchise to begin play in 2002.

Tagliabue, distracted now with problems in Washington and elsewhere, will swoop in and eventually determine the final days and outcome of the process, but without Richardson’s assistance and guidance in the coming months there will be nothing for Tagliabue to orchestrate.

Richardson’s task is to unite 24 owners--separated by their opinions and self-interests--behind a Los Angeles stadium plan and prospective owner by the league’s Sept. 15 deadline.

Last month at the league owners’ meetings in Phoenix, confronted with a slam-dunk offer from Houston and sentiment that Los Angeles had done nothing to curry NFL favor, he delivered a 29-2 vote calling for a resolution to put a team in L.A., if certain conditions were met.

It was a stunning piece of work, achieved with some schmoozing and arm-twisting, and was finally accepted with sincere expectation on the part of some that Los Angeles would never meet such conditions.

Richardson has been there before, bypassing immovable obstacles and lapping a field of five competitors to win a 28-0 expansion vote and bring football to tiny Charlotte.

“Why am I doing this for Los Angeles?� Richardson said. “As much as I love Charlotte, and I love it dearly and I love the Carolinas, if we were going to start the NFL today, we would begin by having teams in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. That would be a given. And then we would start talking about other cities.

“It’s in my selfish best interests to have the National Football League trademark in Los Angeles, a beautiful city that I both admire and respect. And I, as one owner, have pledged in my own mind and publicly now to do everything I possibly can to assist in having a team in Los Angeles. I think it’s the league’s responsibility to do that.�

While his football team took the field for the first time under new Coach George Seifert for a mini-camp last week, Richardson was in Los Angeles, meeting with civic and business leaders.

After coming here for more than three years, he likes what he’s hearing in Los Angeles, motivated, he said, by personal meetings with USC President Steven Sample and Cardinal Roger Mahony, but more than ever he is also concerned that Los Angeles might be too slow to react to NFL deadlines.

“It doesn’t matter how much passion a city or I or the commissioner have,� Richardson said. “At the end of the day, 24 voters have to feel the same passion.�

In rounding up votes, Richardson knows he will go nowhere if Ed Roski maintains his grip on the exclusive negotiating rights to the Coliseum. The owners recently expressed their dismay at having a potential owner forced on them by the trustees for the estate of Jack Kent Cooke in Washington, and rejected Howard Milstein’s bid to buy the team.

And although it had once been a foregone conclusion that St. Louis would become the NFL’s next expansion city, a Roski-type conflict there persuaded the owners to go elsewhere, expanding to Carolina and Jacksonville.

“I was the benefactor of that,� Richardson said. “History’s there to show what can happen.�

It’s all about securing votes, and that’s why Richardson likes the possibility of former Dodger owner Peter O’Malley becoming involved, knowing that could influence more than a dozen NFL owners. Richardson also maintains that building a new Dodger Stadium alongside a football stadium in the Coliseum neighborhood would help the Los Angeles campaign.

“It’s all about someone having a vision,� said Carmen Policy, who successfully led a referendum fight for public funds for a new stadium in San Francisco before becoming president of the Cleveland Browns.

“I know what the NFL did here in Cleveland to make this work, and if ‘critical’ is more a dynamic term than essential, then I’d use ‘critical’ to suggest this process must have a driving force to make it work, whether that’s Jerry Richardson or someone within Los Angeles. Or, I can tell you it won’t happen.

“Personally, I think that merely saying to Los Angeles, ‘It’s yours to lose and if you can put it all together in the next six months and really have a viable project, we’re willing to become partners with you,’ is not enough to get it done. It’s not enough because you need the driving, resolute, indomitable force of someone going forward no matter what.�