Michael Ventre

You can forgive Arnold Schwarzenegger for his naivete. Most of his adult life experience consists of battling evil warlords, Latin American dictators, terrorists, alien cyborgs, Satan and unruly children. Obviously, by getting involved with NFL owners and Los Angeles politicians, he’s in way over his head.

Even his dealings with a truculent state legislature and a mutinous electorate haven’t prepared him for his latest adventure: bringing NFL football back to the city of Los Angeles.

But Schwarzenegger doesn’t just want one team. He’s asking for two.

My first reaction is that Arnold should have used a stunt double more often. The  cumulative impact of his many on-screen fights with villains appears to have affected his judgment. To put his present mental condition in football terms, if he had been the owner of the Houston Texans, he too would have probably passed on Reggie Bush.

Yet this foray into lobbying to bring two teams to his state’s largest city confirms more than any single gubernatorial act that he’s been inhaling far too many Hummer fumes.

This still comes down to a business decision. Cold cash. There has been little if any sentiment in and around Los Angeles and Southern California in general to spend taxpayers’ money on a new stadium. That means that if either of the current stadium proposals were to move forward — the remodeling and modernization of the decrepit Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, or a new structure in Anaheim alongside Angels Stadium — it would have to happen with private investment from either deep-pocketed businessmen in the area or the NFL owners themselves.

So far, no swashbuckling entrepreneur has stepped up to form a coalition of like-minded big shots devoted to bringing the NFL back to the area. Idle chatter has been going on along these lines since the Raiders and Rams both left after the 1994 season. Philip Anschutz had a plan. Eli Broad and Michael Ovitz made overtures. Yet no checks are ever written, no bulldozers ever revved up.

That’s not to say it will never happen. But there needs to be momentum to make it happen. And as of right now, nothing has changed, no matter how much bluster comes out of press conferences.

MESSAGE BOARDS

There is no reason to put an NFL franchise in Los Angeles. It would be nice, but it’s not essential. Few in and around the city or the area walk around in a depressive stupor because the lack of a local NFL team has made their lives meaningless.

The owners themselves would probably like to have a team in the second biggest media market in the country. That would make sense. But they’re not suffering without one. In 2005, Forbes Magazine valued three teams — the Redskins, Cowboys and Patriots — as being worth more than $1 billion; even the Vikings, dead last in the rankings, are worth an estimated $650 million.

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