Football for Dummies

I went back to Baltimore for my 20th high school reunion. It was a well-spent Saturday evening with Loch Raven High’s class of ’83. Reminiscence faded into football talk. Nobody could cough up an extra ticket to the sold-out Baltimore Ravens game the next day. So the football talk eventually veered toward team owners.

If we knew where he was buried, consensus was, we’d make like Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley on the grave of Robert Irsay. Remember him? Irsay was the sweetheart who owned the Baltimore Colts. That white-haired souse loaded my hometown team’s gear into Mayflower moving vans in the middle of a snowy night in 1984. Just like that, the legends and records of Johnny Unitas and Artie Donovan were transported to Indianapolis.

Crabcake-sized tears were shed all that winter, and many that followed.

The National Football League remains today a bastion of money grabbing, shortsightedness and egotism. I’m not just talking about Keyshawn Johnson. This is still about owners—ones who move their franchises in a bling-bling blink. Hey, Al Davis: Just win, baby—but sit still in Oakland for a few years. Hey, Art Modell: Thanks for moving your team to Baltimore (sorry, Cleveland). Isn’t that Robert Irsay calling you over to the light?

Which brings us to Team Spanos. The Chargers organization, owned by Alex Spanos and run by son Dean, has its eye on a new stadium. What if San Diego refuses to cough one up? Watch as the courting begins. The flirting and wooing from other lustful cities will make Fox Sports’ Jillian Barberie look like a choir girl. If not Los Angeles, there’s a passel of cities drooling over the prospect of getting even a dog franchise like the Bolts.

It’s fashionable these days to talk smack about the Spanoses. But are they payroll tightwads? Not really. Do the owners meddle with on-field game plans? Not overtly.

But are they egotistical rich dudes out of touch with their local image? You betcha. Could they benefit from a makeover by the Queer Eye for the Blockheaded Guy staff? Absolutely.

Off the field, the Spanoses are rarely confronted with a public relations challenge they can’t botch. Move training camp out of town? Very subtle. Activate their contractual trigger clause (which lets them leave town) while trying to negotiate for a new stadium? Swift move. Sue the city—in a Los Angeles court!—to get negotiations moving along? A bold gesture that should swing public sentiment right into their camp.

Dean Spanos keeps repeating that he wants to live and work in San Diego. Hey, the whole Loch Ravenclass of ’83 wants to live and work in a sunny state of 72 degrees. Spanos the Younger is a nice enough individual. No need to cringe or despair if he’s in your next golf-tournament foursome. But he seems to believe—wrongly—that a new stadium would be in the bag if Drew Brees could throw straight, Reche Caldwell could catch and the Chargers could score more points than their weekly opponents. That’s not even half-correct.

The Spanoses ought to have studied the prototype beneficiary of corporate welfare: Larry Lucchino. When it came to a public vote for a ballpark, the brilliant former president and CEO of the Padres did benefit from the euphoria of a winning baseball season. But Lucchino also knew how to work the citizenry. He was a real-life presence at meetings and events. I watched Lucchino hand out schedules and answer questions from fans standing in line to buy season tickets. Dean Spanos? I hear he often stays till the fourth quarter at home games.

Even less present is Alex Spanos, an emperor who, if 10 well-intentioned San Diegans told him he wasn’t wearing clothes, wouldn’t believe it until a New York lawyer and a Stockton accountant confirmed it.

It’s great that the Spanoses annually donate money to kids for scholarships, and pitched in more than a million bucks to help firestorm victims. But even their acts of charity ring as hollow tokens of a corporate strategy.

Speaking of strategy: Could the owners generate good will by eliminating the vilified ticket guarantee? Duh. For a couple of million dollars a year, the Chargers could have looked like—if not played like—champs by letting the city off the hook for unsold seats in Qualcomm Stadium. No could do. "A deal is a deal" was the infamous quote by a team spokesperson.

Sport is a business. I don’t like reading about player salaries in newspaper sports pages. But the NFL isn’t really a league—it’s a corporation. What gets lost is how, in San Diego and all over the world, people are moved by the professional athletes who wear the names of their hometowns on their uniforms. Most definitely, there is an intrinsic and intangible value in larger-than-life gladiators doing battle in the name of your burg. A pro football team generates enthusiasm and a city’s sense of self that can’t be quantified in dollars and cents.

But we live in a fiscal world. And San Diego’s politicians—petrified by a fear of public perception of kowtowing to the Spanoses—have been stalling. The local business community was right, in concept, to band together and encourage speedier new stadium talks. Can you blame Mayor Dick Murphy and his team for being hesitant to sign anything offered from Team Spanos? No. But does it make more sense to spend more than $1.3 million—so far—on legal fees for negotiations that have only devolved into lawsuits? No.

It’s unlikely a Spanos will undergo a Grinchian transformation whereby his heart grows three sizes in one day. Bah, humbug. Read this part carefully: Nobody in town wants the Chargers to leave. It’s the owners we’d all help pack. Where have you gone, Ray Kroc? Any barbarians at the gate? Hey, Sol Price, need a football team?

No takers? Then barring a miracle, it’s time to deal with the devils. Mark my words, the scars from the day your football team is geographically ripped from your heart take decades to heal. Take it from me and the class of ’83.

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