Did Aborted NFL Team Bid Set Stage for Dodger Sale?

History has its own surprising symmetries, and one of them seems to be coming into focus in the aftermath of Peter O’Malley’s stunning announcement that he is putting his family’s business, the Los Angeles Dodgers, up for sale.

The Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to the West Coast in 1958 on the strength of baseball’s new economics, L.A.’s centralized, can-do, growth-at-any-cost politics and the late Walter O’Malley’s relentless opportunism. Now, the rapidly changing fortunes of the national pastime, the divided, chaotically immobile politics of Los Angeles and the sensitive, nonconfrontational personality of the elder O’Malley’s son have converged to put control of the city’s premier professional sports franchise up for grabs.

No one in City Hall could have affected the structure or economics of baseball. But Peter O’Malley appears to have been influenced by at least one additional consideration--his deep personal disappointment over the failure of the city and the community immediately around Dodger Stadium to back his bid for a professional football franchise. And that factor does involve decisions made by Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council.

State Sen. Tom Hayden, Riordan’s only announced challenger in the upcoming mayoral election, already has attacked the incumbent’s handling of this affair. Two questions, therefore, are likely to linger in the local air for at least some weeks to come:

* Among the considerations O’Malley weighed, how important was his frustration over his aborted bid for a football team?

* Could or should the mayor and the council have done anything to prevent O’Malley’s disenchantment with City Hall?

The relative importance of O’Malley’s unhappiness with the city’s treatment of his football bid is hard to gauge. Since his announcement Monday that he is selling, O’Malley has declined further public comment. Moreover, he is, according to friends and close associates--all of whom refused to be quoted by name--a thoughtful, personally sensitive, deeply private man who keeps his own counsel. There is no doubt, however, according to a source close to O’Malley, that he was “disturbed greatly” when City Hall asked him to bid for the franchise, then decided that a new National Football League franchise ought to go into the Coliseum rather than Chavez Ravine.

“What the city did surprised the hell out” of O’Malley, the source said. “We’d all gone down the Coliseum road before and we knew it led nowhere.” O’Malley “went to the expense of meeting with the neighbors, hiring consultants and drafting a plan” and was stunned “when the deal was pulled out” from under him.

Riordan, who did suggest to O’Malley that he bid for a pro football team, has no regrets about his office’s conduct in the matter. “I was in favor of getting the quickest possible deal to bring professional football back to the people of Los Angeles,” he said in an interview Friday. “At the time, Peter looked like the best deal. The NFL agreed; he was exactly the kind of person they wanted.

“Unfortunately,” Riordan said, “his bid never got a chance to play itself out fully. And it is hard to say what the City Council might have done if it had.” The mayor added that O’Malley’s bid probably was doomed when Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents the neighborhoods around Dodger Stadium, opposed it.

“This is one of the reasons you need charter reform,” Riordan said. “All Angelenos ought to have a say in decisions that affect the interests of the entire city. They ought not to be disenfranchised by the unilateral actions of individual council members, who now essentially have the power to block any project in their district.”

Moreover, according to Riordan’s senior policy advisor, Steven Soboroff--who dealt directly with O’Malley on the mayor’s behalf--the Dodgers “never completed a thorough economic analysis of their [NFL bid] and they were a long way from financially validating its viability.” That, said a source close Riordan, became more important as Hernandez and the stadium’s neighbors became more vocal in their opposition.

“Peter got very badly beaten up in the public meetings they held with the neighbors,” the source said. He had no personal support on the council and never tried to develop any because he felt that when the Coliseum bid failed, the city would have to come to him.

“Finally, though,” the source said, “the mayor’s office went to him and said, ‘This thing of yours is not going to play out any further. It’s time for you to make a gesture to the city by withdrawing your bid and supporting the Coliseum.’ That’s what Peter did.”

However disappointed--or even bitter--O’Malley may have been about this sequence of events, say knowledgeable sources inside Los Angeles’ business and legal communities, such feelings probably paled in comparison to the financial considerations and his well-known distaste for the current culture of major league baseball--particularly its player salary structure and revenue-sharing policies, both of which O’Malley feels penalize the family-owned Dodgers.

“As a man who buys companies,” said one highly successful mergers and acquisitions specialist, “I know a person doesn’t usually sell a family-owned company unless he has lost confidence in its basic business.”

Other investors said that when O’Malley found that he would be unable to “grow his business” by acquiring a pro football team, he had to confront the fact that his extended family was dependent on a single asset--the Dodgers--which was not only illiquid, but also experiencing increasing cash flow problems. According to these sources, some of whom have firsthand familiarity with the club’s business, the Dodgers--though generally profitable--have had to borrow increasing amounts to meet short-term expenses in recent years.

These factors, coupled with the strong stock market and the unprecedented prices being paid for professional sports teams, helped push O’Malley to his decision, which the financial sources agree appears to be in his family’s best interests. The Dodger franchise is jointly owned by O’Malley and his sister, Terry Seidler. She and her husband, Roland, have 10 children; O’Malley and his wife, Annette, have three.

Most of the City Council appears to be at peace with its role in the stadium affair.

A business leader who has been close to the football discussions from the beginning but spoke on the condition of anonymity said the aborted plans for an NFL stadium at Chavez Ravine had nothing to do with O’Malley’s decision to sell and that, in any event, the city’s politicians were not to blame.

“Riordan told him, and I told him, ‘Go out and seize the moment, get out in front, you’ve got all this goodwill in the city, stand up and say you want this.’ He lost it himself,” the source said. “He would have gotten the team if he got out in front. But . . . he was scared.”

The source said NFL leaders also encouraged O’Malley to push publicly for a stadium and a team, to no avail.

“Peter did studies and waited around,” the source said. “If there’s a vacuum, things happen. He left a vacuum.”

At City Hall, most of those who have been involved with the football question agreed that O’Malley voluntarily backed away from building a stadium next to his ballpark. O’Malley announced in September that he would support the effort to bring football to the Coliseum, a year after he made public his interest in building a football stadium and possibly owning a franchise.

Some say that he was loath to challenge the Coliseum because of his father’s commitment to its history and that he was convinced by the public hearings Hernandez held that the Elysian Park neighborhood would rebel against construction plans. Others, like those on the mayor’s staff, believe that his silence was strategic: He thought the NFL would reject the Coliseum out of hand, and he could step forward again as the savior, having made no enemies at City Hall.

“One thing about the O’Malleys is their reputation, and their name is important to them. When it started getting muddied up, when he had some opposition from Mike [Hernandez] and it appeared there was a push to only do it at the Coliseum, he backed off,” said Councilman Richard Alatorre. “It was smart, and in the long run it could be good because he could not be blamed. I thought he was holding out in the wings and he’d be the only game in town.”

Riordan said he made it clear from the start that his “preference all along was for the Coliseum,” which he felt was out of the running at the time he approached O’Malley. “I am now more confident than ever that the NFL is beginning to look with favor on that site.”

According to Hernandez, he and O’Malley remain on friendly terms despite the contention over siting a football stadium in Chavez Ravine.

When Riordan and O’Malley were behind that idea, Hernandez knew he was up against a powerful team. He launched a public relations campaign against the stadium, organizing legions of Chavez Ravine residents to come to City Hall and complain about the nuisance football would be--and how difficult their lives already were because of the Dodgers.

Behind the scenes, Hernandez worked on his council colleagues, playing to emotional sentiments connected to the Coliseum and the hunger for economic revitalization of those representing neighborhoods in South-Central Los Angeles. He and council colleague Mark Ridley-Thomas, who represents Exposition Park, and Council President John Ferraro, who once played for USC in the Coliseum, led the way, and the council voted to support the Coliseum as the No. 1 choice for football in Southern California. When Riordan signed on too, O’Malley was out in the cold.

“What he found is that the initial support that had encouraged him started going through what I called common sense,” Hernandez said. “As a city, it’d be difficult for us to abandon the Coliseum. What we had was a problem with the NFL because of their image of that area. I thought it was our duty to show that wasn’t the case.

“I don’t believe O’Malley’s intentions at any time were to try and sneak anything by anybody. He went through a process and decided to join with people who were trying to make something of the Coliseum,” Hernandez added. “Ultimately, he wanted to make sure it was good for the city and good for him.”

Ridley-Thomas, who also personally asked O’Malley to defer to the Coliseum effort, said last week that he believed the city’s plans to get behind a rebuilt Coliseum for the NFL “had little or nothing to do” with the decision to sell the Dodgers.

“I think [O’Malley’s decision] has more to do with issues internal to his operations,” Ridley-Thomas said, adding that O’Malley has been gracious and cooperative with those putting forward the Coliseum proposal.

In fact, some familiar with the NFL negotiations believe that O’Malley may yet get involved in pro football as an owner of a franchise that would play either in the Coliseum or elsewhere in Los Angeles.

“Obviously, he’ll be very liquid. He’s got a history of being a very good operator. Peter could fill in the remaining piece in the jigsaw puzzle that might be necessary for the NFL to take us seriously,” said Alan Morelli, a lawyer with South Park Sports Inc., which has a proposal for a stadium near the Convention Center, as well as an ownership group headed by former NFL player and broadcasting executive Danny Villanueva.

“As an operator, Peter could bring a lot to the table,” Morelli said. If the Dodgers sell, “it frees him up, it frees up all his advisors. They’ve got some very strong people who’ll have nothing to work on.”

In the end, said a source who worked with both O’Malley and Riordan on the Dodger president’s bid for an NFL team, the effort’s failure may have had less to do with economics or city politics than with O’Malley’s distaste for the bare-knuckle fight required to push the idea through the council.

When Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, a popular vote was required to approve the transfer of 300 acres in Chavez Ravine from the city to the Dodgers. The elder O’Malley campaigned vigorously and contentiously for the measure, which barely passed despite the support of all the city’s newspapers, the then-influential downtown business establishment and nearly all the area’s political leaders.

By contrast, the source said, “Peter never would have been satisfied with anything but a 15-0 vote in his favor by the council. He didn’t want to fight; he wanted a love fest or he didn’t want anything at all. His father would have taken an 8-7 win and laughed all the way to the bank.”

Times staff writers Jean Merl and Ross Newhan also contributed to this story.

* THE SPIN: Adequate representation for minorities will be an issue in reforming the City Charter, writes Bill Boyarsky. B1