Ill-Prepared LA Grovels for a Super Bowl it Won’t Get

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The Los Angeles City Council, despite having no team, modern stadium or apparently, self-respect, voted unanimously on Wednesday to let the National Football League know that it would like to host a future Super Bowl. Lots o’ luck with that … 

With the next two Super Bowls already scheduled for Houston and Minneapolis, the three that will take place in 2019-2021 will almost certainly soon be awarded to Miami, Tampa, Atlanta or New Orleans, each of which has a team, modern stadium and fan base. 

When the Rams (formerly of Cleveland, Los Angeles and St. Louis) move back to Southern California this fall, they will temporarily play in the renovated-but-still-crumbling ruins known as the LA Memorial Coliseum, where the Super Bowl was last played in 1973. When their new stadium in the mighty City of Inglewood opens -- most likely for the 2019 season -- it will be the venue to which the NFL eventually grants the Super Bowl hosting honors, once the facility has a few full seasons under its belt. 

The Super Bowl will not be awarded to the City of Los Angeles and what will then be the 97-year old Coliseum when there is a toddler-aged stadium a few miles down the 10 Freeway, a venue closer to the airport, the ocean and all that the Westside has to offer. 

The NFL is not averse to holding its big event in colder, more remote, unglamorous locations or even ones that do not have a team of their own. Super Bowl XLVIII took place outdoors in New Jersey in 2014. It was the third coldest in Super Bowl history. Jacksonville, Indianapolis and Pontiac landed the game despite not being hubs of comfort, celebrity, affluence or fun. And Pasadena, which hosted five Super Bowls, though none since 1993, was not a regular NFL city but still has the chops to host enormous events.   

As is so often the case with the City of Los Angeles, it is a perennial pigskin patsy or, as Pink Floyd sang, “it wants its pudding without eating its meat.” 

The last time a professional football was tossed anywhere near LA City Hall was a few years ago when now-former Councilman and Court Jester Tom LaBonge whipped one across the lawmakers’ horseshoe seating arrangement, boasting with certitude that Farmer’s Field would soon be built (read: wedged into) downtown LA to attract perhaps multiple teams and tourists to LA like flies to a dumpster. And you know how that turned out. 

Since Inglewood is about to become Southern California’s professional football destination, with the latest and greatest in stadium luxury, as well as immediate transportation access from the 405 and 105 freeways, LA’s and the Coliseum’s odds of landing a Super Bowl are optimistically somewhere between diddly squat and goose egg. 

Given all this, you have to wonder what LA City Council, the hallmark of integrity that promised to end veterans’ homelessness by last December only to realize that the problem was twice as bad as it thought, is thinking. Perhaps it just wants good press from those media outlets that blindly regurgitate its press releases. And it’s probably counting on the faith of constituents who always believe them when they do.

Like its seemingly futile pursuit of its third Olympics, which takes place in 2024, City Hall’s inability to get the NFL back to LA must be eating at them. It’s still seeking opportunities to congratulate itself for a job that it didn’t get done. A few months ago, when it honored Inglewood officials for “our” success in bringing the League back to Southern California, it became clear that the NFL is LA’s elusive, unaffordable ex-girlfriend for which city officials maintain a figurative (and perhaps literal, save Councilwoman Nury Martinez) priapism. 

It is time for LA to ease its grip on that fantasy and get back to work.

 

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a writer who lives in Los Angeles and blogs on humane issues at ericgarcetti.blogspot.com.)  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.