Whatever You Call Them, Call Them Los Angeles

Ken Behring, owner of the Team With No Name, has places to go, people to see, architectural concepts to digest. Behring and his top advisors seem in agreement on one significant detail, at least. Their football team will be identified as “Los Angeles,” in whichever stadium it plays, and not “California,” “Anaheim” or anything else.

This was one disclosure from a get-acquainted session Tuesday morning with Behring, the 67-year-old car collector and carpetbagger who has come south to pick through the ruins of L.A. football.

His priorities are a grass field, a safe and state-of-the-art stadium, an accompanying entertainment complex and a realistic shot at buying the type of NFL talent that Jerry Jones buys for Dallas--none of which, Behring believes, was accessible to him in Seattle. Staying there, he says, would have meant “to lose money, just to remain a mediocre team.”

Instead, with the impetus of having won six of its last eight NFL games and a vision of leaving mediocrity behind, Behring’s goal is to win over the dubious fans of greater L.A., who are devoted to baseball’s Dodgers and basketball’s Lakers, teams that were transplanted here from far-off states, exactly like his Seahawks.

“We will call ourselves Los Angeles,” he says. “If we can provide a winning, thrilling team, I hope the fans will learn to love us here.”

It is a tough sell. But just as Behring once drove a $90 Pontiac and gradually traded up to exotic Hispano Suizas and Isotta Fraschinis worth hundreds of thousands, he has to start somewhere. That apparently will be in the Rose Bowl, later this year, provided no one in authority puts up a detour sign.

Moving vans have left Seattle. Legislators throughout the state of Washington are furious, among them State Sen. Pam Roach, who sponsored a unanimously approved resolution urging Attorney General Christine Gregoire to help combat “franchise shuffle syndrome,” an epidemic that has plagued more than one NFL city.

Yet when Commissioner Paul Tagliabue went to the nation’s capitol Tuesday to request that Congress empower the NFL to block franchise moves such as Cleveland’s and Seattle’s, he met a stone wall. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that in his opinion, legislation was neither necessary nor justified. And Rep. George Gekas (R-Pa.) added unsympathetically, “I come to this hearing with a closed mind.”

Executive Gary Locke of Washington’s King County went so far as to hand President Clinton a handmade T-shirt, reading, “Save the Seahawks.”

There isn’t much Clinton can do but jog in it.

Prepared to explain himself to his fellow NFL owners at their meetings this week in Chicago, Behring says, “They know that every effort we’ve made to try to get [Kingdome] improvements has been turned down. Instead, baseball got $320 million for a stadium, and we received nothing.

“The baseball team was drawing 10,000 people a night for all those years, losing 20-some million. The Kingdome lost every time there was a baseball game there. The only place they make money is when [the Seahawks] play. We tried everything to get improvements made, until it gets to the point that you say, ‘There’s no future here.’ ”

Headquartered temporarily at a downtown L.A. hotel while making the rounds of proposed stadium sites, Behring is committed to leaving Seattle and its domed fixer-upper. Alluding to the Kingdome’s seven-acre concrete roof, fallen ceiling tiles and exploratory seismology tests, Behring says, “Believe me, you’d be a little scared to go in there too.”

So, theoretically, even had Los Angeles not lost its teams, the Seahawk owner still would have moved. To Vancouver, maybe. To Memphis . . .

“Or Cleveland,” he interjects.

There, Art Modell agonized over moving his Browns before making an announcement in midseason.

Behring was more than a casual observer.

He says, “We made our decision almost overnight, but we’d been brooding over it a long time when we finally said, ‘Enough is enough.’ And Art had the same problem we had with regard to the ‘first-class’ [stadium] part. He would have to lose money just to remain a mediocre team, the same as what we would have had to do.

“I don’t think any of the owners are in it just for making money. We’re in it to win. But if you don’t have the money coming in from a stadium, you can’t get the best free agents. Jerry Jones did a great job of maximizing the money he had, and we have to compete with him. I admire him getting the money so he could get the players and become a great team.”

Foreseeing a stadium connected with an entertainment and educational complex, not unlike the NFL Experience bazaar presented yearly at Super Bowl sites, Behring hopes to attract a children’s audience, saying, “They need somebody they can talk to, somebody to tell them, ‘Hey, I grew up living on a mud floor, but sports gave me a chance to become somebody.’ ”

Having sought out similar community involvement in Seattle, the owner says he was resisted at every turn.

“I was never really appreciated up there. I was the rich land man from California, and they kept on that from the day I arrived to the day I left. No matter what we did, we weren’t accepted. We ran a big charity, raised $180,000 a year for muscular dystrophy. Didn’t matter. Nobody looked at anything outside of where you were from and what occupation you had been in.

“The role I would like to play in L.A. is to entertain and educate. I’m 67 years old. I think I have five or 10 great years left. I’m not a football coach. I’m not going to be the one making football decisions.”

In other words, not Jerry Jones.

But Jones has another advantage. Jones’ town loves his team. Behring’s town isn’t even sure what to call his team.

Behring says, “The last half of last season, I think we played as good a football as any team in the league.”

People will have to give this some thought. Just not, he hopes, with a closed mind.