Football Can’t Afford the L.A. Timeout : Sports: Decline in TV ratings and revenues should energize interest in new stadium proposal.

It is now clear that Los Angeles is moving inexorably, if fitfully, toward the day when it will have a new professional football team. It surely won’t be soon enough for hard-core football fans. But if they’re patient, the National Football League will be back. I’ll explain why.

But first, I’d like to suggest that in order to properly complete the long and arduous task of getting pro football back into L.A., the city needs a football-style cheer.

A cheer will keep the home team--in this case, L.A.’s oft-criticized civic leadership--focused on the task at hand. And it will help keep up the spirits of those of us who can only watch and root from the sidelines.

My cheer doesn’t have the rhythmic resonance of a chant like “Go, Big Blue,” much less the tradition of a slogan like “Win one for the Gipper.” But it states briskly and succinctly what L.A. needs to keep in mind while bargaining with the NFL for a new team.

They need us more than we need them.

If we keep repeating that, I’m convinced L.A. can strike not just a good deal with the NFL, but a great deal. We’ll have a team owned by respected local business people rather than a mercenary carpetbagger like Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, who fled the Memorial Coliseum last year. And we can even build that new team a modern stadium without breaking the local treasury, like Anaheim almost did to keep St. Louis Rams owner Georgia Frontiere happy with Anaheim Stadium before she went chasing after more money like a common gold digger.

I won’t even try to list all the reasons Angelenos can live without pro football. Just think of all the things we have a choice of doing on a typically balmy Sunday afternoon in the fall.

The reasons the NFL needs Los Angeles, badly, is that without a home team in the nation’s second-biggest television market, the league’s TV ratings are down. And that makes the major networks, which pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to broadcast NFL games, very unhappy. And for all the money that NFL teams make in sold-out stadiums, the big bucks are still in broadcast rights. So the league does not want NBC, ABC or Fox unhappy when they sit down to renegotiate those contracts in 1998.

That’s why I’m confident that Los Angeles will have a new NFL team--on paper, if not on the field--by 1998.

The big question is, Who will own that team?

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that it will be Peter O’Malley, owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, easily this city’s most popular sports franchise. O’Malley has expressed an interest in building a new NFL-style stadium, and has some prime real estate to put it on--the 300 acres around Dodger Stadium.

But putting a new NFL team next to Dodger Stadium won’t be as easy as it sounds. Residents of neighboring Echo Park are raising a fuss about putting up with even more traffic and crowds than they already do when the Dodgers play at home. O’Malley has tried to mitigate these complaints with new traffic controls around the stadium and by having Dodger officials appear at community meetings to hear other concerns. One suspects he is would be uneasy with any serious controversy about a new stadium.

O’Malley remembers better than most Angelenos the ugly brouhaha that erupted in 1959 when his father razed an old Mexican barrio in Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium. Latinos have certainly not forgotten. O’Malley is a fundamentally decent man, so I doubt he would force another stadium on his neighbors.

That’s why it’s worth keeping an eye on two other prominent local businessmen who are now in the picture--retired Arco Chairman Lodwrick M. Cook and Sheldon I. Ausman, senior vice president of Johnson & Higgins, a major insurance broker.

Cook and Ausman recently unveiled a plan to build a 72,000-seat football stadium in the underdeveloped area adjacent to the Los Angeles Convention Center and a new arena for the Lakers basketball team and the Kings hockey team. Neither man is as recognizable as O’Malley, but both are highly regarded in L.A. business circles. During Cook’s tenure, Arco was one of the most civic-minded corporations in town. Ausman chaired the host committee for the 1993 Super Bowl game in Pasadena and heads the committee helping the Los Angeles Music Center raise funds to finish the Disney Concert Hall.

Just as important, Ausman used to work in Pittsburgh for the Arthur Anderson accounting firm. Among his clients was the late Art Rooney, a founding father of the NFL whose family still owns the Pittsburgh Steelers. So NFL insiders know Ausman, and he knows the business side of pro football.

Combine the savvy of these three civic leaders with the renewed vigor that Mayor Richard Riordan has brought to City Hall, and you’ll see that Los Angeles is sending out a real all-star team to negotiate with the NFL. Winners all, who can in turn win for all of us if we keep cheering them on.

So all together now:

They need us more than we need them. They need us . . . .