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San Diego Loses Super Bowl Bid to Los Angeles

TIMES STAFF WRITER

San Diego lost its bid to serve as host of the 1993 Super Bowl when the National Football League awarded the lucrative game to Los Angeles in an executive session here Tuesday night.

League owners said they were moved by an 8 1/2-minute video presentation made by the Los Angeles group that concluded with former President Ronald Reagan looking into the camera and saying: “Los Angeles is the obvious choice for Super Bowl XXVII. So let’s go out there and win one for the Gipper!”

“I’m very disappointed,” said San Diego City Councilman Wes Pratt, who came here to try to persuade league owners that Super Bowl XXVII would represent a boon to minority businesses in San Diego. “I guess the bottom line with both the GOP and the National Football League is money.”

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Pratt’s reference was to the 1992 Republican Convention, which, after talk of San Diego being the favorite, was awarded to Houston.

Asked if San Diego had been used by both the GOP and the NFL in trying to extract better deals from other cities, Pratt said: “It’s hard to say. All I know is, we didn’t get either one, after a lot of people thought we’d get both.”

One NFL owner, who asked not to be quoted by name, said Los Angeles--actually, Pasadena’s Rose Bowl and its 101,000 seats--was chosen because of additional revenue, a much greater supply of cherished Super Bowl tickets and the high visibility of the nation’s No. 2 media market.

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While taking the game away from Phoenix, the NFL owners gave that city a second chance, “preliminarily” selecting the Arizona city as host for Super Bowl XXX in January, 1996.

The clear implication was that, if Arizona voters fail to adopt a holiday in honor of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the state’s 1992 election, the NFL will once again bypass Phoenix.

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue had gone on record as opposing Phoenix’s selection as host of Super Bowl XXVII soon after Arizona voters rejected such a holiday last November.

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Tagliabue said the league wanted to remove itself from Arizona’s “ongoing political controversy,” but he subjected himself to what one owner called a “stormy” session that kept the mayors of two major cities waiting for almost four hours, having no clue as to what was happening in the conference room.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor and members of the San Diego Super Bowl Task Force, along with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, waited for almost four hours Tuesday night as the owners debated which city would get the 1993 Super Bowl.

A Phoenix delegation went into the room at 2:35 p.m. local time to try to persuade the league’s 28 owners--who include some of the wealthiest men in America--that they should play the 1993 Super Bowl in Arizona.

The Phoenix contingent left the room 40 minutes later, but the owners then began a heated discussion that did not culminate until 6:10 p.m.

After the announcement that Phoenix was out, Bradley went in, with members of the Los Angeles Sports Council, to persuade the owners that Pasadena’s Rose Bowl--topping San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium by 30,000 seats--was the best place to play the game.

Bradley said he and O’Connor were willing to wait the four hours because the Super Bowl is worth “billions” to the host city’s economy. League officials say a recent economic study indicated the impact of the 1993 event to be worth an estimated $200 million to the host city.

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Members of San Diego’s Super Bowl Task Force say a study that followed Super Bowl XXII in 1988 showed the game to have enriched the city’s economy by $136 million.

O’Connor, Councilman Pratt and the other San Diegans entered the room shortly before 7 p.m., which meant O’Connor was desperately pressed for time. The mayor had said she needed to leave the plush Hyatt Regency Waikoloa, where the league is having its winter meetings, no later than 6:40 p.m., to fly to San Francisco.

She plans to appear before the state Public Utilities Commission at 9 a.m. today there, where the proposed merger of San Diego Gas & Electric Co. with Southern California Edison Corp. is being discussed.

“I’ve got to be on that plane,” the mayor said. “I can’t miss those hearings. I think that’s more important than the Super Bowl.”

O’Connor is adamantly opposed to the proposed merger.

Moments after the Los Angeles contingent finished its presentation, members of its 15-member delegation said they were “supremely” confident that the owners would award the game to Pasadena.

Pasadena Mayor Jess Hughston said Reagan’s closing of the group’s video, narrated by actor Sidney Poitier, was “stunning.” When it ended, several team owners applauded.

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Bradley said of Reagan’s role in the video: “That was a coup. An absolute coup.”

After the film, Hughston said, not a single owner asked the Los Angeles delegation about the recent beating of a black man by Los Angeles police. Some owners had speculated that the savage beating--in the racial and political context of Phoenix losing the game--might be a factor.

Bradley said league owners had no need to ask about the beating because “I hit that issue head-on. I brought it up. I addressed it right at the start, and no one said anything about it.”

After Los Angeles’ glitzy video, O’Connor said, she was able to appear for only two minutes--just long enough to introduce Pratt, who as the only black member of the City Council, was recruited by the Super Bowl Task Force to argue the benefits of the game to the city’s minority community and to try to offset any racial and political concerns.

Every member of the Los Angeles delegation was dressed in a dark business suit with a conservative tie. David Simon, the head of the Los Angeles Sports Council, said that was his rule and a “requirement.”

By contrast, most in the San Diego group--except Pratt and O’Connor--wore casual attire, such as sport coats and Hawaiian shirts.

O’Connor said she was not offended by having to wait almost four hours while a group of men decided where a football game should be played, but noted that the process “ought to be changed.” She said selecting the city first and then coordinating with how the Super Bowl ought to be staged would be an improvement.

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“They’ve got to look at a different way of doing things,” O’Connor said. “For the cities, it’s a lot of time, effort and money put out.”

She said that one moment seemed to sum up the long wait, the boredom and the frustration of not knowing what was happening.

At one point, she entered a hospitality lounge for NFL workers and picked up four cookies--one for Mayor Bradley, one for Pratt, one for a Los Angeles city councilman and one for herself.

“ ‘Don’t do that!’ ” she reported a woman at a nearby counter as saying.

“But I’m the mayor of San Diego,” O’Connor said she told the woman.

“ ‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ ” she said the woman told her. “ ‘Those cookies are for NFL staff members. They’re not for anyone else.’ ”

“I don’t think she believed that I’m the mayor of San Diego,” O’Connor said. “Or, if she did, it didn’t make a bit of difference to her.”

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