As I write this week’s column on Sunday morning, local pro football news is focused on the player lockout and the potential loss of the upcoming season. No one’s yet talking about the word on the street from a confidential San Diego Chargers source that the Spanos family has already inked a deal to move the team to Los Angeles. The information was slipped to me at lunch on Friday. I ran my source data past an unimpeachable corroborator on Saturday, getting the same result. Sigh!
In what may be the first fatality of Governor Jerry Brown’s assault on California redevelopment agencies, concert promoter AEG, owner of LA’s Staples Center will construct a new luxo-pad to lure the team from San Diego where it’s enjoyed fan support since 1959. LA has competing stadium proposals circulating and the Charger’s decision to go with AEG’s Staples-adjacent plan will be a windfall for both team and town.
San Diego officials wagered the Chargers on plans for a new downtown stadium just east of Petco Park and earmarked a half-billion dollars from CCDC (Downtown’s redevelopment agency) to make it happen. Governor Brown’s planned mass execution of the state’s 400 redevelopment agencies and special districts made San Diego’s stadium efforts decidedly murky.
No matter how you feel about taxpayer-financed facilities for billionaire team owners, losing the Chargers is very, very sad. Special interest sports franchises make a city, well, special.
Will San Diego survive? Yes, just fine thank you, but we should not lose sight of the points of pride the team brought us over 52 years.
I remember my dad taking me to Balboa Stadium to see the AFL Chargers play in that bare-bones bowl of concrete bleachers – spending invaluable time with a son who had no real interest in sports. I have always loved my dad for that effort.
I remember the day, I gathered up my own three youngest children so we could participate in a blue and gold flash mob event in the Jack Murphy Stadium parking lot to support the1984 Bolts. We weren’t big fans, but we were caught up in the civic pride they’d brought us that year.
Let’s also state for the record that short of corporate welfare, City of San Diego officials of late tried mightily to keep the team. With precarious municipal finances and the tide turning against publicly-financed playgrounds for the mega-rich, I am sure the team finally saw the graffiti on the locker room wall. Team owner Dean Spanos decided to make one last deal with a populace starved of an NFL home team and willing to overlook his team’s history of poor quality and mismanagement.
Team Spanos did themselves no favors in San Diego. Perhaps the worst public relations managers in NFL history and right up there with the Oakland’s Al Davis and Jacksonville’s Wayne Weaver, the Spanos’ have often been their own worst enemies. It may just be corporate passive-aggressive behavior: We’ll be stupid, demanding and mean, and eventually you’ll kick us out of a house that we really don’t want to occupy any way.
San Diegans won’t fall for that. We will wish the Chargers well. We are too great a place to be insulted or cowed by a big business exposing its profit motivations.
While the Chargers were a definite source of pride over the last five decades, they never engendered the same fanatic loyalty that the league’s storied franchises enjoy in Pittsburgh, Dallas, Green Bay and Boston. The Chargers defend their also-ran record with claims that there’s just too much happening in San Diego (with all this damned sunshine.) Nope, sorry. The truth is there was just too little happening on the field when it mattered most.
Art as home
Superagent Rand Allen of Ascent Realty – one of San Diego’s original members of the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Real Estate Professionals (NAGLREP) – has a primo Irving Gill cottage for sale in Hillcrest.
Gill is the shining star of San Diego architects from the early to mid-1900s. Known for his inspired blending of arches and modernist themes, Rand’s new listing at 3735 8th Ave. will be irresistible to Gill fans and at just $584,000 who can blame them.
Contact: rand@randallen.com for further information.
Jim Abbott is the President/Managing Broker of ARG Abbott Realty Group DRE LIC 1843472. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Nat’l. Assn of Gay and Lesbian Real Estate Professionals. He is a former board member at EQCA, SDAR, CAR and a past Library Commissioner for the City of San Diego. He can be reached at info@argsd.com or at his downtown office where his adult children pretend to let him run the company.
