Spring Loaded

There wasn’t even a hint of doubt in the voice on the other end of the line.

“It’s a little late for this season,” said the NFL executive, “but there is no question you’ll have a team by next season. No question.”

It was June of 1995. I was sitting in an Oakland hotel room doing a story on the return of the Raiders after 13 seasons in Los Angeles.

The second shoe had dropped. Earlier that year, the Rams had deserted Orange County for St. Louis.

The reaction of fans to the loss of two teams? A collective shrug of the shoulders. We’re L.A. The NFL needs us more than we need it.

Fourteen years later, with yet another NFL season looming, I am still waiting to see if that is true.

It’s been 14 years of false starts, bad rumors, proposed stadium sites, planned environmental reports, empty promises and broken dreams.

There was even an attempt by the Seattle Seahawks to force the issue by simply packing up moving vans with equipment and heading on down to Southern California.

Once the NFL got involved, however, those vans headed right back up the road where they came from.

The barrier to an NFL return to L.A. is double-barreled: Who will play and where they will play?

All the teams who have threatened to move in recent seasons seemed to have stopped thinking the grass is greener in Hollywood. And there are no expansion plans being drawn up.

Nor are there any stadium blueprints ready for serious consideration. From Irwindale to the City of Commerce to Carson to Dodger Stadium to Inglewood, proposals have been floated, bloated and busted.

Inglewood was the most viable. Raider owner Al Davis had a solid offer from the NFL for a stadium adjacent to Hollywood Park racetrack, but Davis turned his back on it and headed north.

The NFL still refuses to consider the Coliseum even though the USC Trojans pack it on Saturdays without a problem.

And so, as we head into the 2009 season, I’m sending this status report to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

“Dear Roger,

We’ve got the Lakers and the Dodgers, the Trojans and the Bruins, the Angels and the Ducks. And yes, even the Clippers and the Kings. We’ve got Kobe and Manny. We’ve got the sun and the sand, the mountains and the ocean.

And we’ve got every NFL game we want beamed into our homes. We’ve got our fantasy leagues and our Super Bowl parties.

You want to enrich our sports experience even further, Roger, you know where to find us. But as you well know, we don’t pay the freight. We don’t pay for expansion teams. We don’t pay for new stadiums.

That was true back in the days when we actually had public funds to disburse. It’s even more so now that our state is bankrupt and our city’s unemployment lines are long.

Your organization has the billionaires. You’re the ones with the TV money and the gate receipts and enough merchandise to fill Jerry Jones’ new billion-plus stadium.

When Staples Center was going up, an attempt was made to subsidize part of the cost with public funds.

The Staples folks pleading poverty? Ple-e-e-ase.

We weren’t moved.

They built it anyway and, somehow, some way, with the Lakers and the Clippers and the Kings and the concerts and the awards shows and the political convention, they have eked out a living.

We think you could probably do the same, Roger. So give us a call if you’re interested, but we don’t expect it to happen. With the No. 1 sport in the country, you are doing just fine without us, and with the No. 1 sports market in the country, we are doing just fine without you.

You know what they say: "You can’t beat L.A.”

The banners are being hung, the spotlight is being focused and the seats are being polished.

Mannywood is about to be reopened.

The way the Dodgers are welcoming Manny Ramirez back, you’d think he was returning from the war in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Or a life-threatening injury.

Instead, it’s from a 50-game suspension by Major League Baseball. Ramirez was punished for possessing a prescription for HCG, a female fertility drug, coupled with a drug test that, according to the Los Angeles Times, showed an elevated synthetic testosterone level, leading to the conclusion that Ramirez may have taken steroids.

Ramirez didn’t appeal that conclusion, telling the media, “I didn’t kill nobody. I didn’t rape nobody, so that’s it.”

That’s it, indeed.

While the news that Alex Rodriguez had used performance-enhancing drugs was greeted with mostly anger and scorn around the country, and even some embarrassment in New York, Ramirez is being ushered back in with all the enthusiasm that greeted him when he first arrived last summer.

He had sailed in followed by a wake of horror stories about his final days in Boston, stories about bad behavior and a bad attitude that had even caused some teammates to happily escort him to the door.

That was ignored in Los Angeles from the moment Manny first squared up bat and ball. He responded by putting his teammates on his back and carrying them into the playoffs and all the way to the National League Championship Series, invigorating a struggling, feuding franchise.

As for his past sins, that, said his new best friends, was just Manny being Manny.

Even a sometimes ugly off-season and preseason in which Manny dug his cleats in and held out for a long-term contract were dismissed as, again, Manny being Manny.

All was again forgiven when he finally signed with the Dodgers, just as all is being forgiven now upon his return.

So dust off the dreadlocks, break out the jerseys and let the partying begin.

But what if Manny can no longer be Manny?

Whatever he may have been taking, he was doing so for a purpose. If he was on something, was that the reason his production remained so spectacular? If he is no longer on anything, could that cause a dramatic decline in his numbers?

We have all witnessed players balloon physically during the height of the steroid era only to just as noticeably shrink as baseball’s microscope focused in on the problem.

In his recent absence, Manny celebrated his 37th birthday. Even in his prime, he didn’t exactly look like a bodybuilder.

Don’t be surprised if Manny comes back looking like only a shell of his former self. Be forewarned that, if there were performance-enhancing drugs involved, his performance could be seriously affected without them.

And then what?

Manny is supposed to return to left field, replacing Juan Pierre, who, in Manny’s absence, had one of the hottest bats in the league for a while.

What if Manny can’t match those numbers?

He comes back to the team with the best record in baseball, a team that hasn’t exactly suffered in his absence. What if it suffers upon his return?

If Manny is not Manny on the field, will they still love him in Mannywood? Or in the front office? Will it be enough just to have not killed or raped anybody?

Everybody seems willing to look the other way as long as the hits keep coming.

But if those hits no longer fall, watch out. The foreclosure notices will go up in Mannywood and the dreadlock caps will go in the trash.

Remember how reliever Eric Gagne was the toast of L.A.? Remember how quickly he was forgotten after he was named on the Mitchell report about performance-enhancing drugs?

Manny being Manny? Priceless.

Manny no longer able to be Manny? Useless.

Pete Rose says baseball’s Hall of Fame has a mess on its hands.

Who better to know that than Rose when it comes to all things Cooperstown?

It doesn’t seem likely, at this point, that Rose will ever see his likeness on a plaque within those hallowed walls because of his gambling addiction, which threatened the integrity of the game.

But if Rose will forever find a “Do Not Enter” sign in his face, what about Barry Bonds?

Or Mark McGwire?

A-Rod?

Rafael Palmeiro?

Sammy Sosa?

Roger Clemens?

Or the newest member of the S Class, Manny Ramirez?

All of the above are either known to have used steroids, or some derivative thereof, or are suspected of having done so.

And what about all of their contemporaries? Anybody who flexed his muscles over the last decade to send a baseball into the seats or fired a pitch that jacked a speed gun up to the high 90s is suspect.

Call it guilt by association, call it unfair, but it’s reality.

If what Rose did damaged the integrity of the game, what about all of this bashing of the home-run record, once the most honored and respected standard in all of sports.

When then-teammate Jeff Kent, defending Bonds, asked how we know Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig weren’t on steroids, we all laughed.

They didn’t have steroids back then. But they did have pine tar, they did have spitballs and they did steal signs.

The New York Giants have been accused of stealing the sign that tipped Bobby Thomson off about what was coming out of the hand of Brooklyn Dodger righthander Ralph Branca in 1951, allowing Thomson to hit “the shot heard round the world,” the pennant-winning blow into the left-field stands at the Polo Grounds.

No one denies that cheating has been a part of the game since Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright or whoever it was who invented the game first put bat to ball.

But few have suggested those cheaters be kept out of Cooperstown.

Not unless they wagered, like the Black Sox, like Rose. That was crossing the line. That was bringing in the gamblers and the possibility of the fix.

Now, we have a generation of players who have brought in the chemists and the syringes and the bionic sluggers.

There’s no keeping them out now. Enact stringent drug testing and some devious medical mind will find a way to mask those devilish substances.

Look at the advances made in performance-enhancing drugs in just the last decade and imagine what it will be like a decade from now. Home run titles are going to be won by players who look like The Incredible Hulk. Cy Youngs will be awarded to guys whose grip will resemble that of Wolverine.

Forget about trying to stand in the way of drug development. It would be like offering anger management to the Hulk.

What about all the dire warnings about what steroids and other body enhancers do to the athlete, about his future prospects for health and longevity?

There’s an apocryphal tale told about Hack Wilson, who still holds the major-league, single-season RBI record with 191, a mark seemingly so far out of reach that it can’t be touched with a ten-foot needle.

Wilson, alleged to have been a serious alcoholic, was supposedly confronted in his clubhouse by two tubs, one containing water, the other alcohol.

Into those tubs, live worms were poured. The worms in the tub of water swam around merrily while the worms in the tub of alcohol soon died.

What does that tell you, Wilson was asked.

That I’ll never die of worms, he replied.

Athletes imagine themselves to be bullet-proof. They are young, they are strong, they are breaking records and making millions of dollars. What could possibly go wrong?

So should baseball simply disqualify a generation of ballplayers, just shut the doors to Cooperstown?

Hardly.

What they should do is shut the door on the old era and label everybody who enters from the mid 90s on part of the S for steroids era.

That would not be unprecedented.

Before juice was added to the ball and Babe Ruth to the New York Yankee lineup, baseball was played in what became later known as the dead-ball era. Frank Baker was the home-run king with 12. Cy Young won 511 games.

That will never happen again, but nobody tried to bar the door to anybody who played after 1920. It was understood that conditions had changed and comparisons to the pre 1920s were silly.

So it should be now. Let Hank Aaron and Roger Maris and Ruth forever be the long-ball kings of the 75 years that began in 1920.

Let the bloated hitters of the steroid era be compared to their peers.

Then, the only ones left out in the cold will be Rose and the Black Sox. For their sins, there will never be salvation.

The weekend in the rear view mirror:

The only thing missing from Sunday’s demolition of the L.A. Lakers by the Houston Rockets was Yao Ming pulling a Willis Reed, limping onto the court and taking a few shots to inspire his teammates…

Turns out, the Rockets didn’t need added inspiration. And it certainly helped that the Lakers didn’t have any of their own…

Maybe Yao is saving his Reed impersonation for a possible Game 7…

Imagine where this series would stand if both Yao and Tracy McGrady were at full strength and on the court…

Think Houston coach Rick Adelman sees purple and gold in his nightmares? He has previously been knocked out of the playoffs five times by the Lakers, twice with the Portland Trail Blazers and three times with the Sacramento Kings. Two of those five eliminations were sweeps. But the most traumatic series for him had to be in 2002 when his Kings fell short in the overtime of Game 7. That was the series which produced two games guaranteed to keep any coach awake for months: Robert Horry’s game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer in Game 4 and the suspicious cloud over the officiating in Game 6. Now Adelman is again looking at purple and gold with his top two players, Yao and McGrady, missing from the lineup. The Houston coach must have at least slept well Sunday night…

More than just this season’s title hopes are on the line for Kobe Bryant. There were the Jerry West-Elgin Baylor-Wilt Chamberlain Lakers, the Magic Johnson-Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Lakers and the Shaquille O’Neal-Bryant Lakers. But, if Bryant wants to be up there with MJ, his role model, he needs to create a Kobe dynasty of his own. If not now, when?..

Enough already with flagrant fouls, both 1 and 2. Let’s make it real simple. If a defender is going for the ball, it’s a hard foul. Period. If he’s going for the player, it’s a flagrant foul. What Derek Fisher did to Luis Scola was a flagrant foul. What Ron Artest did to Pau Gasol was not…

Does the NBA really need to clamp down so much on hard fouls in general? The classic was the flying headlock by Kevin McHale on Kurt Rambis in the 1984 NBA Finals between the Lakers and Boston Celtics. It didn’t result in a riot or a brawl or even a fight between Rambis and McHale. Both understood it was a rough moment in a tough series and that was the end of it. David Stern, what are you afraid of? Let the players play…

Speaking of Rambis-McHale, where’s the consistency by the league? On the one hand, the NBA frowned on the Trail Blazers, in the moments leading up to a game against the Lakers in The Rose Garden, showing a hard foul by Trevor Ariza from a previous game. Yet league officials ignored the Celtics replaying the McHale-Rambis incident ad nauseam before each Celtic home game against the Lakers in last season’s NBA Finals…

Saturday’s Denver Nuggets-Dallas Mavericks playoff game may have been the first time in NBA history that a team stalked off the court in furious anger because it didn’t get a foul called against it…

Why didn’t someone stick a mike in Mark Cuban’s face after the game. Afraid of FCC ramifications?..

So Dodger owner Frank McCourt wants Manny Ramirez to apologize to his teammates. Why would they believe anything he had to say since he has already betrayed them…

McCourt also wants Manny to address the media. Maybe Manny can borrow A-Rod’s script which sounded good at the time. Of course, according to a new book by Selena Roberts, A-Rod wasn’t exactly telling the truth, hard as that might be to believe…

Manny or no Manny, the Dodgers will live or die with their pitching…

Why is it athletes look into the camera and mouth the words “Hi, Mom” on Mother’s Day but never seem to respond with the same sentiment on Father’s Day? Too much of a threat to their macho image?

When Oscar De La Hoya fought Arturo Gatti in Las Vegas in 2001, the posters heralding the fight featured a photo of Oscar.

Alone.

No opponent shown. No opponent necessary.

Announcing that Oscar was at the MGM Grand was like announcing Elvis was at the Hilton or Celine at Caesars Palace.

Each was a rock star whose first name sufficed to stir up emotions and ticket sales.

De La Hoya smashed all sorts of notions and standards such as:

-- Boxing lives or dies with the heavyweights.

Wrong.

-- Females won’t support the sport in great numbers.

Wrong.

-- No preponderance of knockouts. No appeal.

Wrong.

-- Losses in the ring translate into losses in the revenue stream.

Wrong.

As a bilingual, articulate fighter with a gold-medal past and movie star good looks who would take on all comers, De La Hoya defied the axioms that had guided his sport for more than a century.

When Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in their unforgettable 1997 fight, it appeared boxing itself had also suffered lasting damage, its image lying in a pool of blood on the canvas.

Instead, De La Hoya picked his sport up off the canvas and carried it on his shoulders for more than a decade, becoming the greatest generator of revenue in boxing history. De La Hoya drew just over 14.1 million pay-per-view buys in his career, resulting in $696 million in revenue. His 1997 match against Floyd Mayweather, Jr. set the all-time record for pay-per-view buys with 2.4 million.

The fact De La Hoya lost his biggest fights of the last few years didn’t dim the enthusiasm. He could still carry a poster by himself.

Felix Trinidad, Shane Mosley, Bernard Hopkins, Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao may have all beaten De La Hoya, but, without him in the ring, they couldn’t beat him at the box office.

But now that’s all history in the wake of De La Hoya’s retirement several weeks ago. With the heavyweight division still in dismal shape, the Klitschko brothers dominating perhaps the weakest field since they fought with bare knuckles, and a worldwide recession battering consumers, is any fighter capable of taking the baton from De La Hoya?

Promoter Bob Arum says one of his fighters, Pacquiao, is the man for the job. It was Pacquiao, after all, who effectively ended De La Hoya’s career by thoroughly whipping him last December.

And few if any question Pacquiao’s position at the top of the list of the best fighters pound-for-pound.

But as Mosley learned when he defeated De La Hoya in 2000, beating THE man doesn’t necessarily make a fighter THE man.

Pacquiao may equal or even exceed the popularity of the president of his native country, the Philippines, but here in America, he can still walk down most city streets without being recognized. Blame that on his inability to speak fluid English. Attribute it to a lack of charisma with U.S. fans. Or simply explain it as a byproduct of troubled economic times when the number of people in the employment line would seem to diminish the number of people lining up for boxing events.

In addition, the sport must now share the combat spotlight with mixed-martial arts. And boxing must further endure the harsh reality of diminished resources for newspapers which has drained much of the coverage the sport once took for granted. The internet cannot yet adequately fill that black hole.

So, fair or not, Pacquiao must prove his worth in a vastly different media environment.

The first test will come Saturday night when he faces England’s Ricky Hatton at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.

Each can boast of a huge fan base in their native land, but can they be stars on the world stage?

Richard Schaefer, CEO of De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions, asks for patience.

“Oscar was like nobody else,” Schaefer said, “but so was Muhammad Ali. So was Sugar Ray Leonard. Each defined their eras. It may take some time, more than a few weeks, to figure out who the next big star will be.

“But let’s face it. Since 2002, Oscar fought nine times. It was sporadic. Maybe instead of one or two big Oscar fights a year, having ten guys fighting in big matches will have impact in its own way. Oscar’s retirement is not a totally devastating blow to boxing. It can open the door to other guys stepping into his shoes. I didn’t say fill his shoes, but at least start with baby steps.”

Pacquiao hopes to take a big step Saturday. But, at this point, no one is ready to put him on a poster by himself.

And when people say Manny in this country, the first image that comes to mind is still a baggy pants outfielder for the L.A. Dodgers.