Chargers Fans Fear Losing Their Team - Ingles

Here is a view of the between-life, or afterlife, known as limbo, for a professional sports team.
The rows of once-temporary steel bleachers below and behind Kyle Spangler show growing patches of rust. Alongside his field-level seat, in the corner end zone at Qualcomm Stadium, the bleacher surface is pitted with fresh tobacco stains, as though to compare their corrosive qualities with those of time and nature.

The hasty return of N.F.L. training camps has left every fan to contemplate a merry-go-round of comings and goings and stayings. In that respect, the Chargers are no different.

Where they stand apart is their status as one of San Diego’s two major sports teams, and what their fans consider a real possibility: that in the absence of an agreement by a cash-strapped city and state to replace Qualcomm Stadium, the Chargers will leave town.

The most likely destination is a two-and-a-half-hour drive north on the Golden State Freeway, to downtown Los Angeles, where the City Council is expected to vote Tuesday on starting the process of approving construction of a privately financed $1.2 billion stadium with a retractable roof.

Financed by Anschutz Entertainment Group, the sports and entertainment conglomerate owned by Philip Anschutz, the proposed stadium is the latest of repeated attempts to lure a N.F.L. franchise back to Los Angeles since the Rams and the Raiders left in 1995.

Also under consideration is a rival proposal, 20 miles southeast of downtown in the City of Industry, also privately financed, by the construction mogul Ed Roski, who worked with Anschutz in developing the downtown Staples Center.

Farther south, negotiations between San Diego and the Spanos family, which owns the Chargers, over a new stadium date to 2002, when the family appointed the lawyer Mark Fabiani as its go-between with the city.

Fabiani, who is also serving as spokesman for Lance Armstrong during a federal grand jury’s doping investigation, said a new downtown stadium for the Chargers would cost $750 million to $800 million. Citing previous stadium projects, Fabiani said the public share of those costs would be about 65 percent.

The calculation for teams, politicians and voters alike will be the price that can be placed on the fanaticism of fans like Spangler, 26, who watched a night scrimmage last week in an Antonio Gates jersey.

Spangler’s love affair with the Chargers — he drove 110 miles from the Los Angeles exurb of Ontario to Qualcomm, as he does three or four times a season for games — began with the end of another relationship when he was 9.

That was in 1995, when the Los Angeles Rams fled Southern California for a warmer welcome and newer stadium in St Louis. With that experience, he can see the future for Chargers fans in his own past.

“A lot of San Diego fans might have the same resentment that I had when the Rams left,” Spangler said.

As with many of the fans at the practice, he says the Chargers’ departure is inevitable.

“The way everything is shaping, it looks like L.A.,” Spangler said. “You hear a lot more about the stadium being built in L.A. than you do here.”

The Chargers’ departure would not be in response to their performance on the field. With five playoff appearances in the seven years, the talent-laden Chargers have been one of the N.F.L.’s better teams in the regular season.

DeeDee Hess sat nearby with her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. Newly returned home after 15 years in “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica,” she was renewing acquaintances with a place and team that had been part of her family’s life from its inception.

As a security guard for the team, her father would walk the field before games during the 1970s and early 1980s. Hess trod the same turf as a volunteer usher for Radio City Music Hall performers when the stadium hosted the Super Bowl in January 2003.

Hess says “absolutely” that the Chargers are headed for Los Angeles, a state of affairs that will be painful for her and the team.

“This is nostalgic for me,” she said. “It makes me mad. Honestly, they’re not going to get the support there. The Lakers are about it in L.A.”

The fans, perhaps 2,000 in all, were scattered through the lower reaches of Qualcomm’s 71,500 seats. From the seats beyond the western end zone, quarterback Philip Rivers’s voice could be heard as he called plays from the far 20-yard line.

The stadium was opened in August 1967, a monolith of concrete, its playing field and parking lots subject to occasional inundation from a tributary of the nearby San Diego River.

Bert and Lucy Hernandez were among those who voted on the original ballot measure for the stadium’s construction, in the mid-1960s. They have been season-ticket holders for 20 years.

He was in the military, and then a salesman, now retired, with no illusions about the state of the place: he waits unto eternity to use the restrooms, the structure itself showing its age.

“They’re not doing anything to renovate it,” Bert Hernandez said of the Spanos family, “because they don’t want to invest in it.

“Right now, I think the Chargers are in limbo because I don’t know if they’re going to leave or stay. I guess they don’t see any hope of San Diego coming through and saving them.”

Players like long snapper David Binn and center Nick Hardwick have more than the usual amount of emotional investment in the team’s future whereabouts.

Both are year-round residents of the city, Hardwick for eight years, Binn since 1994.

“San Diego isn’t known as a huge football town, but the fans are very passionate,” Binn said.

Hardwick, who is also the team’s players union representative, disagreed. “A football town?” he responded. “Oh yeah. When we’re rolling, in our stadium on a Sunday, it’s one of the louder places you’ll play.”

Neither player professes to know the team’s likely destination, but both offer civic pride as a reason for it to stay.

“I guess I would go where I’m told to go,” Hardwick said with a notable lack of enthusiasm about the prospect of playing in Los Angeles. “But I like where I’m at, and I would like to stay here.

“I know a lot of the guys in the locker room would rather stay in San Diego. It’s a great city to live in and play for. We’re proud to be here.”

Timing appears to be critical in persuading local voters to support tax increases. A ballot initiative to allow partial public financing of a $453 million downtown baseball stadium passed easily in November 1998, less than two weeks after the Padres lost to the Yankees in the World Series.

Since then, though, the economy and government’s finances have deteriorated in California. In 2008, voters rejected a proposal to pay for improvements in firefighting services and equipment through a parcel tax increase. This came 12 months after wildfires killed 15 people and destroyed 3,400 houses near San Diego in October 2007.

“The Chargers are very popular in San Diego,” Darren Pudgil, a spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders, said. “For the people of San Diego, it’s going to be a decision to decide if they want to keep the team in San Diego.”

Whatever the resolution, it will not be in the near term. Pudgil said the city hoped to put a stadium financing proposition to a vote on the November 2012 ballot, a football lifetime away. (source New York Times)