Stadiums

Anaheim has hired two consultants to boost its shot at being chosen as the site of a professional football stadium. Financial advisory firm MZ Sports LLC and sports business consultant David Carter will help the city through the complex negotiations, Anaheim officials said Tuesday. Anaheim is one of four Southern California cities the National Football League is considering in its efforts to bring a team to the country's second-largest media market in time for the 2008 season.

It took 37 seconds to bring down old Riverfront Stadium, a prominent feature of Cincinnati's skyline for 32 years and the ballpark that was home to Pete Rose's Big Red Machine and Hank Aaron's 714th home run. With the push of a button, 1,275 pounds of explosives went off in a counterclockwise pattern of blasts around what has been renamed Cinergy Field, collapsing the arena inward onto its former playing surface.

The District of Columbia Council narrowly gave preliminary approval to a plan to build a publicly funded baseball stadium, moving closer toward finding a permanent home for the Washington Nationals. At the end of a seven-hour meeting the council voted 6 to 4, with three members abstaining, to build the stadium along the Anacostia River near the Navy Yard and South Capitol Street. A final vote on the proposal will come in several weeks.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and City Council President John Ferraro have told NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue that they are ready to "jointly explore options with you" on providing a stadium as a permanent home for the Super Bowl and an NFL theme park. The language in the Oct. 17 letter to Tagliabue released by Riordan's office was not clear as to whether Riordan and Ferraro thought a new stadium, as proposed Oct.

A proposal to renovate the stadium where the Vigilantes baseball team plays its home games was vetoed Wednesday by trustees of the South Orange County Community College District. Meeting in closed session, trustees refused to approve a plan that would have raised about $3 million to remodel and expand the Saddleback College stadium so the minor league team could play its home schedule of about 50 games there.

A generation ago, when Montreal was preparing to host the Olympic Games, the mood was "anything goes" here in the world's second-largest French-speaking city. To herald what looked to be a bright future, the organizing committee settled on a triumphant stadium design. The roof would be 200,000 square feet of boldly tented Kevlar--the same high-tech synthetic fabric used to make bulletproof vests--suspended by cables from a unique, curving tower.

It appears as though the deal to build a baseball stadium for the Angels will not be completed in time for the 1998 season. Angel President Richard Brown said it would take three years to complete the $215-million project, a year for the stadium design phase and two years for construction, meaning an agreement with the city of Anaheim would have to be reached no later than this month.

A planned $525-million waterside stadium and mall complex, sold to voters last summer as a job- and revenue-generating bonanza, is in trouble. And city officials are blaming a family feud between owners of the San Francisco 49ers football team. Things began going wrong for the project last December, when Edward "Eddie" DeBartolo Jr., chairman of the 49ers, learned that he was the target of a federal investigation into the award of gaming licenses in Louisiana.

The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball franchise, Donald T. Sterling, said Wednesday after a meeting with Mayor Tom Bradley and Coliseum Commission President Richard Riordan that unless an $85-million new indoor arena is built to replace the Sports Arena, the Clippers will move to "a new facility elsewhere in Los Angeles." Sterling did not specify which site he had in mind. For his part, Riordan said he and the mayor had shown Sterling a new remodeling plan for the Sports Arena that was less expensive than those previously developed.

Two years ago, the city of Anaheim appeared to risk losing its baseball team to protect the future of a football team that did not exist. Today, as the baseball team prepares for the grand opening of its renovated ballpark, the city quietly has eliminated a football stadium from its blueprints. During the 1996 negotiations between Disney and the city, Anaheim officials fought fiercely for the right to build a football stadium adjacent to Anaheim Stadium, now Edison Field.