The notion of the USC football team possibly leaving the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to play its home games in the Rose Bowl has a few UCLA fans peeved and preoccupied.
But it could become a reality. While USC would prefer to stay at the Coliseum, the school wants a master lease on the old stadium so that it can make significant improvements there, but the Coliseum Commission isn’t budging.
Rich Mayo, principal of Cabi West, which is a subsidiary of one of Mexico’s largest real estate developers, says that such a move would be disturbing.
“I think it would be like coming home and seeing pictures of your wife’s ex-boyfriend all over your house,” said Mayo, a lifelong Bruin fan who graduated from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1983.
John Tronson of Ramsey-Shilling Commercial Real Estate Services said sharing the stadium would be like mixing “oil and water it doesn’t work.”
Trojan fans do have something to look forward to: While parking is heinous at both stadiums, often forcing fans to stow their cars on the lawns of neighboring homeowners, Pasadena is pleasant.
“I feel a whole lot better parking my car in somebody’s front law in Pasadena than near the Coliseum,” Tronson said.
Republican Riches
A handful of prominent local businesspeople have contributed money to fund a controversial ballot measure that aims to change the way California counts its electoral votes in presidential elections. The measure, which needs to collect more than 400,000 signatures to get on the June ballot, would have electoral votes given by congressional district instead of the current winner-take-all system. The change would benefit the Grand Old Party the last Republican presidential candidate to carry California was George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Local contributors to the measure include media mogul Jerrold Perenchio with $50,000, billionaire philanthropist Robert Day with $45,000, financier Elliott Broidy with $10,000 and businessman Gary L. Wilson with $10,000.
Photography Fun
Hollywood power couple Bruce and Nancy Berman are auctioning off their renowned collection of 2,500 photographs. The collection will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York in 2008 and 2009 at three separate events.
Bruce Berman, chairman of Village Roadshow Pictures, has produced dozens of films, including “The Matrix,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” and “Mystic River.”
Each auction will be paired with a photography donation to an L.A. art institution. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum will all get works from the Bermans.
Daniel Miller can be reached at [email protected]
