A POSITIVE TENURE - EXCEPT IN L.A.

Byline: BILLY WITZ

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue's reign has been marked by labor peace where there was once strife, mega-billion TV deals that are the envy of every other sports league and franchise values that are escalating as rapidly as the game's popularity.

To much of the country, Tagliabue, who announced Monday that he will retire this summer, will be remembered as a great commissioner.

In Los Angeles, they may beg to differ.

When Tagliabue turns his attention to Los Angeles, it has meant fans, after losing the grip on their team, put their hands to use by covering their ears. City officials use theirs to grab hold of their wallets. Consider: within little more than a year of Tagliabue taking office, the Rams and Raiders were each in their conference championship game.

Now, Los Angeles is embarking on its 12th season without pro football. In the intervening years, there have been demands for public money, and then one proclamation after another by Tagliabue - from under the Coliseum's peristyle, from Hollywood Park, from the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, from the steps of City Hall - that the NFL is coming back any day now. Given the benefit of hindsight - or an otherwise exemplary record - Tagliabue listed the absence of a team in Los Angeles as his biggest regret.

``If we had the benefit of hindsight, we would have made certain that either the Rams or the Raiders stayed in L.A. in the mid-'90s,'' Tagliabue said Monday in a conference call. ``I thought that we were taking all of the steps that we needed to take when we passed that resolution in providing for the stadium in Hollywood Park, and it turned out not to be operative. I guess if you could go back and relive a month, that might be the month where you might do something differently.''

The NFL and Los Angeles have survived nicely without each other.

So much time has passed that it is easy to forget the way the Rams were allowed to leave - running the team into the ground to justify heading to a sweetheart deal in St. Louis. Or the Raiders constant threats.

A little leadership might have gone a long way then. Whether it's his rearing as an East Coast attorney, his experience as the NFL's lead counsel in a successful anti-trust suit by the Raiders and the Coliseum, or his insistence on pronouncing the city as Los Ang-uh-leeze (an ode to Arlo Guthrie would be too ironic), there is the sense that Tagliabue and his staff just don't get L.A.

Tagliabue often gets credit for being the right man at the right time for the NFL, leading the league to a new level of profitability, settling labor issues that plagued predecessor Pete Rozelle's final years.

Not to dismiss the role of the often-dysfunctional political process here, but it seems fair to wonder if Los Angeles would be without football under Rozelle, who was raised in Compton, honed his public-relations sense working for the Rams, and whose cool and charm were a marked contrast to Tagliabue.

``(Tagliabue) has always done a fantastic job of shepherding the best interests of the league, but the best interests of the league have not always been consistent with the best interests of the region,''said sports business consultant David Carter, who has worked for Anaheim, Los Angeles and Pasadena.

Meaning that as long as cities like Cleveland, St. Louis, Oakland, Houston, Baltimore, Carolina and Jacksonville were willing to open up their coffers to subsidize stadiums, they would have teams and Los Angeles would not.

Now, again, Tagliabue is saying that putting a team in Los Angeles is a priority and something he wants to see through before he leaves. It would, of course, be one last piece of unfinished business, removing perhaps the only noticeable blemish on his career. But excuse anyone here for their lack of enthusiasm.

It is, as the commissioner often reminds us, a bottom-line business.