SAN DIEGO _ In a new and entertaining book on the NFL, it's reported that Dean Spanos surprised NFL power brokers when he chose to relocate his Chargers to greater Los Angeles; that Rams owner Stan Kroenke ignored Spanos for a week after the move was announced, and that club owners were "miffed" with Spanos for severing a 56-year relationship with San Diego despite having handed him an L.A. option.
"We should have given him a puppy," one AFC executive says.
Spanos doesn't come off as happy, either, in the early aftermath of the relocation.
"Now I know how Art Modell feels," he says of the detested late owner who moved the Browns to Baltimore.
"Big Game, The NFL In Dangerous Times," authored by New York Times Magazine writer and Patriots fan Mark Leibovich, devotes most of its 349 pages to other recent events and current topics, but Spanos gets a cream pie to the face from both Leibovich and the NFL power brokers he granted anonymity.
"He is generally well liked by his partners around the league, but no one would mistake him for a visionary or even that significant of a force. He seemed to engender greater sympathy than respect from his fellow owners, as if he were a hapless little brother. 'Dino,' they call him,' " Leibovich writes.
The spin that the anonymous NFL brokers put on Team Spanos' relocation is that Spanos underachieved in attempts to get a San Diego stadium despite their noble efforts to empower him.
His brethren gave Spanos first dibs to join Kroenke in his privately financed Inglewood palace, though not before he would have to spend a few years in a small soccer stadium in Carson. Along with dangling an extra $100 million in NFL money toward a San Diego project _ the carrot _ the League handed Spanos the L.A. option as leverage (the stick) to get a deal done in San Diego.
Sympathy for Spanos, therefore, was in short supply when he invoked Modell.
Owners "were miffed at him for turning what had appeared to be a somewhat elegant solution to the L.A. problem into a towering embarrassment," Leibovich writes.
