Scorecard

VOX POPULI

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced last week that he will recommend to the NFL's owners that the 1993 Super Bowl be played in a city other than Tempe, Ariz., which had been scheduled to host the game. That's in keeping with the NFL's preelection stance regarding Proposition 302, the referendum that would have made Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a holiday in Arizona, as it is in 47 other states. Prop 302 was defeated. Also affected by the vote was the Fiesta Bowl, whose officials considered moving the game to another site before deciding, on Sunday, to tough it out in Tempe.

The situation had its ironies. First, the two cities that stand to suffer most are Phoenix and Tempe. Both observe the holiday already, and both voted in favor of the referendum. What's more, the NFL may have done some damage to its own cause by making Arizonans feel that they were being pressured by the league's preelection threats to move the game if the holiday was nixed.

While it's commendable for the NFL to throw its considerable weight behind causes as worthy as this one, it's easy to look cynically on Tagliabue's action. Until last year, when Art Shell became the head coach of the Los Angeles Raiders, the NFL had not had a black head coach since 1925. It still doesn't have a black general manager or majority owner. That's a sorry record, especially considering that almost 60% of the league's players are black. If the NFL truly wants to honor King, it might begin its campaign a bit closer to home.

Also on Election Day:

?A proposal to build a 45,000-seat, $153 million stadium for the San Francisco Giants in Santa Clara, 40 miles south of San Francisco, was defeated. Voters in five Santa Clara County cities narrowly rejected a proposed 1% utility tax that would have funded the building of the stadium. It was the second time in a year that Bay Area voters rejected a proposal that would have paid for a new ballpark. Last year, just three weeks after the earthquake, San Franciscans turned down, also by a narrow margin, a measure to build a new facility to replace cold and windy Candlestick Park, largely because there were reminders all over San Francisco that there are more important uses for tax dollars.

In the latest vote, the timing again proved unfortunate, with voters in the Bay Area, as across the country, in no mood to approve new taxes. The Giants have said they will play one more season in Candlestick, after which they could move out of state if there's no northern California alternative. To keep the team, San Francisco mayor Art Agnos has hinted he will seek private financing for a downtown stadium.

?By an almost 2-to-1 margin, Californians gave a big no to Big Green, the state's omnibus environmental package (SCORECARD, Nov. 5). The environmental movement took it on the chin elsewhere, too, as voters around the country rejected a wide variety of measures aimed at protecting natural resources. A $1.97 billion environmental-projects bond issue was defeated in New York, as were measures to mandate recycling in Oregon, to protect streams in Missouri and to regulate land use in Washington. "This was the autumn of voter discontent," said Al Meyerhoff, one of the authors of Big Green. "We were caught in a wave of voter negativism."

THE BODY POLITIC
Other election news: The new mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minn. (pop. 50,000), is Jesse (the Body) Ventura, a former pro wrestler. Ventura, 39, who campaigned door-to-door in a T-shirt and jeans, received 63% of the vote against 18-year incumbent Jim Krautkremer.

ILLINOIS AND MISSOURI FAIL