Will Gloria Estefan become the Dolphins’ biggest cheerleader?

Arte Moreno is about to get upstaged as the most prominent Latino to own a professional sports franchise, and it will be by someone who didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a ball club.

Moreno is the guy who bought the Los Angeles Angels baseball team one year after they won their first-ever World Series title in 2002 – and hasn’t managed to get close to a pennant since, even though he has been willing to spend top dollar to get talented ballplayers and has created an environment where some Latin American athletes feel overly welcomed.

FOR THE PAST few years, Moreno has been at the top of a very tiny heap when it comes to Latinos who own sports franchises. The fraternity of sports team owners is small enough, and is mostly limited to corporations that use the teams for publicity and a tax writeoff, although a few Anglo business types remain who run their teams for the ego of it all.

But now, Moreno will have to take a seat behind Gloria Estefan and her producer husband Emilio.

The two have worked out a deal to buy a portion of the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League. The Miami Herald newspaper reports that the deal officially will be announced on Thursday.

This is a purchase done purely for ego.

IT’S NOT LIKE the Estefans (who have made millions in the music business, bringing strains of salsa to pop music and making Gloria a star in the entertainment world) are going to start running the team.

It’s not like they even have any special knowledge about football, other than from watching it on television every Sunday (Emilio allegedly is a hard-core Dolphins fan).

But it will add a little bit of entertainment glamour to the Dolphins franchise.

Just envision being in the owners private box at the Dolphins’ stadium on autumn Sundays, with the Estefans partaking in the game along with the other business partners who actually control the franchise.

YET IT WILL be the Estefans who add the bit of glitz that could rub off on the controlling partners and make them look sort of glamorous in the process.

What this could wind up doing is adding football to the Latino experience.

It’s true that to many people in the growing Latino population, soccer and baseball are the top games to follow – although the hip-hop culture that has overtaken professional basketball has its appeal to younger Latinos who can enjoy the flash of the NBA as much as any other American youth.

American football (as opposed to real football) just isn’t a game that is played “back home” in the old country – although it’s not like the basic concept is alien.

THE SAME LATINOS who can get into Mexican freestyle wrestling (lucha libre) because it is an overly physical spectacle of guys in crazed costumes trying to jump on top of and beat up on each other likely could find aspects of professional football that could appeal to them.

And if it turns out that Gloria Estefan winds up giving a little bit of Cubana glamour to an actual NFL franchise, it could wind up that Latinos across the country would wind up paying attention to Miami every Sunday – even if their families’ immigration route has nothing to do with South Florida.

So when I ask if Estefan is going to become the Dolphins’ cheerleader, I don’t mean in some literal sense that she puts on one of those skimpy (and borderline slutty) costumes that the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders wear at their public appearances.

I mean she could become the woman who talks up her “team” every chance she gets, and in the process helps expose them to the fast-growing segment of the population that is so far on the rise that it is almost ridiculous to continue thinking of them as a “minority.”

SO SOME PEOPLE might think that all the Estefans did was spent money on an ego purchase that will get them a good seat in the stadium on game-day.

But if they play their business cards properly, they could wind up bolstering their own interests while also helping the NFL gain a share of the growing Latino market.

And as for Arte Moreno, it looks like he’s going to have to actually put together a ball club that wins a championship if he wants to gain any further attention.

Who knows? Maybe Vladimir Guerrero of the Dominican Republic and his big-bucks contract will pay off someday and he will lead the Angels to a championship, instead of some good personal statistics and a playoff appearance that falls short of ’02.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: E. Javier Loya of CHOICE! Energy is owner of the Houston Texans of the NFL. He too (http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/1109351.html) gets upstaged by the Estefans’ celebrity status.