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Good Riddance, Al Davis

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Well, the other kids wouldn’t play by his rules, so Al Davis picked up his ball and went home--though in typical Davis fashion he went not so much out of pique as for a price.

Los Angeles may be without a professional football team for the second time in 10 years, but there is no reason for city officials or the Coliseum commissioners to be particularly downcast. The Raiders’ players are a colorful and hard-working bunch, but if the average loan-sharking operation were run with Davis’ single-minded pursuit of profit, the Mafia probably would be out of business.

Davis would like people to think that all his club’s troubles here arose out of the Coliseum’s undeniable decrepitude. Perhaps, but the Raiders’ resolute refusal to invest in an adequate promotional and marketing effort also contributed to the problem. You may be able to get away with that in Green Bay, where your stiffest competition is ice fishing, but it won’t wash in Southern California, where fans have so many other professional, major college and participatory sports from which to choose. Finally, there’s the equally undeniable fact that the Raiders haven’t had a winning season or made the playoffs since 1985. If Davis had spent as much time making deals for players as he did for stadiums, his team might have fared better.

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Still, Los Angeles is a big-league town and it will need a National Football League team when the Raiders leave in 1992, which may mean enticing one away from another city. One way to hold down the inevitable cost of that seduction would be for the Coliseum Commission to decide right now just how far it’s willing to go in renovating the stadium in order to secure a new NFL club.

To do that, the commission--which is composed of three representatives each from city, county and state government--needs some renovation of its own. The Raiders were not the first tenants with valid complaints. Even USC grumbles about the way the place is run; so do Spectacor Management Group and MCA Inc., the private companies attempting to run the Coliseum under the commission’s erratic direction.

Before the Coliseum Commission goes shopping, it needs to put its own affairs in order.

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