Old L. A.: Quiche It Goodby

I can remember when franchises used to move to this town.

I can remember when this was the town that bailed out baseball, made pro basketball respectable, rescued the Olympics, moved football into the big time. Franchises used to be lined up as far as the eye could see, taking a number waiting to get in here.

Baseball was the sick Man of Sport in the 50s. It was our “national” pastime only if you lived east of the Mississippi. When the St. Louis Browns moved, they moved to the Atlantic. The rest of the country was moving west, baseball was moving east. Horace Greeley must have been laughing his head off.

When the Dodgers came west, baseball attendance was down, demographics showed young people didn’t care for the sport, found it too slow, too mannered, too antique. L.A. found it just fine. The people poured in. This was the first city to draw 2 million, then the first to top 3 million. If you don’t think that’s impressive, consider the St. Louis Browns drew only 80,000 for the whole 1934 season.

Pro football was kind of a cult sport, pretty much restricted to the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears when the Cleveland Rams came to Los Angeles. Guys who played in the NFL had second jobs. Now look at it. The networks and cable companies just paid $3.6 billion to televise it for the next four years.

When Bob Short took the Minneapolis Lakers west in 1960, pro basketball was a kind of pass-the-hat gypsy troupe that would drop a basketball wherever a few hundred people would congregate. They usually played their games as the second part of a double-header that featured the Globetrotters as the main event. The Lakers changed all that. They played games with Doris Day and half of Hollywood at courtside. They made “Beat L.A.!” a national anthem. Basketball became show-biz, then big biz. The league just paid the commissioner--the commissioner!--$27.5 million. Before the Lakers came west, Commissioner Maurice Podoloff used to take the subway to the office. When Jack Kent Cooke paid $5,175,000 for the Lakers, they thought he was crazy. It was the biggest bargain since Alaska. It was in L.A., wasn’t it?

The Olympics were a foundering enterprise in 1932 when brash, bumptious L.A. won the right to put them on. The world was broke. The countries couldn’t even pay the boat fare here. So, L.A. brokered sales in things such as coffee and silk to help them pay their way. They couldn’t afford housing. So, L.A. pioneered the concept of the Olympic village to house them cheaply.

That’s the way we used to do things here. L.A. was a place of boundless optimism and enthusiasm. “Why not?” was L.A.’s motto when the rest of the country’s was “Why?” This was the kind of community that reached out hundreds of miles for its water, dredged harbors, pioneered supermarkets, invented freeways. It went for broke. It bent rules for the movies because it knew they were important to it. It took chances. It became America’s Mecca. A city the size of Cincinnati moved out here every five years. They said amusement parks were passe, through. So Disney opened Disneyland.

Now look at us. Wimps. A whole bunch of Calvin Coolidges. Pass the Perrier. Quiche eaters. We damn near lost the 1984 Olympics because some pussy-footing politicians and some bogus guardians of the public purse screamed it was going to bankrupt the city. They only made $300 million profit. They only saved the Olympics. Before L.A., there was no other bidder for the ’84 Games. After L.A., Barcelona had a knife fight with a dozen other world capitals.

There’s no way that town--the one that L.A. was--would have lost anything to Oakland--or any other city on the continent.

Al Davis was no stranger to Los Angeles. He was a coach at USC in the mid-’50s. I think he was shocked to see what L.A. had become--a congress of churlish politicians, a college of doomsayers, checkbook clerks, guys who would fold two aces. It was not his kind of image of the City of the Angels.

Davis thought the Raiders were perfect for Los Angeles. Like L.A., the Raiders were notorious for doing their own thing. Going their own way. They were freewheeling, convention-free, uninhibited, uncritical, not hidebound, risk takers, go-deep kind of guys. The way L.A. used to be.

What went wrong? Well, Davis had the high hole card in this high-stakes game--the team. The city had a dilapidated edifice and a bunch of guys in three-piece suits and briefcases. It didn’t take a genius to see who was going to win that pot.

What’s going to happen now? Well, let me guess: The Raiders depart. And the city, after a spate of blame-fixing, finger-pointing and sour-grapes snarls of “Good riddance!” sets about to building a new stadium for some phantom franchise or renovates the Coliseum roughly at the cost of the stealth bomber.

There’s precedent for it. That’s exactly what happened in New York when Walter O’Malley pulled his team out of Brooklyn and took Horace Stoneham’s Giants with him. The city that had turned down both of them promptly began to build a stadium (Shea) in Flushing Meadow and spent more than $100 million renovating Yankee Stadium. A small part of that investment would have kept the Giants and the Dodgers in the first place.

The city of Chicago is building a gaudy ballpark just to keep the White Sox--the White Sox! The city of Baltimore is building a ballpark to keep the Orioles--the former St. Louis Browns. Oakland doesn’t need the Raiders. Oakland needs schools, police, repairs, renewal.

The Raiders don’t need a new town, they need a new quarterback.

L.A. needs a new quarterback, too. Where it used to go long, now it punts.

A town that let not one but two NFL franchises get away is not much of a threat to an aggressive, hungry sun belt metropolis. The prospects of the Coliseum being filled with anything but sea gulls the rest of this century is not good.

We used to have a saying in this state, “Give us men to match our mountains.” Now we have men to match their swimming pools.