You Can’t Compare Them--or Can You?

O’Malley-Davis?

Pick up a 33-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times sports section and give it a once-over: not quite the big time. Walter Francis O’Malley changed your sports section. He pioneered baseball’s presence across the continent and in no small fashion paved the way for other sports franchises to “Go West, young man.”

He asked no more of New York than he did here--”Give me a place to build a ballpark and I’ll build it”--and, oh, what a ballpark. Not one financed by the taxpayers, but with his own money and that which he could borrow.

He put this town on the nation’s sports pages, not the gossip columns. No one gave him $10 million to fly from Brooklyn to see if he might allow the taxpayers to build him a stadium.

Any similarity between Walter O’Malley and Al Davis must be attributed to fiction.

ROBERT S. BURNS

Whittier