St. Nick, Bring Me Someone to Cheer for

On the off chance that anyone out there is planning to send me Laker or Dodger tickets as a gift, please respect my wishes and give them to underprivileged children in my name or have them burned.

All I want for Christmas is a couple of new franchises.

Not that I’m a big fanatic, but everybody needs a distraction now and then, along with a few personalities to root for. This is especially critical in Los Angeles, where nobody is going to fly a Jim Hahn flag out the car window, and the only language everyone can understand is sports.

As it happens, the quickest route from home to the office takes me through Elysian Park and past Dodger Stadium. This is like driving past the house of an old girlfriend you kind of liked until she suddenly began insulting your intelligence.

I began to lose faith when every team in baseball but the Dodgers had a slugger juiced up on steroids. No team needed to cheat more badly than the anemic Dodgers, and it’s not as if Major League Baseball was standing in the way.

If league officials wanted to get tough on doping, they would have pointed out long ago that San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds had a head the size of a hippopotamus.

But I kept going to the occasional ballgame, even after Boston real estate developer Frank McCourt bought the team.

Why?

Because Paul LoDuca was fun to watch, and the Dodgers insisted Adrian Beltre was a future star, even though he kept swinging at pitches he couldn’t have hit with Luke Skywalker’s light saber.

So what happens?

The Dodgers traded LoDuca for a bag of doughnuts and a starting pitcher, and the doughnuts lasted longer. And after Beltre finally became the Los Angeles hero we waited seven long years to see, they let him leave for Seattle without so much as a cup of coffee in return.

They don’t get a dollar from me this year, those salary-dumping, cut-rate Dodgers, unless of course this big trade they’re working on ever amounts to something. Even then, I’ll only go to the park to complain about the price of beer.

(As I write, the trade has fallen apart. One of the players involved heard he was headed for the Dodgers and attempted to hang himself. In the spirit of the season, please find it in your heart to send every Dodger a stocking stuffed with steroids).

Cutting out the heart of the Dodgers could not have been an accident. I can only figure that McCourt wants to turn Dodger Stadium into the Grove at Chavez Ravine, triple his fortune, and then move the Dodgers downtown.

If he knows anything about the returns on campaign donations in this town, McCourt can probably have the lackeys at City Hall build the new stadium for him.

All of this is depressing enough, but that’s not the half of what’s been happening on the L.A. sports scene.

USC hired a basketball coach who quit in tears before his first practice.

Either he saw a tape of one of their games, somebody told him nobody cares about USC basketball, or, in less than a week, he realized he couldn’t stand living in the same area as Kobe Bryant, a Newport Beach resident.

At the rate people are leaving L.A. because of Kobe, the school overcrowding problem will be licked by 2006 at the latest.

Recent studies tell us that illegal immigrants are fleeing for other states, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that like everyone else, they couldn’t handle Kobe’s ego.

Laker Coach Phil Jackson, gone.

Laker star Shaquille O’Neal, gone.

Laker Gary Payton, gone.

Even Kobe’s parents packed up and left town.

Have you been to Newport Beach recently?

All the black people, gone.

You know who likes Kobe Bryant?

The Memphis Grizzlies. That’s a basketball team, according to sources who asked to remain anonymous. I turned on the tube Monday night and watched the Grizzlies embarrass the Lakers at Staples Center, where they were once invincible.

Kobe, who wanted to be the only star in the Laker galaxy, launched 16 shots in the general direction of the basket.

Two of them went in.

Remember when Kobe was in trouble with that woman in Colorado, and he bought his wife a $4-million ring? For the humiliation of watching the Lakers fall to the Grizzlies, I felt like he owed me at least a Timex.

Why do I watch?

For the sick satisfaction of watching Kobe and Laker management crash and burn. Outside of USC’s football team, it’s my only joy.

Meanwhile, a newly chivalrous Kobe -- suddenly struck by an urge to defend his wife’s honor -- recently told my colleague T.J. Simers that Laker Karl Malone had hit on his wife.

Karl Malone, gone.

If I were a member of this Laker team, I know what I’d be doing right now. I’d be calling T.J. Simers to say I hit on Kobe’s wife. And I’d do it before Saturday, when O’Neal’s first-place Miami Heat show up to ruin Christmas for the sad-sack Lakers.

And don’t tell me we’ve got the Clippers to root for. That team exists for only two reasons. The first is to torture fans who keep thinking this is the year. The second is so that McCourt isn’t the worst owner in town.

To all of the above, bah humbug.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com