Doug Krikorian has another good cry over the lack of a National Football League franchise in the Los Angeles area today, and as he sobs himself to sleep the Press-Telegram sports columnist again goes so far as to dream of placing a team in Long Beach, with a stadium next to the Queen Mary. Doug is getting old.

No, I don’t mean I’m growing tired of reading him. Doug Krikorian may be the last sports columnist worth reading in Southern California, a guy who still writes from the gut and lets those guts — his life — spill into his copy in a way that is, frankly, mesmerizing. I read him every day.

When I say Doug is getting old, I mean: Doug is getting old. Like, he’s had lots of birthdays.

Krikorian’s longing for an NFL team derives from a byegone era when a big-league sports franchise really was one of the the marks of a great city. In his latest good cry over the fact that the Los Angeles area has been without pro football since the Rams and Raiders skipped town after the 1994 season, he actually describes the situation as “cultural deprivation.” Of course, the opposite is actually true.

The citizens of this region opened a new era of sophistication — set a new standard for the truly modern metropolis — when they reacted to the simultaneous loss of the Rams and Raiders by telling the NFL to screw itself.

The Los Angeles area lost the Rams and Raiders because the politicians of St. Louis and Oakland used taxpayers’ money to bribe team owners Georgia Frontiere and Al Davis. Los Angeles citizens have served warning to their politicians that to reward such crass behavior — to spend gazillions in taxpayer money on an NFL team — will be an act of political suicide.  That’s why there is no NFL franchise in the area.

That’s also why all the best NFL games are on free local television. If the Rams or the Raiders — or some new expansion franchise — were playing in Los Angeles, we’d be saddled with watching their games every week, per the NFL television contract. Know how crappy the Rams and Raiders are these days? Can you imagine how crappy an expansion team would be? Not having a team with “Los Angeles” or “Orange County” or even “Long Beach” in its name doesn’t diminish a real football fan’s enjoyment of an NFL season — particularly in this era of fantasy football leagues.

Besides, the way NFL tickets are priced, just about anybody with money to attend a game here can afford a plane ticket to St. Louis or Oakland –or Nashville, Jacksonville, Charlotte or any of the other gullible hick cities that believe they are “major league” because they’ve been bamboozled into forking over millions of dollars to NFL crooks for a team that’ll be gone as soon as somebody else offers more.

Finally, Krikorian points out that Green Bay — a Wisconsin hamlet with barely 100,000 people — has its own NFL team, the Packers. He fails to point out that the team is publicly owned by fans of Green Bay — the only non-profit, community owned professional sports team in the United States. It’s been that way since the team was born, and there’s never been a question of the Packers going anywhere else since the 1920s. Doug may be getting old, but he’s not old enough to remember that.

Tags: Al Davis, Dave Wielenga, Doug Krikorian, Georgia Frontiere, Long Beach, NFL crooks, NFL St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders