by Dell Franklin
Mr. Kroenke wanted to show LA sports fans he is not a cold-blooded corporate prick, but a man who can cry over a football team. Boohoo.
Billionaire chiseler/phony Stan Kroenke, after shafting St. Louis and choking up over taking their football team away from them, is now in Los Angeles, which is about as opposite of St. Louis as day and night, and he is again all choked up over promising poor so-called pro football-starved Angelinos the wretched Rams that were stolen from them decades ago by a crew of chiseling phonies not worth mentioning.
The chiseler/phony with the old-country mustache also promises to build a $3 billion tacky Taj Mahal of a football stadium to rival the tacky one built in Dallas by fellow sentimental rival, Jerry Jones, a chiseler so canny, ruthless, and scarily predatory he’s intimidated the entire cabal of chiseling/phony NFL owners and their puppet commissioner, Roger Goodell, who during the meat appraisal NFL draft hugs first round picks like a cuddly uncle before turning them over to the ruthless chiseler/phonies.
Mr. Kroenke wanted to show LA sports fans he is not a cold-blooded corporate prick, but a man who can cry over a football team. Boohoo. If this guy ever ventured into a working-class tavern he’d be stoned within half an hour. He and his shark-like right hand man, Kevin Demoff, who would also be stoned in a working-class tavern within 30 minutes on looks alone, want you to think it’s ALL about boosting a poverty stricken black community like Inglewood and pleasing LA football fans, who are the most disloyal, distracted and superficial west of Miami Beach.
Fat chance.
Look, guys, LA sports fans have better things to do—like taking selfies 24/7 and admiring them…and shopping, primping, dressing, tanning, posturing, posing…and checking and rechecking those little hand phones to see who loves them.
The chiseler/phony already has number-one LA sports fan Magic Johnson in his camp. Magic’s going to buy season tickets. $100 just to get on board, and then we start very high up in the stratosphere of the Taj Mahal for $300, which means if there’s two of you it’s $600 just for games that are not exhibitions, so if you’re filthy rich like Magic you can dole out about $3,500 for one game and probably be close enough to a celebrity to share a selfie, unless of course they’re sealed into the hierarchy glass luxury cocoon where $100 wines and gourmet cuisine is shared by the chiseler/phony and his coterie of sycophants, who stand and cheer when he does, and sit down when he does, and stand again to turn thumbs down and deliver the kill sign when the team gets booed out of their tacky Taj Mahal.
Roman days indeed!
LA Coliseum, under construction in 1922, is in much need of upgrading, where returning LA Rams will play until their billion-dollars dream stadium is completed.
Does anybody who likes to watch a football game in a working-class tavern have a shot to go to these games? Most of the population of LA sports fans are so awash in hi-tech gadgetry they have the attention span of hummingbirds, which means that the day they enter the super hi-tech Taj Mahal they will be in hi-tech heaven and get to test out their own gadgets against the plethora facing them everywhere, a spectacle, really, lights flashing everywhere throughout the game, unless they’re waiting in line to gorge on junk food, quaff over-priced beer, or stand in agony in long lines trying not to pee in their pants.
Meanwhile, for the next three years, these dodos get to revisit the dreaded, dilapidated, uncomfortable Coliseum, where the urgent need for hi-tech gadgetry will be in short supply and the dodos will have to actually watch parts of a football game and see the replays on their own gadgetry; this after inching along on freeways and side streets for two hours, idling and lurching and gnashing their teeth in parking lots for 45 minutes, waiting to be searched for weaponry for 30 minutes, before finally being admitted into a bowl so distant from the field one will need high-powered binoculars or a mini-screen of their own to see what actually happens.
But it’s not all bad. There will at last be a NFL football team in LA. Though it is a football team coached by a lackluster wash-out with a losing record wherever he’s gone, without a quarterback or any semblance of an offense, a team about as boring as the place it came from—St. Louis. Will tattooed, spray-painted barbarian/zealot fans similar to Raider low-lives be allowed to form their own dog pound? Can they afford it? Who wants to rough-house in a glass-encased Taj Mahal surrounded by boutiques for the Rodeo Drive crew?
In any case, the true football fans/marauders can pool their money and barbecue in the parking lots just off the Coliseum starting at six in the morning and get so drunk by game time they’ll have to take saliva tests before entering, but once they’re in it will be like the old days, guzzling, screaming, hooting, cursing, booing, arguing, staking out territory, fighting, causing a panic, maybe drawing the cameras for a split second before the goody-goody boys in the production trailers and broadcasting booths pooh-pooh their discordant behavior and turn us back to the spectacle produced by America’s foremost chiseler/phonies this side of Wall Street—the PR hogwash of good citizenship and humanitarianism among people trying to dismember limbs and in the end immobilize brains—all for love of the game and a few bucks.
Yeh, LA sports fans demand a professional football team; deserve a professional football team; demand and deserve a winner, according to the chiseler/phony. So good luck, LA sports fans, surely you deserve this. §
Dell Franklin grew up in working-class Compton, Calif., at a time when professional sports, venues and players were mostly accessible to the roiling mass of fans/marauders who could then still afford to attend games. For more of Dell’s sports commentary, visit dellfranklin.com.
