Mayweather vs. McGregor: Why do we keep buying empty hype?

Hype sells. And we keep buying it (then demanding our money back when we don’t get what was promised).

But I’m here to tell you, caveat emptor, baby!

Let the buyer beware. To those of you willing to plunk down $100, or whatever they end up charging, for a farce of a fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, be my guest. But don’t say you weren’t warned.

The whole premise of this fight doesn’t involve fists, but mouths. Mayweather has a big one, and a lot of people want to see someone shut it. McGregor has a big one, too, and some other people would love to see … well, you get the idea.

What you’re more likely to see is, well, a whole bunch of nothing. Mayweather isn’t known for shutting people’s mouths. He’s known for avoiding punches, playing pitter-pat with his jab and piling up enough points to win the kind of decision that leaves fight fans disappointed and disgusted at themselves for wasting their money.

Mayweather has knocked out barely half his opponents and hasn’t KO’d anyone out in almost six years. But he’s never lost.

McGregor lost barely a year ago in a mixed martial arts fight to Nate Diaz. That fight didn’t go the distance, and although McGregor won the rematch, but only by a majority decision in an extremely close contest.

So what makes Mayweather-McGregor a fight worth seeing?

I honestly don’t know. You tell me.

In his most famous fight (and the biggest money-maker of all time), Mayweather danced around for 12 rounds and won a decision against Manny Pacquiao in a lackluster fight that left boxing fans frustrated that they’d paid big money to be bored stiff.

There’s nothing to suggest the same thing won’t happen this time. McGregor, much like Pacquiao, will probably stalk Mayweather, who will dance away, land jabs and flurries of light punches, make McGregor look like an amateur and walk away with win No. 50.

There’s no title at stake, but there’s precedent for this sort of spectacle.

In 1976, Muhammad Ali fought a sumo wrestler named Antonio Inoki in a boxing-wrestling hybrid match. Inoki spent most of the time on his back, kicking at Ali’s legs. Ali's incentive? As with Mayweather, it was all about the Benjamins: in this case a $6 million payday.

Three years later, Ali took on Denver Broncos defensive end Lyle Alzado in an exhibition match that was all boxing. Alzado, who had boxed as an amateur, was threatening to leave pro football and devote himself to the ring full time (it was, mainly, a stunt designed to get him a better contract).

Alzado actually put on a somewhat credible performance. But the fight, such as it was, turned out to be better than expected largely because Ali was out of shape and didn’t seem to take it seriously. He still managed to win the unofficial decision after eight rounds.

Ali was officially retired at the time, and when he came out of retirement later, he was a shadow of the champion he had once been.

That’s about the only hope McGregor has of winning a fight against Mayweather: that the guy who calls himself "Money" has deteriorated to such a degree that McGregor has a puncher's chance of winning.

It's a slim chance. But hype is built on such slim chances, especially when a white guy is stepping into the ring to challenge a less-than-popular African-American champion. Yes, I’ll say it: This is another one of those “great white hope” boondoggles that goes all the way back to Johnson vs. Jefferies and has a not-so-illustrious timeline that extends right on up through Holmes-Cooney.

At least Jefferies and Cooney were actual boxers.

Racial overtones aside, it seems farfetched (to put it mildly) to think that a guy from a different sport can waltz into the ring and beat a heretofore undefeated boxer. I just don’t buy it. And if you do, feel free to complain all you want when the fight turns out to be a predictable yawner. Just don’t expect me to listen.

Accountability is Trump's Kryptonite, and he knows it

“The president is entitled to his opinion, but we’re a nation of laws.”

— U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., responding to Donald Trump’s assertion that the appointment of a special counsel in the Russia investigation was the result of a “witch hunt”

Ah, Mother Russia. As in the mother of all scandals.

I’m inclined to think Donald Trump’s guilty of something here, but it may not be because he likes the Russians or wants to do them any favors.

It's probably not treason. And, while it may be obstruction of justice, Trump probably doesn’t view it that way.

What Trump is most likely guilty of doing is following through on exactly what he said he was going to do:  Running the government like a business. Or, more precisely, how he would run a business.

That means a lot of back-room bargaining that will, he’s probably sure, result in a "great deal." This is, after all, the guy who wrote a book called The Art of the Deal. He expects to get the best of any rival in the course of negotiations and, if somehow he doesn’t, he counts on being able to cut and run, as he did when various businesses enterprises failed. (Bankruptcy, anyone?)

Getting things done

Many of Trump’s supporters voted for him because they were sick of government gridlock. They wanted a president who could “cut through the red tape” and “get things done” in a government that too often seemed mired in the quicksand of obstructionism.

Who can blame them? Do-nothing Congresses have become the rule, rather than the exception, and each of the two major parties seems more interested in discrediting the other than in accomplishing anything of substance.

California voters put Arnold Schwarzenegger in office for the same reason, but Schwarzenegger, for all his Governator posturing, ultimately worked within the system.

And was, too many, a disappointment.

Trump isn’t doing that. He’s trying to work around the system, the same way he did as a businessman – by finding loopholes, making deals and avoiding responsibility if and when things go wrong.

A lot of people worried, before he took office, that Trump would fail because "you can’t run a republic like a business." You have to cut deals with Congress, make compromises and play the political game. But that was never the issue. Cutting deals is supposed to be Trump’s forte. But here’s the rub: Even if you could run the country like a business, you can’t run it like a bad business … which is what Trump seems to be doing.

Bad business, bad governance

A good business is accountable to its shareholders; a good government is accountable to the people. There’s at least a superficial parallel there, but Trump’s throwing it all to hell by ditching the issue of accountability entirely.

Shunning the media is bad government the same way ducking a financial audit is bad business. The media’s job is to reassure the public that everything’s running smoothly, in much the same way an independent auditor’s task is to reassure shareholders there’s no funny business going on with the company’s books.

Inviting the Russian media to an Oval Office meeting with Russian officials is like inviting your biggest corporate rival’s bookkeeper to examine your finances while telling your own shareholders to take a hike.  

Seriously? This is how you run a business? Not any business that I’ve ever heard of – at least not a successful one.

The problem may be that Trump is simply so cocky about his ability as a dealmaker that he thinks it’s fine to be careless; that it will all come out in the wash. But government doesn’t work that way. We are a nation of laws, and circumventing those laws won’t overcome gridlock, any more than a business can “get things done” by cheating on its taxes.

Accountability is the answer

In an era where “working across the aisle” and “finding common ground” has become next to impossible because of partisan obstruction, it’s tempting to do whatever it takes to restore some level of responsiveness to government. There are elements of the system that clearly cry out for reform. Gerrymandered congressional districts that discourage flexibility and compromise come to mind.

Here’s the problem: Most of the dysfunction in Washington stems from a lack of accountability. Safe congressional seats. Entrenched “red” and “blue” lawmakers answerable only to think-alike constituents. An increasingly politicized Supreme Court. These problems can be resolved only by increasing accountability, not by undermining it – which is exactly what Trump’s back-room shenanigans succeed in doing.

And here’s what’s worse: Overconfidence is perhaps the biggest breeding ground for failure there is. Trump may have experience in real estate, but he’s got none in foreign relations. Ergo, inviting veteran Russian officials to make some sort of under-the-table deal (if that’s what he was doing) is akin to a college debate champion representing himself in court against Perry Mason. And thinking, because he's always won before, that he'll win there, too. 

If this were a real estate deal, Trump might be able to declare bankruptcy and start over. Starting over after you’ve handed over intelligence to a foreign power is a lot harder to do.

If that’s what he did. As I said at the outset, I'm inclined to think Trump's guilty of something. This, and probably other things, as well. But we don’t know that yet, and as Senator Rubio says, this is a nation of laws. Even if Trump doesn’t appear to be respecting those laws, he’s still innocent until proven guilty.

I'll give him that. But it's also precisely why the current investigation must be allowed to take its course. An investigation he doesn't want.

It's worth asking why.

Mother's Day orphans: When your mom's no longer here

Mother's Day is not my favorite holiday. Father's Day isn't, either. I remember being young and asking, "Why don't they have a Kids Day?"

"Because every day is 'Kids Day,'" I was told.

Yes, kids sometimes have it easy. I know I did. I have no complaints about how I was raised, and I couldn't be more grateful to my mom and dad for their patience, generosity and the hard work they did to raise a sometimes difficult boy. Especially when that boy was enduring the crucible that was (and, from what I hear, still is) middle school. It's not hyperbole to wonder whether I would have survived those years without Mom and Dad.

Which brings me to why, at least in part, Mother's Day and Father's Day aren't my favorite times of year - now, far more than when I was a kid.

First, I'll invite you to look at where the apostrophe is in those names. It's before the "s," which makes it singular, and that's how I always took it. Mother's Day was a day for me to appreciate my mother, and for you to appreciate yours. Here's the rub: I haven't had a mother for 22  years now (and, as of last August, I don't have a father anymore, either).

It's fine to say that all mothers deserve to be appreciated, and I couldn't agree more. They should be appreciated every day of every year they're on this planet.

My mom isn't on this planet anymore. Yes, I still appreciate her. But no, I can't give her a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card to tell her oh-so-imperfectly how much - and at the moment, I wouldn't want to. I'd just want to give her a hug (even though she was chronically off-balance from the polio that left her half paralyzed as a child), and tell her I loved her so she could hear me.

Please don't tell me she can hear me from heaven or "the other side of the veil," because even believing that wouldn't make it the same. It doesn't for me, and I doubt it does for anyone else, either.

It will never be the same again.

It's not just the winter holidays

I've heard people talk about having a blue Christmas, sometimes invoking the all-too-clinical-sounding term "seasonal affective disorder." They don't enjoy the winter holidays because they bring back memories of times spent with loved ones who are no longer there. Mother's Day does the same thing to me, and if anything, it's worse, because there was only one of her, and this day is supposed to be about that one person.

For years, I've tried to shrug it off and not get too wrapped up in sorrow over it, because my mom's death remains the single most traumatic event of my life. When my father passed away last year, he'd been unconscious in a hospital bed for 10 days, and as hard as it when he died, I'd had time to prepare myself.

When my mother died, it was sudden. I was working one evening when I got a call in the back paste-up shop at the newspaper where I was working (back when they still had such things). I heard my dad sobbing on the other end. He never cried. But when he told me Mom had gone to lie down for a nap and hadn't woken up again, it just didn't compute with me. She had been ill, but not that ill. I hadn't seen her since Christmas, which had been more than two weeks earlier, and now, I never would again.

So, Mother's Day isn't a cause for celebration to me. As much as I appreciate everything mothers all over the world go through for their kids, none of them is my mom. I know the same thing will happen at Father's Day this year, and it will might even hit me harder because this will be my first year without Dad, and the day often fell right on his birthday.

None of this is to say you need to tiptoe around me Sunday. I won't take offense at others who, unlike me, have a Mom who's still here to celebrate. Just excuse me if I feel a little left out. I might not even show it on the outside, but it's there, and I wanted you to know because I doubt I'm the only person who has this kind of reaction. And as important as it is to celebrate your mom (please do!), it's important that you know there are other feelings associated with days like these. 

I still miss my mom. Even if there were 365 days to honor mothers, she'd still be the only one I'll ever have.

Everybody's doing it: The decline and fall of American sport

The Russians did it.

They didn’t act alone, it wasn’t planned, and they had no idea the chain of events they were setting in motion when they did it, but I’m going to blame them, even so.

I blame them for the steady decline in the credibility of American athletics since that day in the summer of ’72 that referees – whether out of confusion or bias or something else – gave the Russians not two but three chances to defeat the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team in the Olympic finals at Munich, West Germany (for those of you too young to remember, there was still a West Germany then).

It all came to a head for me on nearly 45 years later, when the New England Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI(e). I added that lowercase Roman letter after the uppercase Roman numerals to illustrate a point: American sports have lost credibility with me, because a team built by a couple of cheaters won the biggest game on the biggest stage.

I’m not suggesting that the Patriots cheated to win this particular game; there’s no evidence they did. But they did cheat by videotaping signals used by the New York Jets defensive coaches back in 2007, and a report suggests they recorded 40 other games played by opponents starting as far back as 2000 in what’s now known as the Spygate scandal. The subsequent Deflategate controversy pales in comparison to that, at least in my mind, but it’s another example of the same team breaking the rules in order to get an edge.

The funny thing is, the Patriots didn’t need that edge most of the time. They could have probably won without it, as they did against the Falcons on Sunday. Or did they? That’s the thing: You never really know. The Patriots have already fooled us twice and gotten caught. Shame on us. How many other times have they fooled us without anyone even knowing?

In fact, that’s an argument I’ve heard used by more than one person defending the Patriots: “Everybody does it; they just happened to get caught.”

Maybe, maybe not. But if so, it only validates my current feeling of estrangement from American sports, because if everybody’s doing it, why bother? What do the results really mean, anyway? That one team is better at cheating than the other?

That seems like the logical conclusion to me.

Hackers and users

In the month before the Super Bowl, Major League Baseball fined the St. Louis Cardinals for hacking into the Houston Astros’ computer database, penalizing them a couple of draft picks and banning the hacker for life.

I wondered at the time why the NFL hadn’t banned Patriots coach Bill Belichick for life in response to Spygate, but the answer appears obvious: Does anyone know the name of the Cardinals hacker before the Astros incident, or was he just another Star Trek redshirt who could be vaporized without anyone really caring?

Belichick, the most successful coach of the most successful team in the NFL, was a different matter. Ban him, and it would reflect poorly on a league whose mantra is to “protect the shield” – supposedly referring to the NFL logo. Don’t let that fool you, though. It’s really about protecting the cash cow behind the shield.

At the same time baseball was doing the right thing in banning the St. Louis hacker, though, Hall of Fame voters were waffling on the idea of giving their blessing to various players linked to steroid use in the 1990s and 2000s.

Players such as Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds – a pair referred to by one writer as “the pharmaceutical daily double” – both received 54 percent of the votes in 2017 after getting just 35 percent three years earlier. You need 75 percent to make it into the Hall, and they’re trending in that direction. The consensus among journalists seems to be that they’ll both get in.

The excuse, again, is that “everybody was doing it,” so to deprive them of a place in Cooperstown would be to, essentially, condemn an entire generation of baseball as illegitimate.

Unfortunately, it was.

The suspicion that everyone was doing it doesn’t make it more legitimate, but less so – except, apparently, in the minds of the majority of Hall of Fame voters.

The turning point: 1972

Scandals are nothing new to American sports, but the way we deal with them is. This is where the Russian debacle of ’72 comes in. Americans were so incensed that they began a campaign to allow pro basketball players to compete in the Olympics. We’d show those no good, cheating sons of Boris and Natasha! We’d assemble a “dream team”of the NBA’s best, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.

That’s exactly what we did. And, I’ll admit, I was standing right there cheering the process along. Karma might be a bitch, but Michael and Magic and Larry were basketball gods looking down from Mount Olympus on those puny humans hiding behind their iron curtain. The Russians didn’t stand a chance.

Neither did we, though, because when we decided to beat those commies over the head with our capitalist might, we ushered in an era of the almighty dollar in sports. It probably would have happened anyway, but it’s fun to blame the Russians, don’t you think? Besides, the 1972 game serves as a convenient dividing line between the era of small-time athletics and big business sports.

We’ve been boiling like frogs as we’ve gone from zero tolerance to zero credibility. Consider:

In 1919, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned Shoeless Joe Jackson for life based on the mere accusation that he helped throw the 1919 World Series. A jury acquitted him, but it didn’t matter to Landis, who decreed that Jackson never play again and never be eligible for the Hall of Fame. Modern Hall voters, by contrast, are likely to let Bonds and Clemens in. What the heck, right? Everybody was doing it.

In Green Bay, the last bastion of the small-town American football dream, the Packers play in a stadium built 60 years ago and are owned by the city itself. Meanwhile, the money-grubbing owner of the Chargers turns his back on the city of San Diego because it won’t give him hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to replace a stadium built a decade after the Packers built theirs.

The Rollerball prophecy

All in all, the NFL itself is looking more and more like Rollerball every day. For those of you who don’t remember that 1975 movie, let me refresh your memories: It centers on a then-futuristic sports league that puts corporate greed ahead of everything else and self-destructs in a vain attempt to keep its most popular player from undermining the “brand.”

The film is set in 2018. Its hero, portrayed by James Caan, plays for a team based in Houston that’s owned by the Energy Corporation. Flash forward to this year’s Super Bowl, which was played in Houston at something called NRG Stadium.

Hmmm.

Rollerball destroyed itself by making its players expendable, allowing them to maim and kill one another in bloodfests and looked more like gladiatorial combat than sport. The NFL hasn’t gone quite that far. But many players have paid a heavy physical and cognitive price for the steroids they used and the head injuries they sustained during their careers. In one study, researchers found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 76 of the 79 players they examined.

College football, meanwhile, has become a cash cow for “educational” institutions that rake in money hand-over-fist from bloated TV contracts. The schools lucky enough to be in elite Power 5 conferences don’t want to share much of that money with the less fortunate, though. They’ve transformed schools that used to be called mid-majors into irrelevant minors, denying them a seat at the championship table – and the cash register.

It didn’t used to be that way.

Backlash and fatigue

Maybe our collective patience is starting to wear thin. San Diegans refused to finance the glitzy stadium that owner Dean Spanos demanded. The NFL’s television ratings fell 9 percent during the regular season and 6 percent for the playoffs. Fewer people watched the college football championship game, too. Fantasy football participation, which has driven much of the NFL’s growth the past few years, plateaued.

None of this means that the NFL, the Power 5 or big-money sports in general is on the verge of imminent collapse. Far from it. Still, more and more of us have grown tired of it all. We pay through the nose for cable access or box seats. And for what? To watch one group of cheaters play another group of might-be-cheaters? To pay for the fat cats to operate their assembly line of athletes, so many of whom wind up disabled or brain damaged for the sake of the almighty dollar?

I’m not on some holier-than-thou crusade here. I’ve loved watching sports all my life, and I don’t feel the least bit guilty for that. But I woke up the morning after the Super Bowl and realized I just don’t love it anymore. I’m not even sure I like it. I’m not trying to claim any moral high ground, I’m just not sure I care.

I’m not saying I’ll never watch sports again, but I seriously doubt I’ll ever enjoy it the way I used to. In an era where “everybody does it,” there’s no one left to root for. Except maybe the Green Bay Packers.

I always did like cheese.

We let the trolls out, and now they're running the show

“Don’t feed the trolls,” they say.

Good advice, but it’s not that easy these days.

Our lives have become a Facebook group, a Twitter feed, a Reddit thread. We haven’t just immersed ourselves in those things; it’s more pervasive than that: We’ve started to rebuild our society in their image. Welcome to the social media experiment of the 21st century.

It’s an experiment we started without any clear plan to prove our hypothesis. Hell, we don’t even have a hypothesis. We’re flying by the seat of our pants into a radioactive “social laboratory.” Whether we’ll make it out in one piece is anybody’s guess.

The new reality

Mass communication has always played a huge role in defining us as a society. We’ve read our daily newspaper, gathered around the radio for fireside chats, watched newsreels and fantasies at the local theater and vegged out in front of the TV. But this is different. Those media — with the exception of the occasional letter to the editor — were all passive, and that allowed us to keep the trolls safely tucked away under their bridge, where they belonged.

Social media have changed all that because they’re, well, social. Who let the trolls out? We did, and they’re not confined to chat rooms and message boards anymore. They’re running around loose in the real world, wreaking havoc and doing their best to tear our social fabric to shreds.

Take this Milo Whatshisname, for instance. This self-described “dangerous faggot” goes around the country on a speaking tour designed to piss people off. The more outrageous he is, the more outrage he provokes. People get angry and protest, which leads to media coverage and — voila! — the attention he’s been seeking. Game over. The protesters are playing right into his hands.

But in an era when trolls are running amok, having escaped the confines of the computer screen, do they really have much choice?

The troll’s game

Imagine you run a social media group. You set some ground rules, start sharing ideas … and inevitably, a troll finds his way in.

He hasn’t been there long before he starts causing trouble. He rails against you for refusing to delete something he finds offensive. Then he accuses you of censorship when you delete one of his posts – ignoring the fact that it violates your ground rules. That just means (according to him) those rules should be changed. In fact, he says, he could do a better job of running the group, and he lets everyone there know it.

Now imagine you can’t block the guy, and members of the group can’t leave. He’s got a captive audience, and even though a lot of members tune him out, a lot of others start listening because he’s so loud and insistent he’s hard to ignore. He finds out what they’re angry about, and he tells them he’s angry too; then he takes that shared anger and directs it at you.

It isn’t long before the guy dominates the group’s discussion. Ideas don’t matter anymore. All that matters a single question: Are you for the troll or against him? The question has to be resolved, so the group decides to vote on who should be in charge, you or him.

In fact, however, the vote doesn’t really resolve anything. Whoever wins, the other side feels alienated. But remember, no one can leave. The troll doesn’t really care who wins: All that matters to him is that he’s the center of attention, and he’ll still be the same attention-seeking drama king regardless of the outcome.

The group, meanwhile, has become dysfunctional and paralyzed. As long as it’s spending all its time talking about him, it can’t be bothered to discuss actual ideas. To look for innovation. To work toward solutions.

A world without rules

“Wait a minute,” you might object. “That stuff doesn’t really happen on social media. There are safeguards. You can block people. You can leave groups.”

And you’d be right.

But this isn’t about social media anymore. It’s about what happens when you take the culture of social media and apply it in the real world, where those safeguards don’t exist.

In the real world, trolls can get elected, and you can’t leave – unless you’re wealthy enough to emigrate, and assuming you want to abandon the place you’ve called home all your life.

It’s easy to avoid feeding the trolls when they don’t have power. When they do, it’s a different matter entirely. Do we ignore them, knowing they’re just in it for the attention? Will that rob them of their power? Or do we actively oppose them, fearful that this very thirst for attention will motivate them to keep pushing the envelope … until it falls off the table into the rubbish heap?

Social media aren’t to blame for this dilemma. The fault is ours for thinking we can apply the rules of social media to real life when we can’t.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve systematically imposed the social media template on the real world. We’ve created a culture in which break room conversations sound like rhetoric from Reddit; where science and pragmatism take a back seat to ideology; where politicians decide to campaign (and govern!) via Twitter.

And where the trolls are running the show.

They’ve escaped from under the bridge and want more than anything to put us there instead. It’s a bridge we built ourselves using social media, and if we’re not careful, it’s going to come crashing down on all of our heads.

Chargers in L.A.: A marriage of inconvenience

I’m known for being diplomatic – even overly subtle – and I don’t like calling people names, but I’ll come right out and say it: Dean Spanos is an idiot.

Only an idiot would use a bad deal as leverage to get a better one, and that’s what Spanos did with his Los Angeles gambit. When the better deal didn’t come through, because San Diego didn’t want to pony up millions of dollars to keep the Chargers, Spanos probably had no choice but to follow through on his threat and move to L.A.

San Diego called his bluff, and instead of folding, he decided to pull his bid off the table and leave in a huff.

Nice.

Now he’s stuck in a city that doesn’t support losing teams – which the Chargers most definitely are at the moment, having lost five in a row to finish 5-11. Not only that, he’ll be playing second fiddle to the Rams, who have won even fewer games (4) than the Chargers did this past season.

The Rams sold a lot of tickets in their first year back, but thousands of those ticketholders stopped bothering to show up when the team’s fortunes took a nosedive. That’s how it works in L.A. People have better things to do than to sit around and watch bad teams play bad football. Fans there have attention spans shorter than the last movie trailer they saw … which they probably don’t remember, anyway.

I spent six years in L.A. back when the Dodgers were a baseball powerhouse, regularly contending for the National League championship. Even then, the joke was that fans would show up at Dodger Stadium in the third inning and hang around a few innings, then hightail it for the exits at the seventh-inning stretch. And it wasn’t far from the truth.

(The Chargers new logo, incidentally, is a blatant ripoff of the Dodgers'.)

Supply, but no demand

Even with all that, it might have made sense to move the Chargers if there was a yearning among Angelenos to make the team their own. But there’s not. There was significant support for the Rams to move back, but no one I know of – except Mr. Spanos – seems to care about having the Chargers in the City of Angels. To quote one old car dealer’s vintage commercials, “Nobody, but noooooobody.”

Spanos probably feels like he has to move because San Diego voters turned down a ballot measure that would have thrown millions of public dollars his way to finance a new stadium. Now Rams owner Stan Kroenke will be paying for the move instead: Under the deal, the Chargers will pay $1 in rent to use Kroenke’s brand-spanking-new Inglewood stadium when it opens.

You have to hand it to Spanos. At least he’s consistent: He always wants someone else to pay for his failures.

The problem is, with no support in L.A., he’ll ultimately be on the hook anyway, even with the sweet rent deal. There’s little doubt that the metroplex will turn up its collective noses at the Chargers, who have virtually no history there and even less history of winning.

The one season they did play in Los Angeles (1960) was actually one of their best: They actually made it to the AFL Championship Game. But that wasn’t good enough to interest L.A. fans back then: The Chargers’ crowds were so sparse they wound up moving to San Diego the next season.

Now they’re back. But what makes Spanos think a losing team will do any better this time around – even if the team is more established, and pro football is a far bigger deal than it was back then?

Artless dud

You might think a businessman like Spanos would know a bad deal when it hits him over the head, but you have to remember that Dean inherited the team from dear old daddy, the guy who really made the family fortune.

And the current fiasco only proves the younger Spanos’ ineptitude as a businessman. Forget “Art of the Deal,” this was one artless dud.

First he alienated Charger fans by threatening to move – to such an extent that attendance fell significantly this past season. Memo to Dean: When you’ve got one foot out the door, you’re not a very attractive suitor. After support in San Diego (predictably) withered, he had little choice but to take that other foot and step out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

But if fewer people wanted him in San Diego than before, fewer still want him in L.A.

Winning is the only way

The Chargers are a team without a country, and they're likely to remain so unless they become very big winners very fast. The former San Diego Clippers will always play second fiddle to the Lakers in Los Angeles, even though they're winning these days and the Lakers have spent the past couple of seasons at the bottom of the NBA barrel.

Spanos should have been paying attention.

None of this matters now, though. Spanos has made his decision to pack his bags for Los Angeles, and all the pieces are in place for the Los Angeles Chargers to become the biggest football flop since Vince McMahon’s XFL. It took just a little more than a decade for the Raiders to hightail it out of L.A. and back to Oakland; I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happen here.

And considering how Dean Spanos has treated the fans of San Diego, I hope I’m right.

Postscript: I fully expect we’re at the end of that era when NFL owners are able to demand massive public funds for shiny new stadiums every 10 years. San Diego said, “No.” And with the NFL’s TV ratings down an average of 8 percent in 2016, cities may soon have a lot more leverage than they do now. Stay tuned …