Dust, doom and gloom for fallen Dodgers

“FORGET it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

There are a handful of vital cinematic realisations of the demons that haunt the 10 million or so citizens of Los Angeles County. Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic is probably the most vital big-screen reality check for anyone deceived by the glitz which conceals the clamour to get through the day in Southern California.

When the movie’s hero/anti-hero — Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes — runs into tragedy and out of ideas on Chinatown’s Spring Street, the credits roll and we’re mercifully spared a tidy resolution — there’s nothing more sickly than a Hollywood ending.

Just a few miles south-east of those iconic hills towards which countless aspiring starlets and budding Rudolph Valentinos have directed their hopeful gaze over the decades, there’s a suitably grittier stage dug out of the sloping, arid landscape of Chavez Ravine which overlooks Chinatown.

Look past the refreshingly primitive electronic scoreboard, out past the palm trees which spring up behind left field and right. Out there in upper-case Hollywood font: “THINK BLUE”.

This is Dodger Stadium, hope of the unapologetically out-of-place LA Dodgers. This is where the generations of shattered dreams which were wrenched out of Flatbush, Brooklyn were scattered like ashes on an ever-expanding city-state. It’s well over 50 years now but there are still baseball fans old enough to hate the game and what it did when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved west.

But for the vast majority of us without a soul, or at least one which has long since succumbed to its sell-by date, the virtue of time as a healer is that a rose can grow from concrete, to paraphrase one of LA’s most famous sons, Tupac Shakur.

Maybe fans of the team will disagree but the Dodgers in their newish guise have regained the iconic status which nourished the game as a whole and, maybe more importantly, the sort of absurdism which helps every institution develop quaintness and depth.

Boston-born Frank McCourt, the inappropriately named part-owner of the club, is currently PR-ing his way through a messy divorce in the other corner of which is his estranged wife, Jamie, the woman he fired from her role as chief executive in October 2009, subsequently leading to the messy fallout which has threatened the very existence of the LA Dodgers.

I visited the ballpark on Friday night to watch a relatively gripping 1-0 victory over the San Diego Padres. My girlfriend’s brother and long-time resident of the City of Angels, Michael Kraus, generously got the three of us tickets behind homeplate. The balmy evening (is there any other kind over there?) and watery beer lightened the frustration of a succession of ineffectual hitters before the ninth inning exploded with the messiness of an action-movie finale.

Relief pitcher Javy Guerra, whose job it is to protect and “close out” a lead for his team, threatened to blow the opportunity with admirable incompetence before a caught ball at centre-field sent everyone home happy.

Fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a small-screen, long-running soliloquy on the vagaries and absurdism of LA living, will recall fondly the episode in which its star Larry David hires a prostitute to take advantage of the car pool lane in order to get to Dodger Stadium on time. As if that wasn’t enough of a symbolic overload for LA iconography, the edited cuts that failed to make that episode, subsequently led to the acquittal of the prime suspect in a murder case in 2004.

David, omnipresent of late as he seeks to promote Curb’s new season which began Sunday night (and in which he took a thinly veiled swipe at McCourt in the new episode), recently wrote an excellent piece about golf for the New Yorker which could just as easily apply to the current Dodger state of mind.

In it, he compared his lack of ability off the tee to the five stages of death: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Dodgers fans have breezed through Depression and Acceptance. The weary, possibly insane, vendors who traipse up and down the steps with hotdogs and tacky souvenirs attest to the general atmosphere. The only celebrity we see is Pat Sajak, the perma-tanned host of Wheel of Fortune. The Krauses are impressed but who in Ireland could possibly care? There’s even a Boston Celtics fan who goes unharmed despite his Larry Bird jersey and accompanying crown.

There’s no Hollywood here, the sporting stars are elsewhere. The weekend was lit up by New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter breaking the 3,000-hit barrier with a home run in the Bronx, just the 28th player to do so. And the ludicrous extra-time and penalties victory of the US women’s soccer team against Brazil is being widely viewed as a contender for the most dramatic moment in the history of US sport.

As I watched that drama unfold flying back east on Sunday morning, I couldn’t help thinking of the beleaguered fans of the Dodgers. It’s high time someone grabbed the owner of their club by the arm: “Forget it Frank, it’s not your town.”

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