SHOULD RAIDERS GET KEY TO L.A.? NO: INVITE AL DAVIS TO RETURN? ARE PEOPLE IN THIS CITY NUTS?

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

In this high-stakes game the NFL owners are playing with L.A., no one seems in any hurry to show his hand.

So why not play the Al Davis card? He's a joker that's wild. If you turn him up it'll assuredly wipe those poker faces right off Paul Tagliabue and his crew.

Flat beer, the missus; nothing can get these men to pull away from the table faster than a hand with Davis in it. He's L.A.'s trump card.

No one has caused more NFL owners to fold in his day than Davis, who successfully sued the league in the '80s.

The danger, of course, is the NFL owners will swallow hard and call L.A.'s bluff. If that happens, heaven help all Angelenos, especially the women and children who would have to be hidden were the Raiders to return to ravage the city's good name.

It's fine to talk of welcoming back the Raiders if that's what it takes to scare the NFL owners into awarding L.A. a pro team at no cost to Joe Q. Public. There's nothing like putting the fear of the devil in some supercilious old men to keep them honest.

The NFL owners showed a lot of nerve in serving notice earlier this week that it's going to take a chunk of public change to deliver a team to L.A. If anything, the NFL ought to pay L.A. for the privilege of harboring another pro sports franchise in the second-largest television market.

For their rapaciousness, the owners deserve to have Davis dangled before them like a noose. But what if they don't quake in their Gucci loafers? The Angelenos could end up being the ones hung.

Want to see the blood rush from the faces of good people? Then go to Sacramento, Carson, Irwindale, Hollywood Park or the Rose Bowl and talk to the jilted suitors of the rogue Davis.

They can remind L.A. of what it'll be in for if Davis worms his way back into its city limits. Irwindale can write the lead paragraph of the cautionary tale, having written Davis a non-refundable check for $10 million in 1987 with the intention of rescuing the Raiders from a crumbling Coliseum.

Davis took the city's money and gave it nothing in return. Not even a satisfactory explanation for reneging on the plans.

He would again prove to be a man not of his word when he finagled from R.D. Hubbard plans for a $250 million stadium at Hollywood Park. The deal lasted about as long as the handshake, with Davis bailing for Oakland before the 1995 season, three months after the Rams left Anaheim for St. Louis.

The league's owners had sued Davis when he left Oakland for L.A. They didn't put up much of a fuss when he re-traced his steps, so happy were they to have eradicated him from the Southern California scene. One unidentified league official was quoted at the time as saying, ``You could make a case that this will be better for the league. It gives us a chance to stabilize the situation.''

Davis has demonstrated to Angelenos that summer sticks around longer than he does. So why should we invest so much as one bead of sweat on the man? He'll only burn L.A., like he did before.

If L.A. is going to have a pro football team, it might as well start from scratch. There's no place in the Coliseum renovation plan for all the baggage that comes with Davis.

Remember his shameful shunning of future Hall of Famer Marcus Allen? And what about his graceless refusal to fork over the $250,000 he owes Mike Shanahan, whom he fired in 1989? This is the same Shanahan, mind you, who nine years later coached Denver to its first back-to-back Super Bowl titles.

That's another reason L.A. should use Davis in this silly game with the NFL owners to sweeten the pot, if it must, but nothing more. The man is like his good friend Jerry Buss. His renegade personality is looking more and more these days like plain old irrationality.

How else to explain the exorbitant contracts the tight-fisted Davis squandered on Larry Brown and Desmond Howard, two players who happened to have the games of their lives in a Super Bowl?

The Raiders have missed the playoffs 10 times in the past 13 years. They are the Dodgers in silver and black.

If Angelenos knew what was good for them, they'd follow the lead of a former Raiders assistant coach - dare we say bitter? - who put a photograph of Davis in his freezer late in the 1995 season in the hopes it would make the franchise's luck go cold. The Raiders, 8-2 at the time, lost their final six games and haven't moved much in the standings since.

Which is all the more reason for them to stay put in Oakland.