Fair Weather Fan

It’s New Year’s Eve 2006. My wife Erin and I are having an amazing time at a fun Los Angeles party. Someone asks us what we are doing the next day. We reply, “We plan on sitting on the couch for about 12 hours watching college bowl games.” The party stops. Everyone stares at us, as if they didn’t quite understand the words we just spoke. They look at us like a casting director looks at a bad actor, with a puzzled and somewhat annoyed expression on their faces. Welcome to being a sports fan in Los Angeles.

Never mind that I watched some of the best football games I’d ever seen the next day. I mean, I still get goose bumps when I think of the Boise State comeback to beat Oklahoma. It was irrelevant to Angelians who would much rather spend some time on the beach, go for a hike in the mountains, work on their next screenplay, or acquire some plastic surgery. Granted, there are endlessly more constructive opportunities to fill your day with in the land of sunshine, but for me there is nothing better than becoming emotionally involved in a Dallas Cowboys game. However, in Los Angeles my obsession is looked upon as a trite novelty akin to an offbeat character in a Coen Brothers movie instead of with empathy.

There just aren’t that big of L.A. sports fans. Oh, some try. When the Lakers or Dodgers are winning you see the purple and gold or Dodger blue everywhere. Stadiums are sold out. The 5 o’clock news leads with a sports story instead of covering Paris Hilton’s dog tinkerbell. But even when those teams are winning championships one can go to a game and watch the fans show up in the 3^rd inning or 2^nd quarter and leave in the 7^th inning or sometime in the 4^th quarter. My favorites are the Oakland Raider fans holding on to the fact that they were once the L.A. Raiders. Of course, they don’t know half the players on the team, but they love to plaster the skull and cross bones all over their duely, er…Prius. And why miss the opportunity to wear silver and black and a crooked Raiders cap so you can “represent.”

The lack of sports fervor in the City of Angels isn’t without opportunity. Some of the greatest collegiate sports can be seen within a 10 mile radius. USC and UCLA are among the most storied college sporting schools in the country. You can throw in Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount, all of the UC schools and you have your pick of any excellent college sporting event you want to witness, and easily. Standard admission tickets to a UCLA football game starts at $12. Dodger tickets start at $7. Los Angeles has two professional basketball teams, two pro hockey and baseball teams (if you throw in step-sister Anaheim), and of course the ever-popular David Beckham and MLS Soccer team. There are 14 million people in Los Angeles, more than enough to have rabid fans for each of these venues. Yet, despite Penny Marshall and Billy Crystal’s efforts to the opposite, the LA Clippers are the least popular franchise in NBA history.

Okay, okay. I know I am the exception to my own rule here, but that is all I and many other transplanted sports fans have to clutch. True sports fans in LA are transplant fans from places much less cool than here. Actually, there is a funny phenomenon in Los Angeles. Every town has its own little sports bar, but only on game days because Sports Bars in LA are very scarce and hard to find (I know this may come as a shock to those of you from Chicago or Boston). For example, on Sunday one can find a Cleveland Browns bar where one can wear the ugly orange and brown, chew on a dog bone, and cheer with 30 other transplanted Clevelandites in 75 degree weather and sing Cleveland Rocks with Drew Carey when Brady Quinn throws 4 interceptions in a loss.

There are some other advantages to sports fans in L.A. For one, during football season there is no “local” game. So I get the featured game every week, which is usually the Dallas Cowboys. Yay me. Also, the aforementioned ticket prices; for a sports fan, Los Angeles is your Gladstone’s oyster. No one gives me grief after a tough loss because no one really cared enough to begin with. Plus, there is always room to be an extra on the sexy, if somewhat unrealistic, Hollywood sports movie.

Welcome to being a sports fan in Los Angeles, where the fanatic and fanaticism are rarely seen, where the term “fair weather fan” loses its meaning, and where myself and thousands of other transplanted superfans are left to chase the dreams of our teams that are thousands of miles away. Oh well. I guess I will have to go for a five minute drive (15 in traffic) to the beach and drown my sorrows in the 80 degree weather next to ridiculously good looking, tanned, athletic, and non-sports fan people.

Pictures from:
Kobe : sportsillustrated.com
Booty: usctrojans.cstv.com