CARSON, Calif. — It is the second quarter of the Los Angeles Chargers’ home game with the Minnesota Vikings and the fans are a cheering, chanting, delirious mass. One of their defenders has just scooped up a fumble and rumbled into the end zone for a touchdown.
The defender runs to the stands and jumps to embrace a clot of joyous, purple-clad fans. They pound his helmet, lean back and loosen thunderous yells: “Skol! Skol! Skol!”
Wait. Purple clad? Skol?
Minneapolis with palm trees gently blowing? No. But fans of the Vikings, Sunday’s visiting team, outnumber those of the Chargers by at least eight to one. This is not uncommon. And it serves yet another reminder that the supposed home field of the Chargers has become the N.F.L.’s friendliest locale for guests. When the Green Bay Packers rumbled in a month back, green jerseys and cheeseheads packed the joint. When the Kansas City Chiefs came calling, the Chargers’ stadium — a soccer arena the size of a big living room — became a red-clad world.
What became of the once-fierce fans of the Chargers? All things considered, many would rather surf these days than offer up a single nickel if it rewarded the Chargers’ owner, Dean Spanos, for his betrayal in leaving San Diego in 2017.
What we have here in Carson is a sun-washed cautionary tale for the rapacious Lords of Football. Once upon a time, the Chargers passed half a century in San Diego, a once-sleepy team and a once-sleepy city coming of age together. The team perfected a signature fan-pleasing toss-and-gun offense led by the Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts, and the fans slathered the players with adoration. Now and then the team rewarded them with a playoff berth. Once, they went to the Super Bowl together.
For quite a bit of that history, however, the Spanos family has owned the Chargers, and never seemed to stop grousing. They made a tidy profit but not enough. They demanded that San Diego foot much of the bill for a world-class stadium, with luxury suites and seat licenses, that theft that masquerades as financial innovation in the National Football League.
The Spanos clan wheedled and threatened, and San Diego politicians and fans kept shaking their heads. They loved their Chargers, but these fiscally conservative residents were not going to build a rich man’s confection.
Dean Spanos pouted and eventually moved his team to Los Angeles. There, his Chargers will eventually live as the kept tenants of another football billionaire, Stan Kroenke, who is spending many billions of dollars to build a ziggurat of a new stadium in Inglewood for his Rams. Kroenke, too, betrayed his fans; his were in St. Louis, where three years ago he packed up the Rams and moved them back to Los Angeles.
Spanos and Kroenke are bride and groom stuck in a shotgun marriage. Spanos will pay virtually no rent but also share in only a small portion of the riches from Kroenke’s new palace. His sale of seat licenses has gone so slowly that his repeated price cuts call to mind a sale at Filene’s Basement.
For now, Spanos’s team is stuck playing home games inside Dignity Health Sports Park, a charming — if diminutive — soccer stadium that seats 27,000 fans, when they bother to show up.
The whole thing has become a wonderful exercise in just deserts for carpetbagger owners.
In the hours before Sunday’s game, I wander into the tailgating parking lot. It costs $100 to park a car here. The sky is azure, the wind blowing any trace of humidity far out into the Pacific and I stroll in search of that rarest of birds, the Chargers fan.
Hey, I ask, where can I find the fans with the powder blue jerseys?
Kenneth Mendoza, a burly Californian, turns to me and laughs. He has a flowing gray beard fit for Odin and a purple Vikings construction helmet. He is draped in purple with a purple bandanna tied about his neck, and at one point during our conversation he reaches inside his van to show me his handcrafted wooden Viking ax. He and his wife, Sharon, are native Southern Californians and football fanatics. But the Chargers? No, no, no. Kenneth long ago fell in love with the Vikings.
“I love the Vikings, love them,” Sharon says from underneath a blond braided wig. “The Chargers? They left all their fans in San Diego.”
Their friend Patrick Madrid is draped in purple, too, although he says that is just in loyalty to his friends. Madrid is an Atlanta Falcons fan. Why Atlanta? He shrugs. “I like any team named after a bird,” he explains, sort of.
“Welcome to Los Angeles, home of the transplanted loyalties,” he says.
Los Angeles once had its own teams, an earlier iteration of the Rams and a decade-long affair with the Raiders. Those Rams had been a successor to the Depression era Cleveland Rams; in 1946, their owner had threatened to fold the team if the league did not allow him to move to Los Angeles and off he went. The original L.A. version had a surfer boy of a quarterback, Roman Gabriel, who could throw the football into outer space. That team split from Los Angeles, too, and in the ensuing decades Angelenos acquired assorted far-flung football loyalties or contented themselves rooting for the Dodgers and the Lakers.
This is the way N.F.L. owners roll. They are like so many gilded dairy farmers accustomed to milking cities and fans for subsidies and hidden costs and whatever else — including their teams — that isn’t nailed down.
The Oakland Raiders, whose followers are fanatically loyal, are serial betrayers. The team deserted Oakland for Los Angeles in a fit of litigious pique in the early 1980s. A decade later, and thwarted in yet another stadium shakedown, the Raiders returned to Oakland, which re-embraced them. Now the team is off again, this time to Las Vegas, which is building a Taj Mahal of a stadium in the desert. One can only hope the team is there when the water finally runs out.
My tour of the lots unearths a few Chargers fans dressed in powder blue. They debate which recent game offered the most galling indignity. There was that Sunday when the Chargers played the Packers and the fans in the stadium rose and thundered, “Block it! Block it!” as the Chargers lined up to punt.
“I mean, that’s ridiculous,” said Rudy Sanchez, who sat with a buddy in lawn chairs, savoring their pregame beers. “Every game is half Charger fans and half the other team.”
He paused. “O.K., when the Raiders were here it was 90 percent Raiders and 10 percent us.”
Later, I come upon two more fans, middle-aged business types. They are catching beers and barbecue. One of the guys shrugs; I mean, it’s 68 degrees and there’s not a cloud to be found. It could be worse.
“We’re just happy to be here,” he says. “Yeah, we’re outnumbered, sure we are. But Charger fans are omnipresent. We’re everywhere. It’s almost mystical.”
He offered me a pull on his joint. I declined his generosity and walked into the stadium, where I found a cliff wall of purple jerseys and one chant of “Skol!” after another. In the second quarter, the Chargers line up to kick a field goal. Suddenly a great swelling chant arises from the stands: “Choke! Choke! Choke!”
Skol, Dean Spanos.
Source: Football - nytimes.com
