When the citizens of Los Angeles asked for football to come back, it was under the assumption that the team we'd be gifted would be good, or at least generally competent. Not a big ask, I think, and yet here we stand. The Rams finished 4-12, and the newly christened Los Angeles Chargers finished a marginally less putrid 5-11. This is like seeing the name "Hemsworth" on the poster for a movie, but instead of Chris, you get Liam and Luke.
The Chargers are Liam—not quite as handsome, maybe a tad generic but with a certain untapped potential that could be useful under the right circumstances, like in The Hunger Games. The Rams are Luke, because Luke also seems like a guy who doesn't know where the sun rises.
Stretching this analogy to its absolute limits, I dare say that if you are a fan of Hemsworths, two lesser Hemsworths are superior to no Hemsworths at all, or worse, one Baldwin. If any city is prepared to half-heartedly shrug at a bumbling sports franchise that moved from San Diego for no good reason, it's Los Angeles. Our disinterest or outright mockery of the Chargers' lazy new logo and Dean Spanos' specious claims of poverty are really a form of tough love.
Look at what a few decades of abuse did to the Clippers. It's a proven strategy here.
That's what awaits for the Chargers. What they're are up against in L.A. is not only our apathy, but also our loyalty. Contrary to what it might look like on the outside, there are actual Rams fans here. They are not mythical creatures like the Sasquatch or the human centipede. They're real, and they live among us.
The Rams are a team that played here for over 50 years before they left behind generations of fans. The Chargers don't have that going for them.
I went to a Rams game this season. More than one. I even went to the game on Christmas Eve. Not just any Rams game on Christmas Eve. I'm talking about the Rams playing the 49ers, with a combined five wins between them at the time. This is the sort of football doomsday scenario that sports fans devise in their most masochistic moments, that spawns prop bets on who will throw the first pick-six. In the alternate universe version of NFL RedZone—where only overthrown balls, delay-of-game penalties, and three-and-out punts are shown—49ers-Rams would be the star matchup.
And yet, I went. Lots of people did. The Rams announced 83,656 tickets were distributed, which is a polite way of saying that about 50,000 to 60,000 people actually showed up on a holiday to watch a meaningless game. That would be at or near capacity for several NFL stadiums, just not the cavernous concrete mixing bowl that is the Coliseum, which can seat upward of 90,000 people.
When the Rams absconded to St. Louis in 1994, they left behind supporters like Lance Goldberg, who goes by the alter ego "Big Seed" in Rams fan communities. He's one of the most high-profile fans in the greater L.A. area, and I met him while tailgating with the RWO—an acronym for Rams World Order, a fan group that derives its name from the defunct professional wrestling group, the New World Order.Goldberg, who lives in the coastal neighborhood of Playa del Rey, invented the melonhead, a curious tradition in which Rams fans carve a hole in a watermelon and place it on their heads for the duration of the game.
Goldberg, who lives in the coastal neighborhood of Playa del Rey, invented the melonhead, a curious tradition in which Rams fans carve a hole in a watermelon and place it on their heads for the duration of the game.
I didn't bother asking about the smell that must fester while wearing the makeshift helmet, but I did broach the subject of why one would feel compelled to put a watermelon on one's head at a sporting event. "Because cantaloupes were too small," he said without hesitation, presumably because he has such witty rejoinders on deck for just the sort of situation in which a nosy journalist like me starts cutting in on his drinking time.
The melonhead phenomenon started in 1983, back when the Rams were playing in Anaheim, home of Disneyland and not much else—a reminder that this team left actual Los Angeles long before it departed for Missouri. Goldberg kept supporting the team, even trying to replicate the melonhead experience. "We recruited a guy in St. Louis to keep the tradition going, but he didn't have much help. That's probably why they moved back," he told me.
Contrary to the detractors of L.A. football, the tailgate experience at the Coliseum is as raucous as any city outside of the dudes who suplex each other into tables in Buffalo. As we were talking, a 2Pac song came on the overhead speakers in the parking lot, and Goldberg started dancing arrhythmically. "This is his song," I was told by another tailgater. His wedding song, to be exact.
Part of me could not believe a track with copious amounts of racial epithets would be played at a small white guy's wedding, but I've also been told Los Angeles doesn't support football, so anything is possible. What it doesn't support is bad football, which we will have in ample supply in just a few months.
Goldberg said he started supporting the Rams while living in Florida. Before he started wearing fruit as a fashion accessory, the L.A. Rams won an NFL championship in the pre-Super Bowl era, consecutive NFC West division titles from 1973 to 1979 and an NFC title in '79. A team that's consistently good would (and did) attract fans from all over the country. A team as consistently bad as the current incarnations of the Rams and Chargers would not.
In the midst of the brain trust of L.A. football fandom, I asked Goldberg what he'd say to anyone who doubted the city's interest in the game. "Tell 'em to wake up and listen to this guy," he said just as a large, alcohol-fueled man in an Eric Dickerson jersey moaned unintelligibly into my voice recorder. "There's a lot of support, but like anything, you gotta win. There's always more support for teams when you're winning, period. Any team, any sport," he continued.
The hiring of Sean McVay to be the head coach and Wade Phillips as defensive coordinator (according to NFL Network's Ian Rapoport) offers at least a glimmer of hope for that missing ingredient in the Los Angeles relocation saga: success.
The dirty secret of football fandom here is that it's not all that different from the other NFL cities. People want to watch their team win games. Some people, the truly obsessed types who hollow out watermelons and walk around with them on their heads, might follow their team into the fiery pit of 7-9 hell. The rest of us just want to get drunk, throw up on the sidewalk, get in fights and maybe pass out from heatstroke due to a lack of shade in the stadium. OK, maybe that last one isn't all that common.
Every sport has that second type of fan, but what a team needs to survive is the first type of fan—the functionally insane people who buy car flags and tattoo the name of their favorite player on their butt cheek. L.A., and the Rams in particular, have that dedicated segment of fandom.
It might take a few decades for the Chargers to earn that loyalty. Or it might never happen at all. Neither of these teams will ever be the Raiders—the Chris Hemsworth of L.A. football, who's now too famous to call you on your birthday—but the Chargers are much closer than their new step-sibling.
Once it became clear my melonhead friend would rather be listening to his 2Pac wedding song than talking to me, I shuffled off to purchase a memento of the shabby occasion: a pin commemorating the Christmas game we'd all later hope to forget. It was a scene unlikely to inspire much in the way of nostalgia, but without the legacy that people like Lance Goldberg spent 22 years upholding, it's one the Chargers might find it hard to duplicate.
Dave is a writer-at-large for Bleacher Report and B/R Mag and hosts the Roundball Rock podcast—a comedic look at the NBA. Prior to joining B/R, Dave wrote for Grantland, the Guardian and Vice.