Rivalry? You Must Be Joking

SAN FRANCISCO -- The first pitch of the World Series has yet to be thrown, but the requisite zingers are flying. The mayor of Anaheim wants to see Willie Brown in mouse ears. The San Francisco Chronicle has sent a team of correspondents in search of Downtown Disney’s soul.

Did they find it? Need you ask? If it wasn’t clear when the Giants’ manager referred to Orange County as “southern L.A.,” we’re getting the message: Now is the time for all good Californians to dust off their North-South fighting words.

But as the San Francisco Giants and the Anaheim Angels face off starting today, the old Norcal-versus-Socal rivalry has never felt less relevant. The jokes have been good, but real rancor has been almost impossible to muster.

“We don’t have a natural rivalry with the Angels,” San Francisco Mayor Brown acknowledged this week, despite a wisecrack or two about the lamentable paucity of “E-ticket rides” in his city. Asked for a comparison of the two places, he smilingly sidestepped: “I don’t know enough about Anaheim.”

From the moment the playoffs ended in an all-California World Series, the battle lines were said to be clear. Two Californias: Orange County conservatives versus Bay Area liberals. Tract homes versus Victorians. Surf Nazis versus Ferlinghetti. No Doubt versus Deadheads.

But as the two places strain to find hard feelings for each other, they keep tripping over their common ground: Both are international destinations. Both rely heavily on tourism, and both have paid dearly for it, post-9/11. Both are just glad, in this downer of an economy, that sports fans will be spending their World Series dollars on this coast. And to the extent that either buys into the concept of two Californias, they do so in just one way: Both are dedicated to the proposition of not being Los Angeles.

“L.A. turned in one generation from the land of dreams to the land of nightmares,” said Robert K. Dornan, the colorful conservative who for 13 years represented Orange County in Congress and who now hosts a talk radio show in suburban Virginia. “People fled to Orange County to get away from the crime and the instability and the rioting.

“For four decades, Anaheim had to watch the power and the glory of the Dodgers and play second banana. With this miracle of the Angels finally getting to World Series heaven, we’d always hoped it would happen with the Dodgers. Just to say, ‘You’re not the big shots. We’re the real Southern Californians, not stolen from Brooklyn. We’re not second-class citizens.’ ”

When Orange County broke away from L.A.County in the late 1880s, it was, even then, because Los Angeles felt “just too big,” says state librarian and USC history professor Kevin Starr. As decades passed and orange groves turned to suburbs, it remained a repository for disaffected Angelenos and anti-L.A. trash talk.

“I wouldn’t go up to Los Angeles to see Jesus Christ rassle a bear,” native Orange County historian Jim Sleeper said as recently as 1990. And in the last decade, Orange County has come into its own as a civic and economic power.

Anaheim, once a grape-growing co-op for German farmers, now has a population of 328,000, two major theme parks and the state’s largest convention center. But the county’s old sentiments still color its feelings about its northern neighbor.

“If L.A. had won the pennant, there’d have been a riot,” Angels fan Marvin Hora told Associated Press as he waited to buy souvenirs at the stadium in Anaheim this week. “Here, everybody had a good time and then we went home.”

San Francisco and Orange County lack that history, however, so their relationship isn’t as emotional or well-defined. Theoretically, people in both places say, they know how they should feel -- as left- and right-wing hotbeds, they should loathe each other -- but they just don’t.

Janice Billings, superintendent of Anaheim Union High School District and a resident of the county since the mid-1960s, said that when the city of St. Francis is mentioned, words such as “cosmopolitan” and “sophisticated” spring to mind.

Peter Buffa, the former mayor of Costa Mesa, knows the old chestnuts -- San Francisco is “either this whacked-out place run by the ‘Brown brothers’ -- Willie in San Francisco and Jerry in Oakland -- or Sodom by the Sea,” he said, laughing. But contempt is hard to sustain because, “there are all these connections.”

“The father of Jeff Kent, the Giants’ second baseman, was a police lieutenant in Costa Mesa when I was mayor,” he said. “Then there’s the fact that the managers for both teams used to be with the Dodgers. There are all these tremendous relationships that go all over California.”

And not just on sports teams. “Anyone who’s in any way successful is now statewide in California,” Starr points out. Tech companies in Palo Alto have clients in San Diego; developers in the Inland Empire lobby lawmakers in Sacramento.

Newport Beach couples honeymoon in San Francisco, and San Franciscans take their kids in the summer to Disney’s California Adventure park. (From a statewide perspective, jokes Ventura-based urban planner Bill Fulton, “the one similarity between Anaheim and San Francisco is that they’re both theme parks.”)

“Don’t get me wrong -- I think the Rally Monkey will be pumped and looking to smack around some latte-drinking artists,” joked Costa Mesa’s Buffa. “But the two places don’t really have a long-standing rivalry.”

In the Bay Area, the apathy is mutual, though there, too, proper respects are paid to the obligation to disapprove of yesterday’s stereotypes. Anaheim was the site, in the 1920s, of the largest white supremacist rally in state history; Orange County was a bastion, in the 1950s, for the hardest of the hard right. On the other hand, Anaheim is now 47% Latino and 12% Asian, and Orange County’s white majority was, at last count, barely holding. “Orange County? Well, I’d like to tell you what we think of it, but frankly, we don’t,” laughed Stanlee Gatti, a San Francisco event planner and party designer. “And when we do, we think of the John Birch Society and Disneyland.”

He grew serious, however, when asked about the Series’ fiscal import. Recession, the tech implosion and the post-9/11 drop in tourism have cut into theme park attendance and pummeled San Francisco’s economy. “How much do we need this? How much do both cities need this? A lot,” said Gatti.

No mention was made of the megalopolis in the middle, which, more than a generation ago now, snatched San Francisco’s mantle of power away.

“It would be different if we were playing L.A.,” said Burton Bradley, the wine director at Moose’s restaurant in North Beach. “It’s the Dodgers that nobody likes here.”

Actually, “unrequited hate,” is how a Chronicle columnist summed up the city’s feelings toward Los Angeles last Sunday. The relationship between Orange County and San Francisco, Bradley said, is harder to get at, because the two places are as singular as, come to think of it, two bottles of fine wine.

“Anaheim,” he ventured, “is ripe, juicy, young, easy to drink, like a young syrah from Santa Barbara County. Whereas San Francisco is more complex, maybe not as pleasant, but layered and with different components, like a 1996 Premier Cru Vosne-Romanee. Or” -- he thought for a moment -- “maybe a nice Carneros Pinot Noir.”

That said, it is understood on all sides that an all-California series is no time to hold back on the celebration of cherished stereotypes.

“Most people don’t realize that the word ‘Irvine’ comes from an old Indian word that means ‘paint everything beige,’ said Nick Arnette, a Southern California comedian.

“San Francisco? It’s a crammed-in big town with a couple of suburbs draining off down the peninsula,” scoffed Newport Beach businessman John Crean. “And the weather’s miserable -- if it isn’t foggy, the wind is blowing. Never thought much of the place.”

“Sure, you got your weirdos down in Orange County,” bragged Peter Ridet, manager of Tosca Cafe in North Beach with signature San Francisco smugness.

“But not like our weirdos,” he continued. “Our weirdos are way more overt.”

“They clearly don’t have the same kinds of attractions as we do,” agreed Mayor Brown, finally ticking off some of the differences between Anaheim and his city. “I don’t think there’s an Anaheim Opera, or an Anaheim Ballet, or an Anaheim Symphony. I don’t think there’s a DeYoung Museum in Anaheim. I don’t think there’s an Asian Arts Museum in Anaheim.

“On the other hand, San Francisco doesn’t have [Disney attraction] A Bugs Land.”