Home Plaint : What Drove Met Fans to Come to Dodger Stadium and Yell: ‘Beat L.A.’?

A READER WRITES to complain about a phenomenon that all of us who enjoy sports have suffered: The guy who sits behind you and roots for the other team.

“I’m so sick of it,” says Tom Broderick of Monrovia. “I do not want to listen to ‘Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!’ in Dodger Stadium. Yankee fans at Angel Stadium. Celtic fans at the Forum. Giant fans, Met fans, Cub fans. . . . Look, this is L.A. Please tell these arrogant, pompous, ‘tough’ folks from back East to go home if they like it so much. If you want to live here, you’re going to be one of us.”

Not only do these people not support local teams, he says, but “they come here to live and then carry on about how they miss home, the seasons and, oh, the snow. And how the natives have no ambition, have no morals, are just laid-back, shallow people.”

I admit that Broderick’s indignation is understandable, but in our democratic society we cannot tell people to go back to where they came from.

We Americans are free to pull up stakes and move where we please. In the Soviet Union, to move from one place to another, a person has to get permission from the government, and hardly anyone does.

So the price we pay for our freedom of movement is to have some anthropoid leaping about in the seat behind us at Anaheim Stadium, beating his chest and yelling for the San Francisco 49ers to stomp the Rams.

Of course, our proprietary claim is somewhat compromised by the fact that we ourselves mostly came from someplace else. And we are in Anaheim , not Los Angeles. No matter: Easterners consider the entire megalopolis as La La Land.

I confess that it always irritates me when people near me--there are usually at least two because they tend to reinforce one another--jump up and down and scream every time the out-of-town team gets a hit or makes a first down. I have been known to turn around and glare at such offenders, the way you do when someone talks in a movie theater. Of course, the glare only goads them on.

The only way to silence these detestable interlopers is on the field. When the home team wins, you look around for the brutes only to see that they have vanished, slunk away in sullen disgrace.

Even so, we cannot contest the right of fans to root for the visiting team. So far, our sports crowds have been fairly peaceful.

One might feel threatened in a Raider crowd (they tend to be animals), but we have had no murderous rioting on a scale sometimes attained by British soccer fans.

If I have occasionally been moved to punch an offensive sports fan in the nose, I have restrained myself because (1) I believe in the rights of all others to express their feelings as they wish, and (2) I don’t have that good a punch.

Besides, resentment for those who root for the out-of-town team is merely a form of xenophobia--a hatred of foreigners.

We live in a cosmopolitan city where hostility toward anyone because of his race or place of origin is unthinkable.

The baseball fans who wore Met caps to Dodger Stadium during the pennant race should not only have been conceded their right to do so but should have been welcomed in our midst.

What could be more gratifying to a Dodger fan than watching the Met fans shuffle out of the stadium, heads down, in shock and disbelief, after that series-winning 6-0 Dodger victory last October?

As for those Easterners who live here but carry on about the seasons and the snow and the morality and the energy and ambition in the places they left, no use wasting any anger on them. They will all go back. The intercontinental highways and airways run both ways.

But after one season in the snow, amid all that morality and get-up-and-go, of sitting in blizzards to root for the Chicago Bears or the New York Giants, they will sneak back out here and buy a condominium.

Next thing you know, they’ll be reading The Times and rooting for the Lakers, resenting anyone who roots for the Celtics.

Caps: RHR Enterprises, Burbank