Fans or Fanatics? : UCLA-USC Game Day Is Approaching and Spirits Are High, but Some Are Nearly Out of Control

There is a major disagreement this week in the Guerra household in Downey. It involves loyalty and revulsion, love and hatred, blind faith and abject misery. Yes, it’s all about football.

Every year, the week before the UCLA-USC football game, Mario Guerra, 33, and Ann Guerra, 31, cease being simply husband and wife. They become schools, institutions, football teams, Bruins, Trojans, combatants. It’s not a pretty picture. And with USC playing UCLA at the Rose Bowl on Saturday, this is the week.

The Guerras’ big problem, although simple in origin, can never be corrected. They graduated from different schools--rival schools--Mario in 1980 from UCLA and Ann in 1982 from USC.

You can tell by their license plates: “USC 4 Ann,” and “UCLA 4 MG.” You can tell by the 6-foot-high lights on the roof at Christmas that spell either UCLA or USC, depending on which team won that year.

You can tell by the topiary bushes in the back yard that Mario planted, all of them cut to resemble bears. Mario has named each one after UCLA defensive linemen. His favorite is the Jamir Miller bush.

You can tell by the swimming pool. Without telling Ann, Mario had several UCLA tiles put into the bottom and side of the pool when it was being built. His feelings are warm, deep and true, and Ann Guerra pays the price.

“We don’t have sex the week leading up to the game,” Mario said. “After a week, I let her out of the garage.”

Ann termed her husband “a little bit eccentric” and said she rejects the garage treatment.

“He’ll hold me in there a few minutes, but I won’t spend the night in there,” she said. “I put up with him. I tell him the outcome of the game is all that matters to me. And in recent years, he’s gotten his comeuppance from me.”

Guerra, an insurance broker, said he loses his ability to think rationally when the subject is USC.

“I just can’t stand the guys,” he said. “I hate them with a passion. If you look at it, half the players there wanted to go to UCLA but couldn’t get in, so they bought their way into USC.”

Said Ann Guerra: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

And so it goes in the Guerra house, and for that matter, in who knows how many otherwise normal homes across Southern California? We’re not talking about normal fans here, but rather your rabid, all-out, obsessive, borderline disturbed type.

Mario Guerra may be typecast. He said he will refuse to permit any of his four children, ranging in age from 3 months to 13 years, to attend USC.

“I’ll tell you, there will never be a day in my life when I will write a check out to USC with my name on it,” he said.

Guerra added that, in time, his children will understand, just as 13-year-old Mario Jr. knows that Dad has missed more than half his youth soccer games because they conflict with Bruin football games.

“He knows UCLA comes first,” said Guerra. “There’s not much else that’s more important than UCLA.”

But not every obsessive fan wears blue and gold the week before UCLA-USC. Actually, only about half of them do. The other half wear cardinal and gold.

One of those is 85-year-old Giles Pellerin of Huntington Park, who has seen every USC football game, home and away, since 1926.

Pellerin’s streak will reach 724 Saturday, but only because he wouldn’t follow doctor’s orders the day of the USC-Washington game in 1949. He sneaked out of Queen of Angels Hospital, where he was to have his appendix removed.

“I said, ‘Hey, Doc, any chance of getting out of here?’ ” Pellerin said. “He said ‘No chance at all,’ so I called my brother and told him to meet me in the lobby of the hospital. We took off for the game with tape holding me together.”

USC beat Washington, 40-28, and Pellerin returned to the hospital for his surgery.

His appendix may be gone, but his heart still beats to the USC fight song. Four years ago, Pellerin entered the “America’s Nuttiest Sports Nuts” contest, conducted by Fisher Nuts, and finished as the runner-up.

“I think I got rooked in that deal,” Pellerin said. “That former umpire, what’s his name, Luciano, Ron Luciano? He was one of the judges. I think he made sure that some guy won who had seen every one of the Baltimore Oriole games that season. But I got a nice prize anyway, a 21-inch RCA TV set.”

To each USC game he attends with brothers Oliver, 83, and Max, 81, Pellerin wears a cardinal coat and gold trousers.

“We are not exhibitionists,” said Pellerin, certainly not a fan who would paint his face as some fans do.

“I think they’re a bunch of kooks,” he said. “But I guess everybody to his own liking.”

*

In the wild, wacky world of sports fans, people doing their own thing while together at a football game may be the norm. It’s all good, clean fun, isn’t it?

Maybe, but according to experts, fan obsession ought to come with its own warning label.

“Fans are obsessive because they don’t have much of a life of their own,” said Mark Goulston, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. “They are drawn to sports figures who are larger than life in their minds, and they think they have a personal contact--some sort of magical bond with these sports figures. When a team wins or loses, it can make the obsessive fan feel that he is a winner or loser himself.”

Goulston said that obsessive fans who live their lives through the actions of sports figures may stunt emotional growth.

“When a sports figure has feet of clay, or a team doesn’t do well, the obsessive fan doesn’t have anything to fall back on, so he is prone to depression, anger or hatred directed at the object of his obsession. . . . He is disappointed, feels devastated.

“I guess the advice one should give to an obsessive fan is to, ‘Come on. Get a life.’ ”

Michael Messner of the USC sociology department said that what many call obsessive fan behavior is actually male-bonding behavior.

“Men use sports talk and sports viewing in a way that keeps them from having to deal with any intimate matters with each other, to keep those issues at a distance,” he said.

*

Last Saturday, a couple of hours before the USC-Arizona game, Ron Ellico, 59, drove his van to the Coliseum, pulled in, parked and got out. He was wearing a toga.

Those who know Ellico by more than just an impressive handlebar mustache, well, they probably weren’t at all surprised. The 1962 USC graduate from Alhambra, past president of the San Gabriel Valley Trojan Club, has arrived at other USC games wearing a grass skirt, dressed as Tommy Trojan and in an 1890s-style wool bathing suit.

Ellico happens to be the three-time defending champion in the best-of-theme category in USC’s annual tailgate party contest.

He notched his latest victory at the “Wide World of Sports” theme weekend. Ellico decorated the outside of his van with structures resembling the Roman Colosseum, complete with Doric columns, a fountain and a chariot. Since he didn’t have any chariot tires handy, Ellico improvised. He used the racing slicks from his son’s Volkswagen.

The person responsible for the tailgate contest at USC is Ron Orr, an assistant athletic director, who said there was only one reason he decided to start it.

“I wanted to taste all the food,” Orr said.

Some fans just want to hear the music. Bob Brandt, coordinator of alumni relations at USC, was amazed that some 1,500 Trojan faithful waited in the lobby of the team hotel in the Bay Area before the USC-California game.

“You’d think that after all these years, people would get tired of the band,” Brandt said.

But even after posting four consecutive victories in the highly competitive field of tailgate party themes, Ellico doesn’t get tired of winning. Maybe this is because of his devotion to duty, not to mention his son’s Volkswagen tires.

Ellico said there are two rules for successful tailgating:

“You don’t get married on game day, and you don’t die on game day.”

*

Ah, game day. It’s that special day for UCLA zealot Geoff Strand. Weekdays, he is a mild-mannered vice president at Dean Witter, sitting calmly behind his desk in his Santa Monica office. But on UCLA game days in the Rose Bowl, Strand becomes something else entirely.

The guy in the eight-cornered hat and UCLA sweater, holding the poster boards and leading the eight-clap cheers while standing on a box? That’s Geoff Strand, who described himself further: “This crazola jumping up and down on a platform leading cheers for the past 17 years.”

A 1970 UCLA graduate from Culver City, Strand, 45, is a former Bruin head cheerleader who embarked on a mission to improve school spirit soon after he left school. Actually, Strand has never really left school, at least in his heart. For the reason, you need to go back to his upbringing.

As a student, Strand was a member of an order of Bruin fanatics called the Kelps, once banned from campus because of such activities as welding Tommy Trojan’s sword to an anatomically awkward spot; capturing USC fans and handcuffing them to a fire hydrant on a street corner in Westwood and hiring a helicopter in an unsuccessful attempt to dump 500 pounds of manure on Tommy Trojan.

“Those are essentially my humble beginnings,” Strand said.

Strand, though, refuses to be tagged as an obsessive fan. Instead, he classifies himself as a spirit organizer, someone who helped bring together the largely untapped base of UCLA fans in the mid-1970s and mold it into a group that can probably do eight-claps in their sleep.

“No, I don’t consider myself to be a rabid fan,” Strand said “I’m just enthusiastic.”

Dorothy (Dottie) Reid, a 71-year-old USC football devotee from Long Beach, is a part-time volunteer in the Trojan athletic department. The day she began working in Heritage Hall is not a day she is likely to forget.

“I’ve been here since the day Mike Garrett’s jersey was retired, Nov. 27, 1965,” she said.

Reid is well-known by Trojan football players, who cannot fail to see her as she stands at the top of the Coliseum tunnel and waits for the team bus hours before the game each Saturday. Many players get a hug and a few words from her. And after road games, she is almost always at the airport, wearing cardinal and gold, waiting to greet the team when it returns home.

“I am with them all the way, win or lose,” she said. “I get very close. When the kids call me ‘Mom’ or ‘Hey, you,’ or ‘There’s my second mom,’ you get attached to them. It’s an emotional thing.”

Reid, whose family includes her husband George and two daughters, said her hobbies are knitting and needlepoint. But she does not call her attachment to USC football a hobby.

“I have a lot of football players who show me a lot of life,” she said. “That’s what keeps me going.”

But rabid fans still leave their traces everywhere. John Kobara, UCLA’s alumni director, sometimes finds evidence on his desk a few days after a Bruin football game.

“Let’s just say I get a lot of interesting mail,” Kobara said. “If we win, it’s often a religious message. If we lose, it’s a religious message, but the after-life they refer to is in an entirely different direction.”

Kobara added that the kinds of Christmas cards obsessive fans send often reflect the score of the UCLA-USC football game.

“If we won, I get some that have the score in blue and gold--nothing else, except for maybe a poem,” he said. “If we lost, then they’re these Crayola-scrawled ransom note-type things.”

Have a great game, fans.