Galaxy Fans Drive Home Their Point at Rose Bowl
A home team.
That’s what they kept repeating Thursday night, those bouncing, singing fools above Tunnel 28 in the end zone corner of the Rose Bowl.
“This is what some people have been waiting all their adult lives for,” said Brian Lewis. “A team that truly represents the city, brings together the people that make it up. Our home team.”
Lewis is a Venice firefighter, bouncing next to an El Salvadoran busboy, one row down from an Argentine mechanical engineer, five seats over from a guy draped in a tri-colored Mexican flag.
Four different accents, one chant.
“Gal-a-xy, Gal-a-xy.”
A home team.
That was the point in Thursday’s Major League Soccer playoff game involving the Galaxy, a rollicking 2-1 victory over the Kansas City Wiz.
That, in fact, has been the point all season.
While the Galaxy began with 12 consecutive victories, finished with the second-best record in the 10-team league, and are now one win from playing in the championship game in Boston, those facts are as substantive as a strand of Cobi Jones’ hair.
What matters most about the Galaxy is this:
It has tapped into long-ignored vein of a large and indifferent city, resulting in a colorful concoction that looks and sounds a lot like community.
Critics who say there is no such thing as a Los Angeles needed only to have attended Thursday night’s Pasadena party.
Los Angeles was spread across tens of thousands of seats like a multicolored quilt.
From the Spanish chants to the hot dogs wrapped in onions to the wave. From the whistles to the Kings jerseys and Laker caps.
Los Angeles was even in the newspaper confetti that swirled through the air in hundreds of tiny twisters.
Words on some of the bits were in English. Others, Spanish.
“Watch this,” said Salvador Estrella, a busboy and student from Hollywood, swaying with the melting pot above Tunnel 28.
He slapped the shoulder of the man sitting in front of him.
That man, firefighter Lewis, turned around and offered his hand.
“I do that to somebody on the street, we fight,” Estrella said. “Here, we are friends. Here, everyone is one being.”
Too much sentimental pap? Want numbers?
The Galaxy has numbers:
On a Thursday night, with playoff baseball and regular season Ducks on TV, 25,212 showed up here.
On the previous Thursday night, hours after a Dodger home playoff game, 30,231 showed up for a similar game.
In mid-July, the Galaxy were averaging more fans than the Dodgers.
At the end of their season, they had averaged a league-high 28,916 for 16 home games.
An amazing number. But a whispered number.
Soccer is a long-ignored sport, and their fan base largely consists of long-ignored minority groups.
Few in the established media believed such combination could prosper in an professional sports atmosphere, so few have taken the time to look.
After only one season, they need only to listen.
“Nobody understood what soccer could do here,” said Ozzy Gomez, a Chino mechanical engineer and president of the Galaxian fan club. “Nobody realized that everybody could come together like this.”
In the beginning, everybody didn’t.
During the Galaxy’s first home games in April, fans would gather by country, and cheer mostly for the players from their country.
There was an El Salvadoran section, a Mexican section, an Ecuadoran section.
In the beginning, there were taunts, and threats, and fights.
The police intervened, but used dialogue instead of force. They spoke with groups from each country. They spoke with Gomez, who leads a group of yellow shirted fans chanting only from the Galaxy.
With the chill of fall has come a strange camaraderie.
“A few games ago, I walked through the sections that were giving us so much trouble, and everybody was sitting together and cheering for one thing--our team,” said Danny Villanueva, Galaxy president. “It was a great feeling to think that this sport has been able to do that here.”
A home team.
“When we started this, I wanted something that looked like Los Angeles, something that was not just for the city, but a reflection of the city,” Villanueva said.
Well done, sir.
On Sunday in Kansas City, the Galaxy will attempt to sweep the Wiz in this three-game series.
You should, of course, cheer against them.
That way, there will be a third and deciding game next Thursday night in the Rose Bowl, giving Los Angeles one more chance to celebrate itself before the second season begins next spring.
One more chance not to only root for a home team, but belong to one.
