Why Aren’t We Root, Root, Rooting for the Home Teams?

Can the Mighty Ducks do it? Can the Anaheim Angels? Can they pull off the impossible? Can they do what no other local sports franchise has been able to do?

I’m not talking about the Ducks winning their playoff series against the Phoenix Coyotes. Or the Angels winning the American League pennant. What I’m asking is, can either team ever unite Orange County and give us something or someone to rally around? Can they be the “thing” that gives us a sense of community and shared experience? Can they get people from Stanton to San Clemente to forget, if only for a while, all about the El Toro airport debate and say with passion over coffee in the morning, “Hey, can you believe those Ducks? . . . How about those Angels?”

Nice thought, but don’t bet the Pond on it.

For reasons that at first seem obvious but might be more elusive, Orange County seems incapable of unifying behind a sports team. That isn’t to say that the Angels or the Ducks or the Team Formerly Known as the Los Angeles Rams don’t have their die-hard followers. Of course, they do. But where’s the countywide passion? Where’s the sense that we all care about the same thing, whether we live in Stanton or San Clemente, Anaheim or Aliso Viejo?

Will we never learn the pleasures of exulting together? Or the balm that comes from suffering together? Will we ever know what it feels like to be a Chicago Cubs fan? Or a Boston Celtics fan?

I’ve spent considerable stretches in two locales--Nebraska and Denver--where sports teams galvanized the citizenry year after year. Even when the locals were divided on other issues, they could find common sanctuary in rooting for the home team. The only thing that has united Orange County in recent years was contempt for county government when it went bankrupt.

Meanwhile, we’ve watched the Cheeseheads reflect Green Bay’s euphoria while going after their eventual Super Bowl victory this year. We’ve heard in years past about Terrible Towels in Pittsburgh and Homer Hankies in Minneapolis--gimmicks, sure, but gimmicks that united communities. Everyone in Nebraska knows what “Go Big Red” means.

There is more than retarded adolescence and outward silliness at play here.

“I’d have to say, yes, we are missing something in Southern California,” says Russell Gough, a Pepperdine University professor who has written about sports in America. “We’re missing something, but whether it’s something essential, I can’t really say. But when you look at the commitment, the fanaticism in a good sense, the camaraderie and history of organizations like in Green Bay and Boston and so forth, there seems to be a social and cultural cohesion that’s related to sports teams.”

While it’s difficult to measure, Gough says, merely bringing divergent groups of people together in a stadium or arena, or having them all interested in the fortunes of a given team, “can be a very powerful cultural and socially unifying force.”

Part of what builds that is permanence in a community, something Southern California is not known for. “Take Boston or Green Bay, for example,” Gough says. “A large percentage of fans are home-grown in those communities, they remain there and feel a strong kinship with the professional teams.”

Only in their fourth year, the Ducks are in the playoffs. They could be playing for the Stanley Cup in a couple weeks with a quirk of fate here and there--OK, maybe a miracle since if they lose today their season ends.

Yet how many people out of 10 in Orange County can even name the Ducks’ playoff opponent? I’ll go you one better: I went to San Clemente this week and asked five men and five women, ranging in age from 20 to 70, if they could name one player on the Ducks. Only two people could, and one was a woman whose family had season tickets. The other was a woman who first said she couldn’t, then added, “Wait, uh, with an ‘S.’ Selanne?”

Chester Kandel didn’t grow up like that. He lives in Leisure World in Laguna Hills but grew up in Brooklyn. Now, that was a community. He laments the fact that his grandchildren, while sports fans, have no particular team loyalties.

“There wasn’t any of my friends who didn’t know or talk about the Dodgers,” Kandel, 75, says. “There were two factions. Either you were a Dodger fan or you were an outlaw and a Giants fan. The competition between the Dodgers and Giants was a very important part of growing up.”

I asked him about the “sense of community” that the Dodgers bred. “It was more than just the fun of going to the ballpark,” he says. “It was like they belonged to you. Your team. They didn’t belong to Branch Rickey or anyone else. This was part of everyday life. Out here, it’s not. It’s, ‘Who won? Oh, OK,’ and that’s it.

“They were fanatics,” Kandel says of the old Brooklynites. “That’s a good word for it. You lived and died by it. It was almost like an extended family. People knew where they [the players] were born, what they did in the off-season, what their stats were. Those were sports fans. Today, they’re not. If you ask people how they feel about sports today, they’d say it’s a business, and it is, because you never know who you’re rooting for.”

OK, let’s concede that when it comes to bonding with a team, Orange County isn’t Brooklyn of 1950. Or even Green Bay of 1997.

And the problem is you can’t force these things. The elusive nature of sports fandom is tied in with the history of an area, the continuity of families and local traditions, and the permanence and involvement of the sports franchise and players in the community. All of those factors militate against widespread local fan loyalty.

I spent some time this week in Roland Kim’s sports memorabilia shop in Seal Beach. He and a couple customers also lamented the lack of a shared community feeling for sports teams. Like others have before, they cited the large number of transplants in Southern California, the increasingly impersonal business aspect of sports. Mark Pound of La Habra said he’d love to take his boys, 16 and 12, to a Ducks game, but that season-ticket sales make it almost impossible to find three or more seats together. That is no way to build a fan base.

Kim wonders why the Ducks can’t market young stars like Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne in the way that the Miami Dolphins once touted Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “I don’t know why Kariya can’t put forth more presence,” Kim says.

“It would make a world of difference.”

My contention isn’t that everyone in a community has to love football or baseball or hockey. Or sports, period. But what distinguishes places like Denver is that even non-sports fans generally share awareness with their fellow citizens about how those teams are doing.

It’s the kind of thing that makes people feel part of something larger than themselves.

“I think there is a lack of collective consciousness in Southern California and a lack of a clear sports team or other sort of symbol of collective identity,” says Stephan Walk, an assistant professor and sports sociologist at Cal State Fullerton. “There’s just too much to do and to pay attention to. I think it’s also complicated by cultural diversity of the area. . . . It’s one of things we’re having to deal with in the late 20th century. In a society as diverse as ours and given the rapid changes in society, is there going to be a sense of collective identity anymore, or are we going to be factioned off into groups that occasionally have common interests?”

Teams and players don’t help by either pricing many families out of tickets or cavalierly shuffling rosters. Walk considers it an “open question” as to whether sports today can be a unifying force.

“The role of sports is certainly changing in U.S. culture, and people are becoming very cynical about the financial aspects of it,” he says. “People are becoming very cynical about the purity of sports. The mobility of a sports team--the athletes are moving around--it’s really hard to identify your place with personalities, because the personalities are moving everywhere.”

The Ducks are billed as Orange County’s own, but you wonder if they’ll ever win our collective hearts and minds. Perhaps we ask too much of them.

But lest you think the subject is frivolous, here’s Walk’s final word on the subject:

“Some of my colleagues thought of sport as a kind of civic religion, as one of last few things everyone does together. Maybe even that’s not going to be so true anymore. . . . Generally speaking, a society needs to have some kind of common framework with which to understand the events of our lives, and sport historically fulfilled that function. I hope it’s not disappearing, but we may be seeing some indications of that.”