To You, It’s the Cheese; To Them, Cheesesteak

Mon amour.

People might have been surprised to see a couple of teenagers running around naked in front of City Hall after the Philadelphia 76ers had won Game 1 of the NBA Finals, but I wasn’t. I lived here for 10 years. I’ve seen that before.

I loved it here too. It may be a “hellhole” to a business traveler passing through (thanks, T.J.), but for us locals, and especially those in my line of work, it was paradise, Sportswriter Heaven, with fans and readers whose passion, for better and worse, knew no bounds.

I fell in love with the city my first summer, 1969, before the Eagles’ exhibition opener. Eagle players ran out under the goal post to cheers--until they introduced an offensive tackle named Lane Howell and the stadium erupted in boos.

Howell was called for holding a lot. In those days, they didn’t even announce the name of the player penalized but Philadelphia fans weren’t just tough, they were hip.

I was thrilled to have such discerning people for neighbors. I thought, “What a place!”

Sacred cows?

Forget that. Eagle fans, bristling at management in the dismal ‘60s, pelted Santa Claus with snowballs at halftime. Phillie fans booed the Easter Bunny when his hot-air balloon failed to take off at Veterans Stadium.

The Vet opened with someone called Kiteman whooshing down a chute in the center-field stands, preparing to fly to home plate to deliver the first ball. Instead, he fell off the chute and toppled into the seats. As he lay there, tangled up, the whole place booed him too.

And zany as these fans have always been, nothing compares to the present hysteria surrounding their die-hard 76ers.

Of course, they’re still Philly fans. In Game 5 of the series against the Milwaukee Bucks, Matt Geiger, in street clothes because of a vaguely understood injury that had sidelined him most of the season, left the bench for the sanctuary of the dressing room after two fans walked up and insulted him.

The first, according to someone nearby, asked Geiger, “How much did you pay for those tickets?”

The second told him, “I heard you were traded to the New York Liberty.”

That’s a WNBA team. Geiger has since returned to the lineup and been a pleasant surprise in the Finals, so all is forgiven, at least until Game 4.

Yes, this place in different.

No, the weather isn’t as pleasant as Southern California’s. Of course, we could all sell our houses and buy two here.

For me, our area is best represented by the plea Jim Murray often made in Rose Bowl columns when the weather was beautiful, lamenting that people watching on TV would want to move here and ruin it for us.

Murray, of course, was from Connecticut.

Philadelphia is at the other end of the spectrum. It’s a perfectly nice place with museums, a huge park with a lovely river running through it, boathouses, wide avenues such as Franklin Parkway (which Rocky looked down when he did his famous dance), leafy suburbs out the Main Line, giving way to country estates. But it’s an old Eastern city, not a new Western one, and it has large, poverty-stricken neighborhoods too.

More to the point, it has an inferiority complex. The colonial capital, Philadelphia was eclipsed economically by New York, 100 miles to the north, and politically by Washington, 120 miles to the south. In the shadow of those giants, local identity has always been a problem.

When I moved here, there were billboards proclaiming “Philadelphia isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it is.” This was supposed to be a campaign to boost local self-esteem, until whoever did it figured out it was backfiring.

In Los Angeles, a large percentage of the population arrived after World War II. In sports, this means they were fans of other teams, even if their kids would grow up rooting for the Dodgers and Lakers. The sports editor who hired me at The Times in 1979, Bill Shirley, ran our section with that in mind, asking for features on other teams, knowing our readers included a lot of transplants who’d be interested.

In Los Angeles, games are just something else to do. Fans enjoy winning teams but don’t get upset at losers. They just forget them and go to the beach, the mountains, etc.

In Philadelphia, it’s about Representing Us. More residents go back generations and their teams are like members of the family. People stop coming to games when the teams do badly, but they don’t lose interest.

Instead, they get mad and read the sports sections to find out whom they should be mad at.

In my case, the 76ers literally became part of my family.

I was a beat writer for seven seasons in the ‘70s, covering woeful teams and spectacular busts, such as the one with Julius Erving, George McGinnis, Darryl Dawkins and Kobe Bryant’s father, Joe, that blew up in the ’77 NBA Finals.

One of my nephews, Billy, was a ball boy. He and his siblings, Brian, Beth and Caitlin, once appeared as extras in a 76er commercial.

My brother and sister-in-law, Chuck and Jackie, went to St. Charles Borromeo Grade School with the beloved 76er president, Pat Croce.

Chuck now has season tickets. Of course, when Croce took over, tacked exhibition games onto the package and made fans pay for them, Chuck took his exhibition ducats, wrote, “You need these more than I do,” signed his name and stuffed them in Croce’s mailbox.

My sister-in-law, Dorothy, worked in the 76er front office, where she met and married the team’s young video scout, John Gabriel. John subsequently went to work for the Orlando Magic and worked his way up to general manager, which means in the family, the official team is now the Magic.

(No, I don’t have a team. My wife, Loretta, roots for the 76ers. Our daughter wanted to wear her Kobe jersey to school. I’m just trying to get home for the summer.)

This divided-loyalty thing leads to some confusion, as last season when the 76ers beat the Magic and my sweet-tempered mother-in-law got mad at her granddaughter, Kate, for rooting for the 76ers.

Of course, the Magic is now, uh, resting and this is a special moment here, so they’re all 76er fans now.

And what a wonderful, loony time it is too.

On Sunday, before Game 3, the Inquirer devoted more than half of the front page to the 76ers. There were also stories on A11, A12 (Rahimah Abdullah-Sabir, the organizer of Islamic Heritage Day, noting, “We root on the Sixers, even though we’re Muslims”), A13, A14, A15, B1 (Sister Mary Scullion, watching on TV in the Dominican Retreat House in suburban Elkins Park, yelling “Woooo! Woooo!”), B2, B3, B4 and B6 (Gov. Tom Ridge paying $261,717 for a 30-second spot on the game telecast, extolling the state’s business climate).

Intermixed were stories with headlines such as, “Immigration Fuels Tensions in India” and “Cheney Meets With Gov. Bush.” That was before you even got to the sports section.

Even if opponents tire of hearing about it, this is a particularly appealing 76er team that has played through so many injuries, triumphed in so many harrowing playoff series and is now trying to slug it out with the Lakers, who, everyone understands, are superior.

That’s on paper. In the series, it’s only 2-1, as we wait to see if the 76ers have one more great effort left in them.

“People here go overboard for whatever sports team is currently hot, but this has been exceptional,” says ESPN analyst Jack Ramsay, a former 76er coach who still has a summer home in nearby Ocean City, N.J.

“Allen Iverson has a lot to do with that. The way he plays--if he didn’t play like he does, I don’t think there would be as much interest in the team, and people wouldn’t be as forgiving of him. But he plays with such all-out intensity, a little guy, throwing himself into traffic, and never stops. I mean, never stops!”

Of course, people here don’t think much of the Lakers or Kobe Bryant, who went to high school here but left and never looked back, or Phil Jackson, who’s usually in charge of inflaming crowds on the road, but has been eclipsed this time around by our own T.J. Simers.

In the biz, we understand Simers does over-the-top commentary but as the legions of Angelenos who blast him daily suggest, sometimes people miss that.

Not that Philadelphians worry about understanding his motivations after he called this place a “hellhole.”

T.J. is now a bona-fide villain here. Monday, the Philadelphia Daily News ran a photo of him, identifying him in the caption as a “brain-dead hack columnist.”

Gee, can’t we all just get along?

OK, maybe after we get this tournament out of the way.