At Kings Games, the Commoners Play Hard Too

Mark Kates rolled his eyes, as if the answer were as brutally obvious as a 220-pound defenseman slamming into the boards with a spray of ice chips. “What’s the difference between a Kings fan and a Laker fan?” he repeated.

“About 60 decibels,” said Kates, shouting to make himself heard over a steel-drum band and the dull roar of the gathering throng outside Staples Center.

His point was well taken. Oh, you’ll hear other accounts of what supposedly distinguishes L.A’s pro-hockey partisans from supporters of our heavily belaureled basketball franchise. You know: Laker fans wear black leather and carry cell phones. Kings fans wear black-and-purple sweatshirts and carry six-packs. Laker fans take their behavioral cues from Dyan and Jack--the essence of privileged Hollywood cool. Kings fans follow the lead of Dancing Boy, a gyratin’ madman who pumps up the crowd between periods. Laker fans arrive at games in limos. So do Kings fans--as their chauffeurs.

Stuff like that.

But the old jokes didn’t faze the faithful on Monday night at Staples Center, as the Kings crossed sticks with the Colorado Avalanche in game 3 of their Western Conference playoff series. With the Lakers battling to keep their NBA title and the Kings in the hunt for hockey’s holy goblet, the Stanley Cup, L.A. sports fans have been doubly blessed this spring. Throw in the (gasp!) first-place Dodgers, and you’ve got a veritable trifecta of major-league actualization. In a city that loves flirting with winners, pro sports in L.A. is conducting a three-way affair--though some parts may turn out to be merely casual flings.

For Kings fans, recognition is especially sweet. Vanished are the days when L.A.’s long-suffering devotees of the glacial arts skulked in the shadows of the Great Western Forum, and finding a hard-core hockey fan in Los Angeles was like searching for an Iroquois sweat lodge in Beverly Hills. Gone is the era when not even Southern California’s radiant skies could brighten the long, dark Canadian winter of the L.A. hockey fan’s soul.

The icy buildup of defeat and despair began to thaw more than a dozen years ago, when the Kings acquired superstar Wayne Gretzky, the baby-faced assassin from Edmonton, and went all the way to the Stanley Cup finals. Since then, many previously closeted hockey fans have come out, and some L.A. scenesters have discovered that Kings tix still are a bargain compared with what it costs to watch Kobe and Shaq. Plus you won’t be distracted by bare-midriffed halftime shows. Nowadays, as L.A.’s unofficial hockey culture expands and evolves, and the Kings burrow deeper into the city’s affections, some fans seem more concerned about attracting too many zealots, rather than too few.

“Personally, I don’t mind the Johnny-come-latelies,” said Jon Kaplan, 36, as he and his parents, Mary and Don Kaplan, dashed toward the arena in the fading afternoon light. “They come for the violence more than the actual play-making.”

A fifth-grade teacher at Benito Juarez elementary school in Anaheim, Kaplan said he’s been coming to Kings games since the ‘60s. Among his most cherished childhood memories is “almost getting hit by a puck by Bobby Orr during warmups.” Today, he transmits his love of the game to his students. “I give ‘em extra credit if they give me the score the following day.”

A few yards away, a group of tie-dyed classmates from Peninsula High School on the Palos Verdes Peninsula hoisted a large banner in psychedelic shades, proclaiming themselves followers of the “Grateful Deadmarsh”--a reference to the Kings’ play-making winger Adam Deadmarsh, with apologies to the late Jerry Garcia. “I’m a die-hard Laker fan,” said Matt Willens, 16, “but I think this year Kings fans have a lot more emotion. You can feel it in the air all around Los Angeles.” Just what Southern California needs: another cult.

What the Kings really have needed is a good-luck talisman. Currently auditioning for the role is Davis Gaines, best known for playing the title role more than 2,000 times in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera.” At Kings games, Gaines has become the voice behind “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his soaring tenor a rallying cry akin to Kate Smith’s booming vibrato when she serenaded the “Broad Street Bullies” Philadelphia Flyers teams of the ‘70s to glory.

On Monday, Gaines sent the sellout crowd of 18,478 into near-pandemonium. They didn’t quiet down until former King Rob Blake stunned his ex-teammates with a goal less than five minutes into the game.

That temporary setback was enough to make Kings fan Sean Weiss start crying and screaming like a baby. Sean has a good excuse, though: He’s only 10 weeks old. “He didn’t like that one,” Sean’s mother, Nicola Weiss, joked as she cuddled and cajoled her son in the concessions area outside the upper deck.

Weiss, born in Germany and raised outside Zurich, said she began skating as a child on a little lake that would freeze up during winters. Though she and her husband live in Orange County, home to the Kings’ NHL neighbors, the Mighty Ducks, the couple can’t bring themselves to root for their local franchise.

“The Kings are more sports-oriented, whereas the Ducks seem to be more family entertainment, more dog-and-pony interruptions,” Weiss said. Then she and Sean ducked back to their seats just in time to watch the Kings even the score on a Luc Robitaille power play goal. (Um, for all you Laker fans, a power play is when one team has more guys on the ice than the other team.)

In fairness to Laker fans, at Staples it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether you’re attending a hoops contest, a rock concert or a Democratic Party convention. Whatever the occasion at this multi-tasking edifice, there’s often the same food, the same piped-in disco and heavy metal, the same aura of a highly controlled environment. Then a door opens or a curtain parts somewhere and it hits you: a faint chill, the frosty breath of the ice. It’s hockey night.

As the first period ends, cell phones are whipped out. Concession stands magically spring to life. Voices coarsened by cheering drift through the halls. “Exciting so far, huh?”

Dwayne Trenchuk is on the hunt for a slice of six-layer cake off a passing dessert cart. “I’m just a Canadian who never learned basketball,” said the Orange County physical therapist, who originally hails from Edmonton. He’s been going to Kings games since ‘78, remembers the ’82 “Miracle on Manchester” and blames the Gretzky phenomenon for sending Kings season tickets “sky high.” But he clings to the game he grew up playing in colder climes.

Next in line for a glucose fix was Michael A. Rembis, chief executive officer of Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood, which Rembis said is the “official hospital” of the Lakers, Kings, Dodgers, Sparks and Avengers. “We’re rooting for the Kings, and we think they’re positioned to go all the way,” Rembis declares. “We like to think we contribute to it. We consider ourselves an extended part of the family.”

As the Avalanche lead builds to 2-1, then 3-1, however, a few family members start to drift off. Ron Houlston, 65, tells his wife, Gillian, “I’m taking a walk.” A Toronto native, Houlston moved to L.A. nearly 40 years ago for “the weather, the money.” He left behind his hometown’s sacred Maple Leaf Gardens, where his parents had season tickets for years, and a tribal ritual perhaps best comprehended by those who know the reality of a May snowfall and the skill it takes to run on frozen water.

“Go to a game,” Houlston advises hockey detractors. “Look at what they got under their feet. That’s a quarter-inch blade, and that’s what carries them back and forth. See if you can be as graceful on the ice. See if you can even walk, let alone skate.”

An oceanic roar went up from the crowd as a Glen Murray backhander brought the Kings within one. But the euphoria was short-lived. Colorado scored again, and as a last-second Kings rally fell short, the Avalanche took a 2-1 series lead into tonight’s Game 4 of the seven-game match-up.

By then, Houlston and his wife were long gone, spilling out into the cool evening and the downtown traffic. A young couple paused briefly en route to their car to inspect a statue of an angel garbed in a Kings jersey, part of a public art project to honor our heaven-sent city. “He’s No Angel, He’s a King,” read the title at the statue’s feet. Up the street, a blond woman in a leather jacket ran off with a string of black, white and purple balloons she’d pilfered from a railing outside the arena. Everyone laughed. No one cared.

No, they’re no angels. Not second-class sports citizens, either. Just hockey fans who’ll be back again for another try tonight.