We play by our own rules

ANGELENOS and our sports — we’re a match made on the 50-yard-line, at home plate, at center court.

We’re alike, fans and franchises both. Immigrants and transients, almost all of us, come from somewhere else, looking for something better. Sometimes we find it. The Dodgers have. So have the Lakers. Brooklyn’s Trolley Dodgers moved to a city that was selling its own trolleys for scrap. The Minneapolis Lakers departed the Land of 10,000 Lakes to play basketball in a place whose lakes are usually water hazards on the back nine.

Los Angeles is no Cleveland, no Pittsburgh or Green Bay, where the team puts the city on the map, not the other way around. This is not some Rust Belt burg, where the club’s fortunes and the town’s are one and the same, and civic spirits roller-coaster along with the win-loss record. We like winners. That bears repeating. We. Like. Winners. Not for us the heavy lifting of “for better or for worse” losing-team matrimony.

L.A. is too cool, too practical, too diffuse a place to live or die by the seasonal prowess of outsized men in numbered costumes. Too many things beckon or distract us: the beach, the movies, the eternal sunshine of the backyard chaise, even the solitary sport of pressing the right foot to the accelerator pedal.

Oh, Kobe Bryant got 81 points in a single game, second-highest total ever. Cool. But let us know when he breaks the record, ‘kay? A Dodger pennant or a Laker title gives us a few minutes’ office chatter, but so does a dark-horse Oscar winner or a frisson of earthquake. For every deliriously loyal Dodger fan hollering his heart out at a playoff game, there are five Angelenos peeved that the game is mucking up traffic.

The first million-dollar paycheck the Dodgers ever cut wasn’t to anyone in uniform, but to Vin Scully, the broadcaster whose vivid play-by-play means that millions of Angelenos never have to bother to set foot in Chavez Ravine. L.A. makes the world a gift of the virtual realities of movies and television, and is the biggest fan of it: Give us the virtual game — no long drives, no traffic jams, no expensive tickets, no lines at the concession stand and bathroom, no thigh-to-thigh seating with strangers. Home is the stadium that has all the others beat.

L.A. played host to two boffo summer Olympics, in 1932 and 1984, but when you come right down to it, landing the Games had less to do with sports than with status; the rest of the world was admitting Los Angeles to the ranks of first-string world cities.

The city’s first homegrown pro team is a transplant of sorts. The Kings play hockey, a sport native to ice, a substance that occurs naturally in Los Angeles only in cocktail shakers. Jack Kent Cooke, who launched the Kings, had thought that thousands of Canadian ex-pats living in Los Angeles meant a slap-shot winner. He found out otherwise: “Now I know why they left Canada,” he bitched. “They hate hockey.”

If a pro team doesn’t prosper here, then, like Hollywood has-beens and never-weres, it simply packs up and slinks away. The Rams caromed out of L.A. to Orange County to St. Louis. The Raiders, who in their too-short-but-not-short-enough residency here, barely bothered to put “Los Angeles” on their minatory black-and-silver gear, soon headed huffily home to Oakland, where worshipful fans didn’t just cheer, they practically performed human sacrifices.

L.A. is the biggest city in America without a pro football team, and the only people who seem troubled by this fact are the politicians and millionaires who fantasize about themselves in skybox suites.

The Los Angeles name means a lot, but not necessarily in Los Angeles. When the Rams punted past the Orange Curtain, L.A. county supervisor Kenny Hahn snarked, “Who’d go to see the Anaheim Rams?” In this generation, Anaheim went to court but couldn’t stop the Anaheim Angels from re-branding themselves as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. So too do real estate agents brag about houses being “Beverly Hills-adjacent.”

Oh, but beneath our cool, tanned exterior there beats a fierce and passionate heart for two teams who can never leave town: USC and UCLA. Fans come to blows and to tears over these two. It’s L.A.’s biggest football game, bigger even than the Super Bowl. Any wonder? That game had been playing to sold-out stadiums for a decade and a half before the Rams dumped Cleveland to come west in 1946. Pro teams hoping to bust in and clone that sentiment for themselves might as well try to come between Norman Bates and his mother.

Here’s why all this went down as it did:

For decades before jet travel, L.A. was like Australia — so isolated by time and distance that it evolved its own teams and its own sports tastes, just as Down Under evolved the duckbill platypus. The Chicago Cubs came out for spring training, but at Gilmore Field and Gilmore Stadium, the local boys played practically year-round.

In the 1930s, when the city’s population was around a million-five, auto races drew crowds of 75,000 people. And where film stars went, fans followed. Well before Jack Nicholson got a permanent Laker courtside seat, Clark Gable went to the races in Santa Anita, Mae West sashayed into the Olympic Auditorium. In swimming pools and on golf courses public and private, Katharine Hepburn was a one-woman Olympics. Bing Crosby yielded to the allure of California’s golf courses long before ex-presidents did.

Sport in Los Angeles was and remains casual, individual, personal. Casual as the pickup soccer games that need only a ball and a bunch of kids and a bare piece of land. Individual as the joggers on the San Vicente median and along the canyon pathways, thudding along in iPod isolation. Personal as the solitary sweaty narcissism of the gym. The voyeur-exhibitionist pleasures of Muscle Beach, the surf-and-turf biathlon of surfing and skiing, and the delicious conceit that here you can do both in the same day. All-weather walking that is exclusively about heart-rate and calf-stretching and never ever about getting to a destination, and the bicycling undertaken on the same terms. Here is Christopher Isherwood, the English author, self-exiled to L.A. during the war, writing in August 1943: “Yesterday morning, I cycled to Malibu and back before breakfast: it was much further than I expected.”

It always is.

Go, team — Team L.A. A team, perpetually, of one.