Sluts of the sports world

There’s a scene I vaguely remember from “Escape from LA” (not the most memorable movie, by the way; it pales in comparison to its prequel). Snake Plissken is forced to compete in some kind of basketball shootout at the Memorial Coliseum, presumably with his life on the line. He triumphs and the crowd adores him, chanting his name, much to the chagrin of the bad guy. Steve Buscemi’s character takes in the situation and says, “This town loves a winner.”

Oh, how true that is.

I’m unsure why, but Southern Californians are notorious fair weather fans. They adore their local teams when they win, but are completely indifferent when fortunes have soured. Granted, many sports fans are like that. The White Sox and Cubs have hordes of closet fans, and I’ll say no more. Ten years ago the Iowa football team was horrible (the Hawks finished the ’99 season 1-11). The 2000 season opener against Western Michigan, which I attended with Mervgotti, scarcely drew 50,000 to Kinnick. However, when the team started winning a few years later, the stadium was filled to its 70,397-seat capacity. The Iowa men’s basketball team has experienced the opposite turn around recently. When I was a kid, Carver was packed with 15,500 rabid basketball fans, but now they need to lower ticket prices and offer special promotions just to get 9,000 through the gates.

Iowans, though, have loyalty. Despite poor results on the field or court, they remain Hawkeye fans. They may not be as enthusiastic or willing to spend money and see the game in person, but they are still Hawkeye fans. Most SoCalians, though, are a different breed. They don’t care who they cheer for as long as the team’s winning.

Case in point. On Sunday I walked down to the beach to relax and do a little reading. I passed a lot of people wearing NFL team jerseys. They were riding their bikes down to Main Street to watch the games in the bars (unlike me, who doesn’t give a shit about the football they play on Sunday's). There were people in Chargers, Raiders, and 49ers shirts, but the majority of them were wearing Steelers gear.

The Steelers? I thought. When the fuck did everyone become a Steelers fan? There can’t be that many people with Pittsburgh or Pennsylvania roots here.

It was like Surf City had become a satellite Steel City. Then I remembered: the Steelers won the Super Bowl last year.

Pathetic. The people wearing Steeler black and gold probably all had an Eli Manning or Plexico Burress Giant’s jersey, an homage to the previous NFL champs, buried in their closet.

All spring and summer I’d noticed an increase in the number of cars displaying Steelers stickers and license plate frames. Some of them were faded and old — placed long ago by true wavers of the Terrible Towel — but most of them were shiny and new, still sporting leftover price tag residue. I have no respect for those kinds of bandwagon jumpers, the people who blatantly, shamelessly, and wholly switch allegiances like a windsock pivoting with a changing wind. They whore their loyalties to whichever team last hoisted a trophy. Unlike a lot of us, who stick with our teams through thick and thin, these sluts of the sports world don’t even deserve to be considered fans. They’re just memorabilia consumers.