My Biggest Mistake Was Loving You Too Much

I will stay off social media mostly because I don’t claim to know what it is like to have your local team ripped away.  I will continue to be a Chargers fan until they rebrand and probably go inactive entirely.  But it’s different already.  The last two years of sitting in San Diego and playing with the fans’ emotions wasn’t good for anybody.  There’s no way it helped the team on the field, no matter what they say.  The Mighty 1090 confirmed today what a lot of fans have said all along–San Diego will root as hard against the relocated Chargers as they once rooted for them.  I am pretty sensitive to what many San Diegans are feeling so I don’t think talking about the coaching search, draft, etc is appropriate one bit right now.

This was an interesting read.  But it doesn’t really apply to me. 

Do I care less about this team because how low they’ve sunk or because I’ve grown up?  It’s the same question I might have had to ask myself if Jerry Garcia hadn’t died in 1995.  I haven’t outgrown sports, but can’t imagine my family (or even getting to the point where I have one) being OK with me becoming totally absent over the Chargers.  I’ve always been in a unique spot because I chose to be a Charger fan.  The fact that I never lived there was “my thing.”  If I lived in San Diego, I would just be another passionate follower living in the city.  That’s not why I have lived in New York all my life, but I know that my panache is being the NY Bolthead.  I will never forget taking the bus to the Super Bowl with a Charger fan in a wheelchair who defended me to every person who claimed I was a bandwagon fan from New York.  I know, it’s crazy to think we were ever good enough to have a bandwagon.  “This guy knows more about the Chargers than you ever will,” he’d yell at anyone who challenged me.  This was from only hanging with me (and drinking Jim Beam out of the wineskin I brought to the game) for 30 minutes.

I feel really sad, but more so for those in the city.  There isn’t a single emotion that someone could express right now that I would say is off limits.  Right now, I feel pretty numb.  But this team has been doing that to me for a while now and the potential move certainly has had something to do with that.

 http://www.fightforla.com/

It’s crazy that the player wallpapers already have the working logo on it.  I think like many people, I will just give myself some time to take it all in.  But if I lived in San Diego, I’m sure that’s not how I’d react.  Burning jerseys, protests…I can’t blame anyone for what they are doing.  It’s sad that I am listening to Dean Spanos on AM 570 in Los Angeles being more forthcoming than he ever was with San Diego.  That’s fucked up and I get people’s anger completely.  Am I angry with Dean?  For a number of things, sure.  But when it comes to the move, I can’t isolate my frustration on that.  But if I thought this team was cursed in San Diego, they will be doubly cursed now.

I totally get why many of my Twitter followers would no longer follow me if I continue to write about football.  At the very least, I’m not going to root for them to lose like they are.  In Dean’s interview, he said it would be up to his sons if the team re-brands.  If that happened, I think I’d finally bow out, but if the name went back to San Diego I’d eventually root for that team.  But if the Chargers just ceased to exist, I guess I’d have no team at all.  Maybe that’s what has already happened.  Maybe it happened a while ago.  I just don’t know.

La la land just doesn’t seem right.

RLW