Life Without the Chargers

Aztec football just knocked off Stanford (!!!) and the Padres are on the road to being good... eventually!!! So things are kinda looking up for the San Diego sports scene. 

But the Chargers are still in LA. Which even 9 months later, still totally sucks. 

"Sucks" really downplays it, actually. The Chargers in Los Angeles is wrong- in a visceral, primal sense. There is something fundamentally not right about the Chargers playing in a soccer stadium in front of 25,000 fans, more than half of whom are rooting for the opposing team.

Now, I don't hate the Chargers as a team, or the players that comprise that team. 

People like Antonio Gates and Philip Rivers will always be a part of the community in San Diego, even if the team isn't. They are forever San Diego Chargers- playing their last 2-3 seasons in Los Angeles doesn't diminish that.

I hate Dean Spanos. 

I hate that Dean tried to exploit the taxpayers of this city to bankroll a stadium he could've easily paid for himself. I hate that Dean ripped the Chargers from a fanbase that had shown them nothing but unconditional loyalty for the last half-century, only to impose them onto a city that didn't want them at all. Hell, I might even hate most of all that Dean had the audacity to charge the remnants of that aforementioned fanbase 100 dollars to park at the StubHub Center.

Dean Spanos is not even attempting to masquerade under the pretense that he "tried his hardest to get a stadium built in San Diego" anymore. Dean is no longer tacitly prostituting the Chargers to serve his own financial ends- his greed has now been laid bare, for all the world to see. 

Spanos should probably just completely rebrand the team- leave the Chargers name with San Diego, where it belongs, and rename the team the "Los Angeles Stars", or something. The denizens of Los Angeles would eat that kind of thing up- and it just feels more right. But if Dean were to admit defeat, and move the Chargers back to San Diego, the city would welcome them back with open arms. I can dream. Either way, the Chargers brand was dead on arrival as soon as it entered LA city limits. 

Knowing that, watching the Chargers last Sunday was akin to watching a zombie grope about, desperately searching for flesh- except instead of flesh, the Bolts are wildly flailing for the almighty dollar, in the form of 100 dollar parking passes and public stadium funding.

The Chargers aren't exactly a team with a storied history- but right now, we are watching the team debase themselves in an absolutely unprecedented way. Until now, the Chargers were losers- regardless of whether they were good or bad. And they were our losers. 

They had a soul- and the city of San Diego rewarded them for that. But when that same city wouldn't give in to Dean's pathetic attempt to extort the taxpayers out of 2 billion dollars to build his own stadium, he sold that soul to move to a city that has met their arrival with complete and total apathy- all in the name of ultimately renting out a football field from the Rams for 16 weeks of the year. 

Now, the Chargers are soulless losers- and that's simply an untenable ethos in a town as vapid and superficial as Los Angeles.