LA Sports: Play, Games, and Community in the City of Angels

By David K. Wiggins

LA Sports brings together sixteen essays covering various aspects of the development and changing nature of sport in one of America’s most fascinating and famous cities. The writers cover a range of topics, including the history of car racing and ice skating, the development of sport venues, the power of the Mexican fan base in American soccer leagues, the intersecting life stories of Jackie and Mack Robinson, the importance of the Showtime Lakers, the origins of Muscle Beach and surfing, sport in Hollywood films, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781610756297

Book preview

Other Titles in This Series

Making March Madness:

The Early Years of the NCAA, NIT, and College Basketball Championships, 1922–1951

San Francisco Bay Area Sports:

Golden Gate Athletics, Recreation, and Community

Separate Games:

African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation

Baltimore Sports:

Stories from Charm City

Philly Sports: Teams, Games, and Athletes from Rocky’s Town

DC Sports: The Nation’s Capital at Play

Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood

Democratic Sports: Men’s and Women’s College Athletics

Sport and the Law: Historical and Cultural Intersections

Beyond C. L. R. James:

Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity in Sports

A Spectacular Leap:

Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America

Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

LA Sports

Play, Games, and Community in the City of Angels

Edited by

Wayne Wilson and David K. Wiggins

Copyright © 2018 by The University of Arkansas Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-68226-052-4

eISBN: 978-1-61075-629-7

22   21   20   19   18      5   4   3   2   1

Designer: Jamie McKee

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947017

To Jan, a true LA athlete

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction. I Love LA: The Sporting Culture of Los Angeles

Mark Dyreson

1. The Life Cycles of Sports Venues in Los Angeles: Sports and Local Economic Development

Greg Andranovich and Matthew J. Burbank

2. On Los Chorizeros, the Classic, and El Tri: Sports and Community in Mexican Los Angeles

Luis Alvarez

3. Pitches Less Than Perfect: Notes on the Landscape of Soccer in Los Angeles

Jennifer Doyle

4. Figure Skating in Southern California: From Frontier to Epicenter

Susan Brownell

5. Sports Car Paradise: Racing in Los Angeles

Jeremy R. Kinney

6. Professional Football in the City of Angels: The Game Moves West

Raymond Schmidt

7. The 1932 Olympics: Spectacle and Growth in Interwar Los Angeles

Sean Dinces

8. Never Go Back: Pasadena Racial Politics and the Robinson Brothers

Gregory Kaliss

9. Reel Sports: Hollywood Stars at Play in LA

Daniel A. Nathan

10. Behind the Curtain: Leadership, Ingenuity, and Culture in the Making of Earvin Magic Johnson, Showtime, and the Laker Dynasty

Scott N. Brooks

11. The Golden Games: The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics

Matthew P. Llewellyn, Toby C. Rider, and John Gleaves

12. Shaping the Boom: Los Angeles Surfing from George Freeth to Gidget

Tolga Ozyurtcu

13. The Halcyon Days of Muscle Beach: An Origin Story

Jan Todd

14. I Was Standing There All the While: Jim Murray and the Birth of a Sports Mecca

Ted Geltner

15. Vin Scully: The Voice of Los Angeles

Elliott J. Gorn and Allison Lauterbach Dale

Notes

Contributors

Index

Series Editor’s Preface

Sport is an extraordinarily important phenomenon that pervades the lives of many people and has enormous impact on society in an assortment of different ways. At its most fundamental level, sport has the power to bring people great joy and satisfy their competitive urges while at once allowing them to form bonds and a sense of community with others from diverse backgrounds and interests and various walks of life. Sport also makes clear, especially at the highest levels of competition, the lengths that people will go to achieve victory as well as how closely connected it is to business, education, politics, economics, religion, law, family, and other societal institutions. Sport is, moreover, partly about identity development and how individuals and groups, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class, have sought to elevate their status and realize material success and social mobility.

Sport, Culture, and Society seeks to promote a greater understanding of the aforementioned issues and many others. Recognizing sport’s powerful influence and ability to change people’s lives in significant and important ways, the series focuses on topics ranging from urbanization and community development to biographies and intercollegiate athletics. It includes both monographs and anthologies that are characterized by excellent scholarship, accessible to a wide audience, and interesting and thoughtful in design and interpretations. Singular features of the series are authors and editors representing a variety of disciplinary areas and who adopt different methodological approaches. The series also includes works by individuals at various stages of their careers, both sport studies scholars of outstanding talent just beginning to make their mark on the field and more experienced scholars of sport with established reputations.

LA Sports: Play, Games, and Community in the City of Angels provides important information and insights into the development of sport in a city known for its sunshine, beaches, palm trees, crowded freeways, glamorous lifestyles, and movie stars. Edited by Wayne Wilson and myself, the collection of essays is written by well-known scholars with long publication lists and expertise on various aspects of sport in Los Angeles. Although space limitations did not allow for coverage of every topic, the essays that are included in the anthology furnish details about the pattern of sport in a sprawling and diverse urban community through cogent analysis and interpretations. To a large extent, there is something for everyone in this collection, from essays that are biographical and cover specific sports to those that analyze the Olympic Games and evolution of sports venues. The story of legendary sportscaster Vin Scully is included here, as are the careers of renowned sportswriter Jim Murray, the indomitable Jackie and Mack Robinson, and a host of other men and women who contributed to the growth and popularity of bodybuilding, surfing, ice skating, soccer, car racing, football, and basketball in one of America’s most iconic cities.

David K. Wiggins

Acknowledgments

This anthology has been a pleasure to put together. Like all anthologies, however, it has been a time-consuming task and has required the patience and expertise from a number of different people to bring it to fruition. As with all the books in the Sport, Culture, and Society series, a special thanks should be extended to Mike Bieker, David Scott Cunningham, Deena Owens, and all the other staff at the University of Arkansas Press for their unwavering support and enthusiasm for this project. Thank you to Shirley Ito and Michael Salmon, of the LA84 Foundation Sports Library, for their remarkable dedication and expertise. We also would like to thank Jon SooHoo, Mark Langill, and Oscar Delgado for providing us wonderful images of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Lakers. Finally, but certainly not least, we would like to thank and extend our sincere appreciation to all the contributors to this book. Each of the contributors, all of them very knowledgeable in their chosen fields, has been a pleasure to work with. They have added immeasurably through their individual essays to our understanding of sport in one of America’s most important and intriguing cities.

INTRODUCTION

I Love LA

The Sporting Culture of Los Angeles

MARK DYRESON

When Los Angeles sport franchises win games, the strains of I Love LA frequently fill stadiums and arenas. Since the iconoclastic songwriter Randy Newman released the tune in 1983, this unofficial anthem of Los Angeles has heralded victories by the Dodgers, Lakers, Clippers, Kings, and Galaxy.¹ Though recently replaced at Kings and Galaxy games by the more raucous tune This Is LA, written by the Los Angeles–based Celtic punk band, The Briggs, I Love LA remains the traditional anthem of many Los Angeles sports fans.² Indeed, when the Rams returned to Los Angeles from twenty-one years of exile in St. Louis in 2016, the chords of I Love LA coursed through the Los Angeles Coliseum as 90,000 people attended the first preseason game of the National Football League’s (NFL) restoration in the city.³

I Love LA has become a tribal custom at a multitude of sporting events in SoCal, the region that is coterminous with the greater Los Angeles megalopolis. In particular, it heralds wins by the Dodgers and Lakers.⁴ From the South Bay to the Valley, Newman’s distinctive voice blares over stadium loudspeakers. From the West Side to the East Side, Newman warbles. Everybody’s very happy, he cheers. Or, at least those who stayed until the end of the game are very happy, as Los Angeles fans are notorious for being fair-weather front-runners who arrive late and exit early, to get to the beach or their favorite nightspot or just to beat the massive traffic jams that plague the city.⁵ ‘Cause the sun is shining all the time, Newman trills, taking a shot at urban rivals in lesser climes, New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and others. Looks like another perfect day, he gloats. I love LA, Newman’s canned voice chirrups. We love it, respond his canned backup singers.⁶

Los Angeles is like other American cities in some ways. Sporting contests and sports teams provide possibilities for building communal bonds and defining civic identity.⁷ In Los Angeles, however, molding commonweal presents special challenges. Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city, the early twentieth-century manufacturer of witticisms, Dorothy Parker, herself a lifelong New Yorker, once famously quipped.⁸ Los Angeles indeed lacks the centuries of urban history, prominent architectural anchors, and clear geographical determinants that many other American metropolises enjoy. Inhabited by indigenous peoples for millennia, a village of Los Angeles sprang into existence in this Pacific coastal basin when in the eighteenth century the imperial overlords of New Spain decided to plant several pueblos in the wilderness of Alta California to support the military presidios they had already built in the region. These new villages, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Jose, were settled by Spanish pioneers from Sonora in the 1770s and 1780s.⁹

The official founding date of Los Angeles was 1781, the same year that the army of the brand-new United States effectively ended at Yorktown, Virginia, the British campaign to quell its rebellious North American colonies, thus guaranteeing the survival of the fledgling American republic.¹⁰ During the Spanish period the population of Los Angeles counted only a few hundred inhabitants. After Mexico revolted from New Spain, the hamlet grew to a few thousand. In the 1840s the expanding republic of the United States, now a regional power with ambitions of stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, seized Los Angeles and millions of square miles of Mexican territory and incorporated the lands into its continental designs. By the 1870s, the US town of Los Angeles had 5,000 residents. By the 1890s Los Angeles had exploded into a city of more than 50,000. Over the next century it grew at even more astounding rates, appearing on the list of the top-ten American cities for the first time in 1920 with over 500,000 residents and climbing to the second-largest city in the nation with over 3.4 million inhabitants by 1990.¹¹

In a nation with an urban history characterized by the sudden and rapid appearance of boomtowns, Los Angeles stands out as the newest and largest megalopolis—and from many vantages, the most rootless and transient. Los Angeles represents a dichotomy, a city at the same time both exceptional and ordinary, a one-of-a-kind urban structure and a commonplace urban space.¹² Los Angeles has also developed a sporting culture that is both unique and exaggerated as well as conventional and mundane, as the essays in this collection on the sporting life of the City of Angels reveal. On the one hand, Los Angeles has all the regular sporting traditions available in any US city, including a thriving intercollegiate sporting scene at the University of Southern California (USC), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as at more than fifty other institutions that dot the city, large and small, public and private, secular and sectarian.¹³ Los Angeles also sports franchises in all the big four American national pastimes, baseball, basketball, hockey, football. Other customary sports, from golf, tennis, and track and field to horse racing, sailing, and swimming thrive in greater Los Angeles.¹⁴

In terms of distinctiveness, Los Angeles serves as the cradle for action or lifestyle sports. Beach volleyball, mountain biking, triathlon, snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing, windsurfing, BMX biking—each traces a lineage to the Los Angeles basin.¹⁵ Los Angeles also has a special connection to the Olympics, having produced more Olympians, hosted more Olympic Games, and developed more training infrastructure for Olympic sports than any other urban region in the United States. The city remains convinced that it plays a special role as the Olympic backup location, ready to step in and take over should any host city falter in its duties.¹⁶ In the interim, urban boosters dream of a third shot at formal hosting duties. As of this writing, that dream seems likely to come true in 2028.¹⁷

I Love LA has a connection to the city’s Olympian aspirations, serving originally in an unofficial anthem role for the 1984 Olympics. As Los Angeles in the early 1980s geared up to host its second Olympic Games, songwriter Randy Newman penned this catchy, sardonic tune about his native city. Newman later explained that the idea sprang from a conversation he had on an airplane flight with Don Henley, the leader of the iconic 1970s and 1980s rock group, The Eagles. Henley, a native Texan who had relocated to Southern California in order to make his career at the center of the American popular music industry, mentioned to Newman that everyone in the business seemed to be writing songs about urban angst and social collapse set in Newman’s native Southern California. The Eagles, Henley related, had contributed Hotel California (1977) to the genre. As an indigenous Angeleno, Henley contended, Newman was in a perfect place to contribute to the growing number of popular songs that painted Los Angeles as a false paradise.¹⁸

Taking but twisting Henley’s cue in his own inimitable style, Newman wrote I Love LA as the opening track of his Trouble in Paradise album, a compilation that debuted in 1983 to enduring critical acclaim and won a spot on Rolling Stone magazine’s 100 Greatest Albums of the 80s list.¹⁹ Though the song certainly skewered the image of Los Angeles as an unadorned nirvana, juxtaposing images of vagrants vomiting in the streets with depictions of perfect weather and perfect landscapes, I Love LA became something that Newman never intended—an anthem for his native city. The tune has been employed repeatedly in soundtracks to invoke the ambiance of Los Angeles, beginning when it was first released and placed in a time capsule to promote John Carpenter’s Southern California–based science fiction drama Starman (1984).²⁰

Newman’s original music video, played endlessly on Music Television (MTV) and other cable-music channels in the 1980s and 1990s, featured the songwriter cruising the streets of greater Los Angeles in a red 1955 Buick Super Convertible with, as his lyrics chronicled, a big nasty redhead cuddled next to him.²¹ The music video evoked images of Southern California sprawl and car culture, motifs that Hollywood films borrowed in cruising scenes from Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) to Naked Gun (1988) to Chips ’99 (1998).²² The tongue-in-cheek quality of the song lent itself especially to the Los Angeles disaster movie genre, movies in which epic calamities destroy huge swaths of the city. I Love LA played while lava and fire covered the city in Volcano (1997), while the British comic Rowland Atkinson bumbled through several cataclysms in Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie (1997), and while earthquakes, floods, crime sprees, political catastrophes, and decadence turn the city into an apocalyptic island prison in the campy science fiction thriller Escape from LA (1996).²³

Since Newman penned I Love LA in 1983, other, darker songs about Los Angeles have hit the airwaves and become symbolic canticles of the Los Angeles experience. Some of these songs grew from the emerging Southern California hip-hop culture and highlighted the deep racial and social divisions that plague the city, including NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (1988), Dr. Dre’s Let Me Ride (1992), and Tupac Shakur’s To Live and Die in LA (1996). Punk and metal bands from the same era produced their own dark (but white, in contrast to hip-hop) and dystopian homages of the city’s underbelly, including Guns N’ Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle (1987) and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Under the Bridge (1991). None of those memorable songs, however, became embedded in Southern California’s sports culture in the way that I Love LA has burrowed into the production of Los Angeles sporting events. I Love LA has been even more popular at Los Angeles sporting events than it has been in Hollywood schlock. The song blares when the Dodgers triumph in a baseball game at Chavez Ravine and when the Lakers or Clippers won a basketball game at the old Great Western Forum—and now when they win in the new Staples Center. In the short-lived early twenty-first-century challenger to the NFL’s dominion, the XFL, the Los Angeles Xtreme cranked up I Love LA every time they scored a touchdown.²⁴

While I Love LA has become a popular anthem for the city, the song remains controversial in Southern California. While some see it as a catchy pop tune that showcases the glamour, pleasures, and sparkle of Los Angeles, others understand it as an acidic commentary on a community that is vapid, shallow, and illusory. Like other trinkets that adorn Los Angeles, including the nickname tinseltown, Newman’s lyrics cut both ways, celebrating and condemning his hometown in the same breath. Everybody’s very happy, Newman cackles about his fellow Angelenos. Looks like another perfect day, he croons. But are they happy, amid the palm trees and beaches, and is endless sunshine a recipe for perfect days? Those questions rest at the heart of the Los Angeles conundrum. Is the city an American paradise, or does the glitter mask harsh, dream-killing currents that lure the foolish to certain disappointment?

In the world of sports, Los Angeles has always been a bit of both. The City of Angels is the only American metropolis to host two Olympic Games, and frankly the only Olympic site that the American public remembers and celebrates. Olympic venues, such as the Los Angeles Coliseum, remain tourist attractions because of their Olympic heritage. Few recall that only two decades ago Atlanta hosted an Olympics. Tourists rarely pilgrimage to Atlanta to relive Olympic memories. Even more forgotten is St. Louis, the city that hosted the first Olympics on American soil in 1904, and in which visitors would have to search diligently for any remnants of past Olympian glories. Everyone remembers, however, that Los Angeles is an Olympic city.²⁵

Not only did Los Angeles host two Olympics but both Games transformed the world’s most popular sporting contests in enduring ways. The 1932 Olympics cemented the nascent link of sport, politics, and mass entertainment as Hollywood’s dream factories turned the Games into a spectacle of beautiful and youthful athletic bodies battling for national glory in thrilling competitions. After 1932, no questions remained about whether or not the Olympics was a significant global event.²⁶ The 1984 Olympics transformed the spectacle again. In an era in which the Olympic movement seemed bound for extinction as taxpayer-funded boondoggles and political controversies threatened to drive even the most confident or delusional cities out of the hosting business, Los Angeles stepped in when not a single other municipality in the world was willing to provide a home for the Games. The 1984 Olympics created a blueprint for successfully funding and promoting the Olympics that restored the luster of the Olympic brand. Olympic host cities have been duplicating the Los Angeles model ever since.²⁷

In many ways Los Angeles became a paradise for the Olympics, and the Olympics showcased the fleeting dreamland that Los Angeles could become during global mega-events, as the essays in this volume by Sean Dinces on the 1932 Games and Matthew Llewellyn, John Gleaves, and Toby Rider on the 1984 Games illuminate.²⁸ Those two Olympics remain in civic memories moments in which the diverse neighborhoods that make up the city became, if only momentarily, a united community rather than a mostly geographic collection of sprawling parts. The two Olympic spectacles also showcase the city’s enduring sporting architecture that contributed a great deal to the unique financial success of both of those events.²⁹ Los Angeles has done a far better job, as the essay in this collection by Greg Andranovich and Matthew J. Burbank demonstrates, of building and maintaining and refashioning and repurposing stadiums and arenas that by modern standards have exceptional life cycles.³⁰ No other host of multiple Olympics (London—1908, 1948, 2012; Paris—1900, 1924; Tokyo—1964, 2020) has ever used the same main venue, as Los Angeles has with the Coliseum in 1932 and 1984—and plans to do once again should it win the 2024 Games.³¹ In many other host cities even recent Olympic venues have become empty white elephants. Los Angeles, however, seems to be the repurposing king of athletic facilities, as the histories of the Coliseum and its sister site, the Rose Bowl, for everything from football, soccer, and Olympic events to rock concerts, religious revivals, and action sports contests reveals.³²

The architecture of sports has left its marks on Los Angeles, and not only through monumental buildings that hosted athletic events. The iconic palm trees that line Wilshire Boulevard and other major streets were planted to prettify Los Angeles for the 1932 Olympics and revitalized again for the 1984 Games.³³ The Olympic structures occupy a special place in the city’s civic culture. The 1992 riots following the Rodney King trial verdict witnessed the destruction of a great deal of property in parts of the city, yet spared not only the area around the Coliseum but the LA84 Foundation headquarters built to memorialize the heritage of the Olympics in the south-central neighborhoods that stood at the epicenter of the racial unrest.³⁴

In American culture, sport has long been used as an emblem to promote visions of racial and ethnic harmony and integration. Sport supposedly highlighted the virtues of meritocracy, a unique space in American society where talent and not heritage or background triumphed. Of course, not only in Los Angeles but everywhere else in the nation, sport also revealed racial and ethnic discrimination and division. Sometimes urban boosters in Los Angeles used sporting events or iconic athletes to promote images that Los Angeles was a paradise of racial harmony. Certainly the organizers of both Olympic pageants sought to portray the city as a racially progressive oasis where whites, blacks, Latinas/Latinos, and Asians lived amicably. Commentators frequently offered the city’s embrace of the Mexican-born Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela in the 1980s, the much ballyhooed Fernandomania, as a counterpoint to the long history of discrimination and hostility toward the large Latina/Latino community in the city.³⁵ In his essay for this volume, Luis Alvarez dissects the roles sport played in the community-building endeavors of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the frequently hostile environs of the city, revealing moments of connection that appeared amid enduring patterns of segregation.³⁶

This volume also offers an examination of the African American experience in Los Angeles from the vantage of one of the most well-known figures in the struggle for civil rights on playing fields and in the broader realms of American life, as well as from a key figure who lived largely in the shadow of the more famous athlete. Jack Jackie Roosevelt Robinson stands as one of the central figures in the dismantling of legalized segregation in the twentieth-century United States. Many historians regard his pioneering challenge of the color line in the undisputed national pastime of his era, baseball, a crucial first assault on segregation that paved the way over the ensuing decades to integrate almost every realm in the American public square. As the well-known folktale reveals, the story has an important Los Angeles connection. An infant Robinson escaped the rigid apartheid of the Deep South—Cairo, Georgia—and grew up in the allegedly vastly more racially progressive environs of greater Los Angeles. In the suburban neighborhoods of Pasadena, he attended schools and played on teams with whites, matriculating to more integrated success first at Pasadena City College and then UCLA. In Southern California he seemed to have escaped the scourges of racism, rising to stardom not only in baseball but in football, track and field, and a host of other endeavors. Indeed, some chroniclers of Robinson’s story imply that only after he signed his first major league contract and he and his wife took their first trip from Los Angeles to the spring training grounds of the then Brooklyn Dodgers to Daytona Beach, Florida, a town in the deepest recesses of the Jim Crow South, did Robinson for the first time experience the unvarnished venom of racial hostility.³⁷

However, as Gregory Kaliss reminds the readers of this collection in his contribution, in spite of his multitude of opportunities to compete on the playing fields of Los Angeles, Robinson routinely felt the sting of racism in the supposedly more enlightened climate of Southern California, as did his older brother, Matthew Mack Robinson. Kaliss rescues from obscurity the important narrative of the lesser-known Robinson brother, a world-class athlete himself who earned a 200-meter silver medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics behind Jesse Owens, and pairs Mack Robinson’s narrative of perseverance in the face of decades of persistent racism in Southern California with the more celebrated tale of Jackie’s triumphal rending of the color line in baseball that helped to spark the modern civil rights movement.³⁸ Los Angeles emerges in Kaliss’s and Alvarez’s accounts as less than the racial paradise that it often posed as, and more the conflicted and divided city that Newman captured in I Love LA.

In spite of those ethnic and racial divisions and the myriad other social conflicts that rent Los Angeles and, indeed, sometimes because of them, the city has produced two iconic chroniclers of the Southern California sports scene who have sometimes united the local masses across ethnic, class, and even generational gaps and at other times illuminated the fractures that divided the metropolis. Jim Murray, the legendary columnist and correspondent for Los Angeles dailies and national magazines, arrived in the city from the East Coast in the midst of the boom times of the Second World War and spent the next five decades exploring the transformation of the city into a sports mecca, as Ted Geltner in his essay for the collection aptly labels both the place and the era.³⁹ Murray, like Randy Newman, always sensed trouble lurking in paradise. He challenged local and national racial and sporting sensibilities, championed civil rights causes and decried pugilism as an unconscionable vice that brutalized the participants in the ring to sate the bloodlust of the masses.⁴⁰ Like Murray, Vin Scully, the legendary radio and television voice for the Dodgers, migrated from the East Coast to Los Angeles. Indeed, Scully began his career with the Dodgers in 1950, when they still resided in Brooklyn. He migrated with the team to their new home in 1958, and altogether in Brooklyn and then Los Angles spent sixty-seven years broadcasting Dodger baseball. Unlike Murray, Scully tended to soothe social fissures rather than shining a light into the dark underbelly of the Southern California wonderland. Still, he provided a remarkable symbol of continuity to a notoriously transitory and ephemeral city, linking together generations of Angelenos, newcomers and old-timers alike, as Elliott Gorn and Allison Lauterbach Dale reveal in their treatise on Scully in this volume.⁴¹

Other elements of the sport history of Los Angeles reveal more trouble in paradise and illuminate the fragility of communal bonds in the city. While Los Angeles is the only American city to host two Olympics, it is also the only American city to lose two of its franchises in what for the past half century has been the dominant national pastime in the United States, professional football. In 1995, the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Raiders both fled the city, in large part due to their failure to get public funding for refurbishing their homes in the old Olympic venue, the Los Angeles Coliseum, or securing guarantees for public financing on new stadium sites. The Rams had been in Los Angeles since 1946 when city boosters purloined the team from its original home in Cleveland, while the Raiders had relocated from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982. In the hardball world of professional sports economics, Los Angeles has hardly been a paradise for local fans or entrepreneurs seeking riches in the booming goldfields of professional football. Professional football teams, as Raymond Schmidt divulges in his contribution to this collection, have come and gone more frequently in Los Angeles than most fans remember.⁴²

When it comes to fútbol, the version of football Americans call soccer and the rest of the world adores, Los Angeles has been a much more beneficent climate. While other cities, St. Louis and Philadelphia in particular, claim a longer soccer lineage, Los Angeles has been since the mid-twentieth century the most fertile American soil for the growing importance of fútbol in US culture. In 1994, the Rose Bowl staged the final in which Brazil beat Italy on penalty kicks in the only World Cup held in the United States. In 1999, the Rose Bowl housed another iconic soccer moment that ended with Brandi Chastain stripping off her jersey to warm the hearts of sports bra manufacturers everywhere following her winning goal in the penalty kick shoot-out in front of the largest crowd in American history to witness a women’s sporting event as the United States beat China in the women’s World Cup final.⁴³

Fútbol has flourished in Los Angeles in part because Latin American immigration has made the city a haven for Latinos and Latinas. Since the mid-twentieth century Latinas/Latinos have become the largest ethnic group in greater Los Angeles. Migrants from Mexico, Central America, and South America have brought their Latin American soccer cultures with them, fusing their passion for fútbol with a strong native interest in the game to make the city into a soccer hotbed. When the US national team meets El Tri, the Mexican national side, in friendlies or in the more hostile conditions of World Cup qualifiers, stadiums in Los Angeles fill to overflowing and Mexican partisans sometimes outnumber US partisans. So deep is the Mexican fan base in Los Angeles that for a decade from 2005 to 2014, Chivas, a powerful Mexican soccer club from Guadalajara, opened a Los Angeles branch in the US-based MSL.⁴⁴

Soccer in Los Angeles, however, has evolved from more than just Latin American roots. White fans flock to games to see global stars such as David Beckham, the premier English player of the early twenty-first century who spent his twilight years playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy and cultivating his celebrity as well as facilitating his wife’s brand, the British pop-star Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice of the Spice Girls), in the entertainment capital of the world. European clubs regularly tour and train in Los Angeles. The city has a huge contingent of white players and a long history of cultivating the sport among the Anglo middle classes. The American Youth Soccer Organization, a leader in the mid-twentieth-century mainstreaming of the game, was founded in 1964 in Los Angeles.⁴⁵ The city’s ethnic, class, and social frictions frequently emerge in the collisions between soccer and fútbol, as Jennifer Doyle demonstrates in her keenly observed reminiscences of pick-up and recreation-league games for this collection.⁴⁶

Newman’s I Love LA video did not capture any images of local soccer but it did pay homage to the ubiquity of cars and beaches in the sporting life of Los Angeles. Newman’s song and video highlight the significance of the automobile in the history and culture of Los Angeles. Rollin’ down the Imperial Highway, Newman croons, With a big nasty redhead at my side. He feels the Santa Ana winds blowin’ hot from the north, and declares, we was born to ride. Cruising in his car becomes the ultimate symbol of freedom in Newman’s LA anthem. In his contribution of this volume, Jeremy Kinney recovers the surprisingly lost history of auto racing in the region. Though Indianapolis or Daytona Beach come more quickly to mind when fans ponder the power of race cars in American life, no city has had a more profound impact on the history of the automobile than Los Angeles.⁴⁷ Angelenos were born to ride—and to race, as Kinney reveals in his essay for this anthology.⁴⁸

Newman’s evocation of the unique climate and geography of Los Angeles inspire other sporting motifs in his video montage of the song. New York City and Chicago are routinely frosty and frigid, not exactly places for year-round cruising in a convertible or regular trips to the beach. The paradisical landscapes of the Pacific strand have long been iconographic sites for selling the Los Angeles dream to the rest of the world, as well as important sporting habitats that give Los Angeles its own unique niche in the American landscape. The seashores of greater Southern California have given the world beach volleyball and triathlon. Those famous coastlines also serve as the epicenter of the American surfing scene—a recreation that Los Angeles cannot claim to have invented but which the region can argue that it transformed into a global industry that has had a tremendous influence on everything from fashion to linguistics. Tolga Ozyurtcu’s essay for this collection provides insights into the history of surfing in Los Angeles, a sporting culture that has perhaps most deeply indulged in the mythology of the city as a paradise.⁴⁹

Newman’s I Love LA video bursts with depictions of beautiful young surfers playing on the beaches, and also with the corps of bodybuilders who have made the Pacific shores into their alfresco theaters. American weightlifting and muscle shaping might have first emerged in less edenic climes, such as York, Pennsylvania,⁵⁰ but as Jan Todd’s meditation for this volume chronicles, multitudes of Americans for whom the cultivation of the body was the highest priority soon deserted harsher climates for the sun-kissed sands of Muscle Beach. At the Santa Monica location that served as the original Muscle Beach and at a myriad of locations around greater Los Angeles, including indoor palaces such as Gold’s Gym, they sculpted their bodies and made the city into the capital of producing beautiful exteriors.⁵¹

Of course, Los Angeles is home to huge enterprises that require beautiful human exteriors—the motion picture and television industries. Weightlifters and bodybuilders who trained in the city not only dominated international competition circuits but crossed over into the entertainment markets. The original Muscle Beach and its countless offspring in Los Angeles trained and tuned bodies to appear in front of the cameras. A few devotees even made the leap from bodybuilding to Hollywood stardom, most famously Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria but had his major breakthroughs when he relocated to Los Angeles.⁵²

While beaches and buff bodies immediately summon visions of Los Angeles, figure skating rarely conjures up images of Southern California. Indeed, skating would seem better suited to the cities Randy Newman disparages in I Love LA, cold and damp New York or the Chicago he suggests be left to the Eskimos. Surprisingly, in spite of its balmy climate, Los Angeles has become a major center for ice skating, as Susan Brownell documents in her essay in this volume.⁵³ As she notes, the entertainment industry has played a major role drawing ice skaters to Los Angeles, serving as a staging ground for at least a century of ice shows and as early as the 1930s drawing skating ingénues such as Sonja Henie with the prospect of Hollywood stardom. Ice skaters have, like Henie, relocated to Los Angeles in the quest to garner world-class coaches and training opportunities as well as to chase stardom.⁵⁴ The city has also produced homegrown champions including Olympic silver medalists Michelle Kwan and Linda Fratianne.⁵⁵

The unexpected history of ice skating in Los Angeles reveals a crucial reality about the city’s sporting scene. More than any other metropolis in the United States, sport, celebrity, and the entertainment industries comingle and combine in Los Angeles. Figure skaters leap from Olympic ranks onto silver screens and bodybuilders with thick European accents can become Hollywood action heroes. One of the greatest American football players of all-time, Jim Brown, abandoned his athletic career while still in his prime for a series of mediocre film roles.⁵⁶ A mediocre football player named Marion Morrison, who was born in Iowa and grew up in Southern California, lost his spot on the mighty USC Trojans roster after he broke his collarbone at a Los Angeles beach in a body-surfing accident, then quickly abandoned football, changed his name to John Wayne, and became one of the biggest superstars in the history of American cinema.⁵⁷

Celluloid storytelling and sporting lore mix regularly in Los Angeles. In his contribution to this anthology Scott Brooks chronicles the rise and cultural cachet of the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers that developed in the late 1970s and dominated the National Basketball Association with their star-studded teams and their collection of starlets and stars who had to sit courtside at their games. From A list movie stars such as Jack Nicholson to B list staples such as Arsenio Hall, the Hollywood glitterati turned out to watch players who themselves were stars of such a magnitude that the public know them by a single moniker, from the era of Magic and Kareem to the epoch of Shaq and Kobe.⁵⁸

Hollywood’s moviemakers have long been fascinated with sport. The sports film genre dates all the way back to the late nineteenth century when British and American filmmakers first turned to the world of sport for subject matter and directed their cameras to record prizefights and cricket matches, baseball games and football contests.⁵⁹ In the early twentieth century as American filmmakers began to congregate in the Los Angeles area, Hollywood began to make sport films. Among the first was The Champion, a pugilistic comedy starring Charlie Chaplin that hit American theaters in 1915, shortly after the studio that produced the film moved from Chicago to Southern California.⁶⁰ Since then, as Dan Nathan chronicles in his essay on Hollywood and sport, Los Angeles studios have made hundreds of sport movies.⁶¹ Some of these movies have been great, like Eight Men Out (1988). Others have been good, like Tin Cup (1996). Some have been bad, like The Mighty Ducks (not only the 1992 original but also all of the sequels). Some have been just plain ugly, like Kingpin (1996).⁶² Some have even fantastically transformed the Rams—in their Los Angeles not their St. Louis incarnation—into Super Bowl champions, like Heaven Can Wait (1978), a cinematic trick that has yet to be performed in mere real life.⁶³

I love Los Angeles, the comedian Billy Connolly once remarked. It reinvents itself every two days.⁶⁴ Reinvention might in fact be what Los Angeles is best at and what sport most contributes to the cultural fabric of the city. The Rams appear and disappear—and then reappear again. The Olympics come and create an ephemeral sense of community and then depart, a magical zephyr that lasts for only a fortnight every half century. Skaters thrive in a city where the temperature rarely falls below the mark necessary to turn liquid water into solid ice. Most celebrities come and go, but a few seem to endure forever, like Vin Scully. Hollywood and Burbank’s dream factories produce multitudes of trends and fads and occasional cultural touchstones. I love LA, Randy Newman warbles. We love LA, his fellow Angelenos warble back—at least in the music videos that promoted the song.⁶⁵

The unofficial anthem of the city and its sporting culture represent this defining penchant for reinvention. Newman initially intended it to skewer the vacuous smugness that cloaked his city like a pesky smog. While some musicologists have incorrectly inferred that Los Angeles organizers asked Newman to write a theme song for the 1984 Olympics, his quirky canticle did serve as the unofficial soundtrack for the Olympian spectacle when a blossoming American corporation with global ambitions used the tune in its scheme for pirating Olympic glory away from the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) official corporate sponsors.⁶⁶ Nike, the global shoe giant, repurposed I Love LA as the centerpiece for its 1984 Olympic marketing campaign. Nike had lost the competition to become the official cobbler of LA84—the shorthand nickname of the second Los Angeles Games, when it balked at the $4 million price that rival Converse paid to the IOC for that privilege. A cabal of clever Nike marketers then huddled with the advertising geniuses at Chiat/Day, the Los Angeles firm that a few months before the 1984 Olympics made Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial for the Super Bowl, an advertisement that the industry’s experts unanimously concur revolutionized the medium. For roughly $100,000 Chiat/Day’s virtuosos produced what advertising experts consider the first ambush commercial in history, an innovation still celebrated in case studies at American business schools. Nike hijacked the Olympics away from official sponsor Converse and put LA84 into the service of its own Swoosh-marked products.⁶⁷

The Nike spot, played incessantly throughout the Olympics, begins with Randy Newman at the wheel of his big red Buick Super Convertible, the nasty redhead back at his side, tooling through the same classic Southern California scenes his song and video had originally evoked. Surfers stroll into epic waves; palm-fringed boulevards roll by; neon signs flash from the same familiar buildings that inhabit thousands of movies and television shows; roller skaters preen along the trails at Venice beach; high-end sports cars flash by. The ad celebrates the city’s racial and ethnic diversity without a hint of the divisions beneath the veneer of paradise. Low riders prance; African Americans dance; white biker gangs pose; and the LAPD pulls over not some scary gangbanger but Gary Shandling, a white, Jewish comedian who made a career lampooning mainstream, middle-class, middle-aged angst.⁶⁸

Sporting celebrities appear prominently in Nike’s I Love LA spot. A Dodger resplendent in blue and white, smiles before adoring crowds; a clutch of Raiders (then in Los Angeles) posture in the back of a convertible; a cabal of body sculptors wave to the cameras at one of Muscle Beach’s many progeny; Moses Malone plays basketball with joyous children at an outdoor playground; beautiful California girls jog along pristine beaches. To aid in the campaign Nike erected massive billboards that rose for many stories on the sides of Los Angeles buildings that featured Nike’s talented pool of sponsored athletes. Newman and his red-headed friend drive by a giant billboard of Bo Jackson, the Raiders football star as well as a major league baseball phenom whom Nike featured in multiple campaigns during the 1980s. Nike had also wisely signed several American Olympic favorites. Carl Lewis, who would match Jesse Owens legendary feats from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and win four gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, 4x100 meters relay, and