When I started following sports as a kid, I was fascinated by the Dodgers. I hated them, but with that cool stadium, the uniforms, and that LA vibe, I mean, wow. To me they were LA so when I heard some of the older folks starting to reminiscence about the “Brooklyn Dodgers” and that d*** Walter O’Malley, I found their bitterness hard to comprehend. I was seven, the Dodgers were always LA, and these old guys needed to stop living in the past. I didn’t ask them if they tied onions to their belts when they went to the games in Brooklyn, which I heard was the style at the time.
I think I understand them better now.
They have broken up the Pac-12, my conference since I was a kid, for spare parts to feed TV schedules. I’m reminded of Karl Marx and his quip about capitalism changing our social relations.
Living in Arizona, the Pac-12 was the dream. Day-trips out to LA to catch whoever ASU was playing. Five hour drive, hit the In-N-Out Burger in Palm Desert, both driving out and coming back. Living in Arizona you had a love-hate relationship with LA and with California in general, call it an inferiority complex. However, sitting in those stadiums! There was the Rose Bowl when the sun started to set behind the San Gabriel Mountains. Then there was the LA Coliseum. Al Davis was right when he called it a dump, but to go to a game in that place was as close as a western boy was getting to Yankee Stadium
Then there were the weekend trips to places like Eugene and Corvallis. Strange lands of green landscapes, humidity, and this water falling from the sky that they called rain.
That was the Pac-12, our conference, for us westerners. We were in a time zone that played games when the rest of the country went to bed. Games played in places that were either paradise or big sky. Now we are going to places where people want to escape from: Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Iowa.
A little while ago, a friend of mine reminded me before there was a Pac–12 there used to be a Pac 10. In fact he remembered there used to be a Pac-8 before 1978 when they let in the hicks from Arizona, and wow did the rest of the conference kick up a storm. What I saw as permanence was in reality a snapshot in the midst of constant change.
As my friend said, you had 45 years in the Pac, that should be enough. Things change, life moves on.
This Fall, there’s going to be a kid who starts watching college football for the first time and he will think that it’s normal for USC-Rutgers or ASU-Cincinnati to be a conference game. That’s okay, I can live with that. That belongs to him in the same way that for me the Dodgers belong in LA.
However, I’m never going to a conference game in Cincinnati.
Being from Iowa I feel the same about the old midwestern conferences, the Big 10 and Big 8, especially their relationship to the old bowl game formats.
I feel your pain, my beloved SEC is a mishmash of teams from far away places.
That said, why is it necessary to take a cheap shot?
“places where people want to escape from: Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Iowa”
My guess is there are plenty of fine people in those places who love where they live.
“…permanence was in reality a snapshot in the midst of constant change.” Yup.
Colonial Athletic Association has changed many times since I went to William and Mary 50 years ago.
I wrote about the larger issue of permanence versus ephemerality just this week, for post 10,000: https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2024/09/post-10000-ephemerality-and-permanence.html
Big 8 memory – Thanksgiving dinners, after which there would be the football game where the Sooners would be running up and down the field against the outmatched and outmanned Huskers. The pro league eventually saw the money potential for games on that day, and the TV network kicked the college game to the curb.
Carl: “That said, why is it necessary to take a cheap shot?”
Your point is well-taken, didn’t mean it as a slight, but could have worded it better
Cheap shot? I guess. Out West you meet a lot of people from those places. You see their license plates in the parking lot, get a chance to talk to them, and they mostly say the same thing that they are glad to be here. Poke them a little more and they will say they are glad to be where they are from, but they would rather be here. When things get settled down in, they’ll have extended family come out in winter time, maybe take in some Spring Training games with the home town team, and take the kids back for Thanksgiving. However they will invariably say they are here now, they are immigrants, and they are assimilating.
It’s a bit different in NY or DC. I see a lot of people on the weekend wearing Midwest stuff or various Midwest slogans or college decals on their car. When I get a chance to talk to them, they will tell me all about the Middle America, Big 10 (or whatever they call that 18-team conference now), and all that. When I ask them if they will ever move back, they give me a strange look and tell me they dread even visiting there. They want to claim that pride of place you allude and wield it as an artifact, but they really hate it. They are hypocrites, even to themselves.
Think of how we speak in terms of language. We go “out West” but then there’s “back East.” The West, to this day, is still a place where one goes to get a fresh start. In many ways Florida and parts of the South are the same way, but without the historical mystique of loading up wagons and hitting the dusty trail.
Then there are all the coastal people, both side of the country, who have come out and colonized the West as if it was some imperial province. Saw it in the early 90s in places like Prescott, especially from California.
There is a line somewhere in Indiana, east of that line you go to Florida, west of it you move well.. out west for your fresh start,, I know places on both sides of that line as a kid and I go back and visit them, especially upstate NY and I’m saddened., but call it the pendulum of History or Hegel’s dialectical but there’s another, better chapter waiting to be written about those places people move from…. and it won’t just be for the cheap housing If you don’t think so, look at all those blacks who have reversed the Great Migration and come back South.
Norman, Oklahoma here. “Sooners” ring a bell? I don’t want to leave, and I sure don’t dream about visiting the Left Coast! Boomer Sooner!
I was newly transplanted to Silicon Valley in the 1970s, and every summer I’d see a bunch of Illinois license plates at the semiconductor plants. I kept hearing pleas that the
FrignteningFighting Illini might actually be good enough to beat Michigan and Ohio for a trip to the Rose Bowl, but everybody knew it was futile.No idea what schools make the Big-whatever nowadays. Drifted away from college/pro ball years ago and lost track.
To the extent that “College” football still had some connection to college or education, however slight, NIL has ended it. It’s now just another pro league. If you could find an “educator” with whatever combination of insanity, courage and integrity is now required to give a failing grade, can you imagine the uproar when such an injustice interrupted the pay check of a “student athlete”? I’m sure that there are lawyers gearing up to bring the first suit as we speak.
I suppose the bright spot is that 99.9% of the recipients of degrees in “sports marketing” or whatever that don’t make the pro’s and are otherwise unemployable at any level above assistant hod carrier will not be saddled with debt for their useless degrees. The ones paying for that will be the tax payers. The athletic departments are surely not going to waste any of that NIL money on anything as foolish as tuition or room and board.
The geographical reach of conferences related to the ease of travel.
I, too, think breaking up regional conferences to create multiple national conferences was a mistake.
”Now we are going to places where people want to escape from: Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Iowa.”
Wow!! What an asshole!
Re: The conference ties to bowl games. The Rose Bowl was the Holy Grail in the Pac-10. The success of your season, the safety of a coach’s job, all of that was related since the last time you went to Pasadena. There was something magical about it as well, get to travel to a warm-weather exotic city like LA, Miami, New Orleans.
Taking a step back and comparing the college game today as opposed to say 40 years ago, it seems the main trend line is to “rationalize” the game, iron out the quirks. National champions were picked solely by news service rankings. Postseason games were run by the bowl system with New Year’s Day bowl match-ups anchored by assigned conference champions. Consequently decisive championship games #1 vs. #2 were quite rare and usually only occasioned by non-aligned teams achieving top status (Notre Dame or various east coast teams such Penn St. or Miami.) Conferences were organized only on a geographic basis and much of the Northeast as well as Florida St. and Miami were non-aligned.
Because of the focus on record and rankings and not championship match-ups we ended up with controversy and strange results such BYU being the national champion in 1984 as well as co-champs in 1991 and 1992
Of course money was always a factor, especially on the level of boosters though under the table.
What started to iron out the quirks was TV money which started a process of rationalization. The 1984 Supreme Court Case NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma allowed schools and conferences to negotiate their own TV contracts. Then you had the process of championship rationalization with various initiatives such as the Bowl Coalition through the Bowl Championship[ Series to the rapidly expanding College Football Playoff. Now that they have been subordinated to the playoffs, what’s going to be the status if the big bowl games in 20 years? Are they going to live off reputation? See the fore-mentioned process of rationalization.
Taking a step back, you start to see a business model built to emulate NCAA basketball.
Personally I liked the quirks. As I explained to my kids about the controversy of choosing national champs by ranking that life wasn’t always fair. When Florida State was excluded from the playoffs last year despite being undefeated, that’s life
When the idea of using the post-season bowls to host a national champion playoff started getting traction, one major college coach said he wanted it to stay the way it was – a reward to the players for having a good season
I have spent quite a bit of time traveling across the US and one thing we don’t spend a lot of time talking about is space, people’s attachment to it, and how our view of it change over time. I find that strange given a major divide in our country, nationalism and the connections that people who occupy a common area should/do share, is implicitly based on space
I originally wrote the post as exploring one’s relationship with sports through time, but it’s also a story about space and one’s relationship with it. The Dodgers were not the only team who pulled up stakes and moved west, but it was they who left the greatest emotional hole.
That process of leaving, in their case escaping, was inevitable as the US population grew and moved west. In a sense the Dodgers left (or abandoned) tradition and their fan base/family, and left. That not only creates a hole in the place they left or fills the one in which they arrived at, but the mere act of moving West also creates a new identity for the Dodgers themselves. In many ways the story of the Dodgers, their leaving Brooklyn and moving to LA mirrors a larger story in our national history.
I’m biased here because of my own family’s history of pulling up stakes and moving west. However for 175 years, since the California Gold Rush, the West has been defined by the sense of “becoming”, of building a better life. Whether it was the 49ers or Brigham Young and the Mormons or somebody in the 1950s chasing the sun. Even though the American frontier was officially declared closed in 1890, that sense of “becoming” still dominates the psyche of the West.
However that sense is changing. You can attribute it to mismanagement as in California, but part of its also age and maturation. California is no longer defined by Americans moving there so much as those who (legally) are born there, that creates a definite mentality one more of “being” than “becoming”. The western frontier is now, ironically, to the East in the Intermountain West.
Arizona is in the process of its third stage of settlement. The first was up until WW II and was dominated by the Mormon settlers and various pioneers. The second was the post WW II Sun Belt boom fueled by Midwesterners. The third is from California and the East and, perhaps most importantly, the native-born. You can map a lot of the political divide in state politics across those who draw their roots from those stages. What is clear is that Arizona, much like California, Oregon, and Washington before it, is slowly losing that sense of possibility, of becoming, and instead is now maturing to just “being.” That’s going to be the history of the Mountain West for the next 30 to 40 years.
It is that difference between becoming and being, reflected in the Western Migration, which provides a sharp line in one’s relationship to a particular place. In addition to visiting, I have lived in a number of places east of the Mountain Time Zone. What has always struck me was the sense of community and history, three generations of family going to sporting even, able to leave your front door unlocked, the bog town celebration for Independence Day.
Yet I know people in Arizona and other parts of the West who are from those same places, but while still having some emotional attachment to their home towns also feel a sense of alienation because they have picked up and left. It is wrenching decision and they are quite clear that they chose to leave and they won’t be going back.
There is no right or wrong. I loved spending my time in the East and Midwest and I learned to appreciate the great regional differences we still have. However… it’s not home. People in those places I mentioned… Oklahoma, Cincinnati… would say the same thing if they came out to Arizona or New Mexico for a spell.
Through the years when I pick up people from the airport there would be either be a sense of shock or wonder based on what they saw, same from people who moved here. They complained there that was no sense of community, that we were simply transplants occupying the same space and they were right.
No right or wrong, just is. You just pick where you want to be. There’s beauty and honor in all places.
Being a sports fan is nothing but emotion. I remember somebody from back then, maybe it was Bill Simmons, who dismissed it as “rooting for laundry.” However that’s not true, it’s about rooting for community, identity, a sense of place and time. This might be a false consciousness given that professional, and now college, sports is defined by money.
So what is the sense of place for a western sports fan? I know plenty of people who still root for the Packers or the Bears, fandom is a lot like a virus that just stays in your bloodstream. They even after a few beers will be nostalgic about where they came from, but inevitably the question will come “will you go back?” and they saw no. They made their choice.
Perhaps the shift in California’s mentality was symbolized more than the 1992 LA riots, than in the decision of the LA Rams to move to St. Louis. For the first time the westward migration reversed course. Now with the end of the Pac-12, those connections with the East have strengthened while those with the rest of the West have weakened. California no longer beckons to those who wish to escape, it’s now coming home
As far as Arizona? We will be jettisoning the Pacific and turning inward to perhaps our true home in the Intermountain West. The games with BYU, Utah, Colorado are those with which we share somewhat of an identity through history and place. The rest of the Big-12? No. Those are places we chose to leave behind. If you are from the those places, you really don’t want us either. We don’t fit. No right or wrong, each to his own.
The ironic thing is that after there was the Pac-10, there was the Pac-12. We shifted our center of gravity eastward by stealing Colorado and Utah in 2011 from other conferences. I know I wasn’t the only one not in favor of that. To be even more ironic, we looked to grab the two Oklahoma schools, Texas, and Texas Tech. At the time that was seen as an unbelievable move, that would radically change our identity, and that was stillborn.
The funny thing was that we still will play Oklahoma St. and Texas Tech as conference games, just in someone’s else conference. Life comes at you fast.
I coached for Johnny Majors in 1989 when we went to the Rose Bowl to play UCLA around this time of year. We won 24-6. I was surprised at what a dump the place was. Also surprised that we could see the trees above the top of the stadium. At Neyland, also a stadium that also holds 100,000, there’s only sky to be seen from the sideline.
Big time athletics is definitely a business. Money is why the Ivy League schools took control away from students playing their games in the first place (see Telander book). The important thing to remember is that the coaches are the only people on campus with any accountability. And no matter how much news there may be about cheating, etc., the athletic department is far more honest than the rest of the university.
Finally, the worst possible use of all the cash generated by college sports would be to waste it on the black hole of academics. Colleges don’t suffer from any lack of funding. They are the most corrupt, dishonest, inefficient and ineffective institutions in America.
All you need to know about our colleges is that the quality of a professor’s teaching has zero to do with his career advancement. As an alum of a top ten college and top 12 law school, this is what I think needs to be our focus.
I hated the Dodgers when they first came to LA but for a different reason. I was an undergraduate student at USC, which is adjacent to the Colosseum where the Dodgers played their first few seasons. Dodger fans took all our parking places on campus, which were free at the time. Eventually, we got parking structures but had to pay for them. Years later, when my son and daughter were USC students, they heard a lecture about auto theft. The policeman giving the lecture told them that the highest rate of auto theft in the world was in California. The highest rate in California was in LA and the highest rate in LA was in those parking structures on campus.
Since the changes in college football, “the transfer portal, etc.” I have lost interest in USC football. This, after 50 years of season tickets.
By the way, my grand daughter is a senior at U of Alabama majoring in Sports Marketing. Her boyfriend is a kicker on the football team but is also on an academic scholarship majoring in finance. My wife’s grandson’s wife is a sports marketing person doing very well working for Michael Jordan’s NASCAR team. We are trying to get the two of them together, as the grandson and his wife are now in North Carolina. My grand daughter is pretty and vivacious and will probably be good at it.
I have lived in TX for decades, but have always favored OU versus UT, because my mother was an Okie. I don’t pay much attention to college football. (UT football coach Darrel Royal, who got the stadium named after him, was an Okie, BTW.)
The place where I got my BS has always had a good basketball team, but wasn’t a national force in basketball until several decades ago. I had some first or second-hand connections with its basketball team before it was a national power.
It seems to me that before it became a national power, its basketball players were students and athletes. A three-year starting center got a degree in EE. I knew a second stringer on the basketball team, because his cousin was a friend of mine. The second stringer scored 20 points in a game he started, but as he was backing up a second team All-American, such opportunities were rare. The second stringer got a degree in English and eventually got a doctorate in psychology from Harvard. One of my housemates one year was the ex-wife of a basketball player, who got a degree in English and joined the Peace Corps. A number of former basketball players became business executives- among other things, players learn teamwork and prioritizing- which are useful in the business world. These basketball players were students and athletes.
Now that its basketball team is a national power, it seems that sports studies or the like is the main major of its players. They have a decent graduation rate, though. Given the great amount of time that being a member of a nationally ranked team takes, I don’t fault them for becoming sports studies majors. Their main job is the team, not their classes.