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.