El Tráfico and the quintessential L.A. sports experience
What can we learn about a great California rivalry by tailgating?
The first WHL bantam draft I took part in with the Everett Silvertips was in 2008. Scouting 14 and 15-year-olds is far from an exact science, and only three players from that draft went on to accrue more than 100 NHL games. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, selected first by Red Deer was one; Adam Lowry, selected in the fourth round by Swift Current, and Joel Edmundson, taken in the sixth by Moose Jaw, were two more.
We’d selected Ryan Murray ninth overall, and it took all of one shift in his first WHL training camp to realize he was going to play well beyond major junior hockey. Murray was actually 14 at the time, and while players were divided to share the ice with those also in their age range, he began camp as one among many recent draft picks and young prospects before ascending to skate with the actual roster players. A teenager for all of two years, he played his exact same game against a veteran WHL group that entered the season ranked fourth among the 60-plus teams across the Canadian Hockey League. Though his skill set is one of the subtler, more intuitive packages that banks on poise, lightning-quick decision making and fluid skating, that he was something special was instantly recognizable. He was selected by Columbus second overall in 2012, and if not for the injuries that dogged him in both major junior and the NHL, he’d have done the same things in The Show he’d done at all other levels.
Through the 13 years that passed since that training camp, I’d always thought of Murray when spotting an entrancing, extraordinarily talented younger player whose hype you might not have followed closely. And though a rare feeling, it surfaced again on a hot Saturday when watching Julian Araujo of the LA Galaxy, who’d turned 20 just two weeks prior to El Tráfico’s first game in front of a full crowd in two seasons.
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There was a point on Saturday, more than two hours into tailgating and some two hours before kickoff, when discussion turned to organized fan groups pushing to remove an offensive chant that has infiltrated large sections of the Mexican Men’s National Team’s cross-continent fanbase. It’s a chant that was heard in the brand-new Banc of California Stadium early in the existence of LA Football Club, and it was quickly extinguished through team directives and vigorous self-policing.
This chant is hard to imagine infiltrating one of the most progressive fanbases in professional North American sports. Four seasons and 111 games into Chivas USA’s expansion phoenix, the LAFC fanbase’s cultural awareness was evident. Visibly, audibly evident. On this Saturday, Lxs Tigres del North End waved a Palestinian flag amidst the 3252 – the team’s renowned drum-banging, chanting, sign-waving, raucous supporters section that draws its name from the stand’s seating capacity that made plenty of noise throughout the teams’ breakneck 3-3 draw. Against the Vancouver Whitecaps earlier in the season, they and others unfurled a “NO PRIDE IN GENOCIDE” banner to show solidarity with the thousands of unmarked graves found at Canadian residential schools, where countless more First Nations children were abused and tortured.
Half the signs draped from the overhang on this late-August day were in Spanish. A half-dozen LGBTQ+ flags were visible. Not that wearing some sort of American flag cloth on your body or head should be a calling card of political leaning, or that a rainbow flag should be viewed as a political symbol rather than an emblem of basic human rights, they’re often indicative of such allegiances, and I recalled only one American flag on a T-shirt throughout the seven hours we spent downtown. The number of Black Lives Matter logos on clothes, flags and banners far outnumbered the talismans that many on the right champion as their insignia of American patriotism.
Though soccer is the sport most clearly linked to cultural, political and neighborhood identity, and the American sports-financial complex tends to shy away from sports and politics, except when it can be marketed and linked to a corporate brand in a well-meaning if empty endorsement of nonthreatening equality, there were plenty of parallels to entities within and outside the sports landscape. I kept thinking of the Vegas Golden Knights, and how expansion teams have such a clear advantage when creating their history from a blank slate: The world is their oyster. Maybe it was just all the black and gold. And as a person who dabbles in Phish (fine, I’ve seen something like 90 shows), the makeup of the crowd similarly skewed towards the gender-heavy neo-hippie party crowd. Except this crowd was even more dominantly male – we’d remarked that for every 10 men inside the beautiful, modern grounds, it seemed as though there was one woman. This was different within the welcoming 3252, and clearly at the tailgates, but once the masses arrived, it might have been the most lopsided gender discrepancy within a mass gathering I’d ever attended.
The tailgates, which are constructed early in the morning and fill out the Christmas Tree Lane adjacent to the stadium’s North Stand, were incredible. I’ve experienced square kilometers of tailgates surrounding Big Ten football stadiums, and anyone who’s experienced the Rose Bowl understands the significance of celebrating mild mornings upon the manicured grass of Brookside Country Club on New Year’s Day.
But collegiate tailgates draw from a different demographic – particularly those from elite institutions like the USCs, UCLAs, Oregons and Wisconsins of the college football world. UCLA’s may be more ethnically diverse, but the elite Westwood institution also has a reputation as a wine-and-cheese crowd. “I grew up poor as fuck,” repeated an East L.A.-raised member of Lxs Tigres we spoke with.
On Saturday, the square acreage of the LAFC tailgates was much smaller, and also much louder than a typical college football tailgate. In a profound juxtaposition, it was abutted by the more corporate “fan fest,” which was strewn with a hodgepodge of promotions surreptitiously designed to avoid the realization that you were just interacting with a 3-D commercial. Kick a soccer ball through a target, sign up to test drive a Toyota Highlander. Scan a QR code at the Continental Tire booth, enter to win a free LAFC scarf. Spin a wheel at the Warehouse Shoe Sale. This area remained empty.
The fan tailgates, constructed early in the morning and depicting the many official and unofficial fan groups, didn’t need a Heineken DJ booth to entertain. Live Tejano bands played to the well lubricated. Everywhere there was beer, there were shots, there were non-alcoholic offerings and tacos and pupusas and traditional American barbecue. Within three minutes of entering the tailgates, and before we’d even begun to search for the groups we were to meet with, we were offered cans of light beer and eager Premier League banter sparked by my Brentford FC jersey. It was impossible to not make friends.
We first headed to the Cuervos, a fan group that I later learned was a gathering of fans from the San Fernando Valley. Asked what distinguished the Cuervos from the other two-dozen awnings across the grassy lawn, our host thought for several beats and answered that it was their laid-back, family atmosphere. These were all groups in which I’d be more than comfortable bringing my two and five-year-olds to experience this inherently Los Angeles experience. I’d grown up in rather sheltered surroundings in The Valley – too young to recall being born into a house in North Hollywood, I’d lived in the homogenous surroundings of Woodland Hills and Encino. It wasn’t until I’d attended Raiders games at the Coliseum and high-fived those around me after Bo Jackson touchdowns and days in which Jay Schroeder threw more touchdowns than interceptions.
I’d also seen incidents emblematic of what ultimately doomed their Los Angeles residency in the early 1990’s. It always amused me that printing on Coliseum souvenir cups read “All games start at 1:00 p.m.” year after year. Chiefs fans were shoved and thrown against a wall when I was using the bathroom trough. Broncos fans were followed and verbally threatened. These encounters happen in many NFL stadiums on both coasts, but in the aftermath of the 1992 riots and the branding of “gangster rap” around the same time, it wasn’t an easy sell to get people to attend games south of downtown, even on Sunday afternoons. When we’d attended the Raiders-Rams game at Anaheim Stadium in the teams’ final seasons in Southern California, there were so many visible swells of fans standing to either observe or move away from the fights around them that The Big A was one large, whitecapped ocean of hostility. For the second straight year, the Seahawks visited in front of a 2:1 empty seats-to-seats ratio. Needing a win to extend their L.A. representation at the end of the season, Vince Evans entered in the fourth quarter and threw a long touchdown pass to get one final emotional surge out of a crowd that was two-thirds full. But the Raiders fell 19-9 on a rainy December day, and their L.A. existence ended with a fitting whimper.
It was the converse of the LAFC crowd. You couldn’t tell that the home team, then winless in seven straight, was struggling to an unprecedented degree during their brilliantly nascent existence, or that the Galaxy, whose season began with promise, also entered in a slump. Neither team’s aged stars – Carlos Vela for the home team and Chicharito for the visitors – were available for selection. Galaxy fans were situated in a far corner from LAFC fans, and as we learned that afternoon, could only enter and leave far away from the gates the 3252 departed from. Because of this, we saw very few Galaxy fans before the game. Protected by barriers, the mass of tailgaters was a large interior sea of gold and black. Player and personalized jerseys were everywhere. One study identified Calgary’s Scotiabank Saddledome as the NHL arena where the highest percentage of home fans wore their team’s jerseys, and though the 3252’s tailgates presented an embellished snapshot, my scientific formula, using highly advanced calculus, informed me LAFC and the Dodgers are the L.A. fanbases most heavily clothed in jerseys. (This could also be said about the visiting Galaxy fans in attendance.)
It was a quintessential Los Angeles experience. There is a shallow observance of Los Angeles sports culture that dismisses the non-white existence: that its fans are blasé and that the city’s most pervasive characteristic is derived from throngs of (implicitly white) Americans who’ve moved here to become actors or work by extension in entertainment.
By its own estimate, 49% of the roughly four million people living within the city of Los Angeles are Hispanic. The Census’ estimates, based on 2010 data that will be updated soon, is that in 2019, 48.6% of the 10-million people living in Los Angeles county identified as Hispanic and 28% as solely white. This experience downtown was much more representative of the compete Los Angeles identity than that assumed by outsiders whose impressions derive from the bottom 10 rows of televised Lakers games.
And one of the things my friend and I discussed when returning to our car after the game was how much we love Los Angeles Mexican-Americans and Salvadoran-Americans. Like trying to define Los Angeles itself, it’s a nebulous affinity that’s difficult to explain, easy to appreciate. Perhaps it’s influenced by kinship, by the familial atmosphere described by our new friends in the Cuervos. Or it could be influenced – and this is as surface-level of an explanation as those lamented above – by more intense sports fanaticism than that embedded in neighborhoods less racially diverse. Feel free to share your own theories.
But once we got inside the building, and were thrilled to learn that Bludso’s pulled pork sandwiches were available, and that our seats were at the front of an overhang in close proximity to the 3252, we weren’t really thinking about that. We were thinking about 20-year-old Julian Araujo and the braces on opposite sides supplied by 21-year-old Uruguayan international Brian Rodríguez and 22-year-old Serbian forward Dejan Joveljić, the latter of whom started five Europa League games last season.
These are the players I wasn’t as familiar with and changed my perception of MLS from a league that banks on those whose days playing in Europe’s best leagues are well behind them. The game ended in a captivating 3-3 draw behind a pacey and emotional second half – the ideal and representative type of game when first experiencing El Trafico, which stands among California’s best rivalries.
And this is what a recurring segment on this Substack will approach. “Here’s a rivalry we know little about. Let’s go in as blank slates, learn something, and share our impressions.” There are excursions planned. They’ll take us out of Los Angeles, and barring any lockdowns/closed borders/locust infestations, out of California and the United States. A podcast is forthcoming, as are recollections and stories from the Kings, sprinkled with explanations towards my approaches covering them as an in-house reporter afforded – for the first five or six years, at least – ample discretion and independence. Expect some media commentary, intelligent interviews, audio and video and hopefully articulate conversation. I look forward to you joining me on wherever this journey leads. (It will lead to more Phish shows.)
Love the inside look at LA. Can’t wait to read and hear more Jon!
A lot here. One memory: I recall a Raider game where a beer vendor accidentally spilled a little on a fan as he went up the (steep and uneven) coliseum stairs. The guy stood up and beat the crap out of the beer vendor and then sat on the stairs and waited for the cops to come get him.