"When I was a young boy my father took me into the city,
To see a marching band...
'Because one day, I'll leave you, a phantom
To lead you in the summer, to join the Black Parade.' " - My Chemical Romance
I became a Los Angeles Kings fan because almost no one else was.
Up to the age of 8, when I moved to California from rural Pennsylvania, my interest in sports was based on which team's logo my toddler synapses found most appealing (hat-tip to the late '80s Blue Jays and Dolphins). The 1992 move to Los Angeles introduced me to more than just my father. It transplanted me into surrounding excitements and distractions I'd previously only seen fuzzy glimpses of on our 11" television screen with its 8 stations, 3 of which were redundant local NBC's. In Linesville, I'd listened to Magic Johnson's HIV announcement on the radio of my mother's flower delivery van, and 5 years later I was sitting in the stands in Inglewood during his 1996 comeback, watching him go up against Michael Jordan one last time. Standard of living improved pretty dramatically too. My favorite food went from being my grandmother's confusingly-titled Colombian Dish (rice, hot dogs, ketchup, and frozen vegetables) to swordfish at The Palm. This was all newly possible because of my father, who was learning how to be a parent for the first time in his late 50s and compensating for the lost time.
As the CEO of an insurance company, he had not only access but first dibs on their corporate tickets. He'd take his small allotment for Lakers, Dodgers, and Kings games, have the other games cycle through the rest of company, and then get the leftovers that people didn't have much interest in. Which meant we inherited a lot of trips down the 405 from Santa Monica to the Great Western Forum while wearing silver and black.
Basketball was flashier and the Lakers far more successful, but the love for the game never stuck. Even if I wasn't processing these observations at the time, hockey's appeal was probably in that it was equal parts foreign and familiar. Hockey always came with a distinctively alternative rock soundtrack. The ice was the closest I was going to get to the true winters of Northwestern PA, the game inherently blue collar enough to appeal to the kid who used to wear hand-me-downs, still questioning how he had ended up with second-row tickets and all the intermission food he could eat. I'd never played hockey growing up, or even watched a game back in Pennsylvania, but NHL '94 was without question my go-to choice on Sega Genesis. At the games I was getting to see the 16-bit players from 16 feet away, with my dad by my side, his presence just adding to the surrealism. The preteen was too young to speak to the 61 year-old about Hemingway, so thoughts on how Luc Robitaille or Rob Blake was playing had to suffice. Aside from that, I don't remember what we talked about, or if we did much. Sports have a tendency to speak for themselves. Which maybe made it easier for both of us. Surrendering your emotions to the game in front of you and their extremes is always easier than creating those spikes organically.
Near the end of our father-son pastime, just 2 years before I moved away to college and he and I drifted apart, the Kings made the move from the Forum to Staples Center. For those few seasons, our trip to the game was a 5 block walk down Figueroa from his office to the arena. The games were a little less frequent, the corporate seats a section farther up, the conversations still frustratingly eroded from my memory. As for the Kings themselves, they were still the afterthought of both the city and the league and would continue to be for the next several years. The years in which I didn't talk to my father. The years in which I went to 1 or 2 games and even then felt unnatural at not having him by my side.
That exile changed this season. I sought out the Kings in October in New Jersey with a few Devils fans from my old job. Near the start of the season, the teams were both mediocre, the seats $25 with free food and a drink thrown in. I had tickets to see them in Long Island but a paralyzing hangover during a friend's visit got in the way (hat-tip to Nicole Alvarez, who can outdrink me but apparently not outvomit me). I watched them limp into the playoffs on the last day of the season, next to my Sharks fan best friend at a NorCal-themed sports bar, forced to listen to a roid-rager with frosted tips berate my 2 other fellow Kings fans for clapping at a goal. I spent the next week waking up at 3:30am for my morning news job, turning off my alarm and immediately checking my ESPN app for the previous night's Kings/Canucks score. As time expired in Game 4 to complete their sweep of the Blues, I screamed and lifted my nephew up in the air in elation. Against Phoenix, I fought pouring rain to find the one bar in downtown Boston showing West Coast hockey rather than the NBA playoffs, getting a mid-50s couple to look up from their PDA-ing to see what I was wildly clapping at. The Game 5 overtime clincher I celebrated with tequila shots shared with a random fellow bar patron who turned out to be an actor from Desperate Housewives, reminiscing about L.A. restaurants over beers in the Village. For the Finals I was back in the same New Jersey arena with roughly the same seats as 8 months earlier, but this time my ticket cost more than my rent. Beside me were Reed & Lauren, friends from college and die-hard Kings fans who had flown out for Game 2. Our reward was seeing Jeff Carter bury a game-winning wrist shot in overtime, and being among the 200 or so people out of 18,000 that that was good news for. A week later I was back again for a game 5 I was hoping would never happen, but fully anticipating the Kings to continue their flawless road record by winning that night and clinching the championship, fully anticipating seeing my favorite team raise the Stanley Cup in person. That my lucky number 11 would pull through as their 10-0 road record improved by one more. My row consisted of 5 Kings fans who had come down from Ottawa, ones whose love for the game was also birthed during the L.A. Gretzky years. 2 rows ahead were 4 fans in from Silver Lake with jerseys from each of the Kings' eras of uniforms. We watched every possible break go New Jersey's way, palpably feeling the series' momentum shift to the Devils as they defeated the Kings 2-1. Like them, I went home absolutely crushed, listening to Devils fans on the PATH brag they now had this series in hand. Were about to spoil the Hollywood ending. I spent the first period of Game 6 at Bleecker Street Bar and watched as the Kings clinched the game, the series, their first ever title, in a euphoric span of 5 minutes during a first period power play. Behind me were 3 girls from L.A.'s Koreatown, along the bar in front of me a row of seething Devils fans. The Kings won the first Stanley Cup in their history on June 11th, my lucky number coming through after all. Text messages of congratulations poured in from friends; I exchanged a few with Reed, who was at the game, seeing in person what I wasn't able to, but experiencing the same emotions from opposite coasts.
The next day I holed up in my friend's apartment and rewatched the full game by myself. The adrenaline and camaraderie of the revolving cast of those around me for the previous games absolutely became part of the astounding journey that this season's Kings' championship was. But this was the way I needed to end it. Watching it by myself, or more accurately with the palpable absence of my father. To share the elation, the relief, the innocent joy of an 8 year-old child over again. To go back to the emotions of the Forum for the final time. We never had a beer together. We never got to compare our experiences of running with the bulls in Pamplona five decades apart, or to discuss Hemingway. But seeing the Kings raise the greatest trophy in sports, my thoughts were on him. On the special times through the years that I look back at most centrally as us.
A lot of people hate on sports as a waste of money, a gross exercise in commercialization and egoism, a narcotic for the masses. That's fine, as long as you recognize that occasionally it can be a genuine unifier, of classes and generations. Storage into which to pour some of your best memories, apart from a rather expensive way to break your heart year after year.
My father didn't live long enough for me nor our beloved Kings to make him proud. But their victory parade on Thursday will take them down the same 5 blocks of Figueroa in Downtown Los Angeles that we walked together to attend games at Staples Center. And it will do so in an explosion of pure emotion and with the Kings' simple colors echoing my often broken, but currently jubilant black-and-white heart. My inheritance.
Up to the age of 8, when I moved to California from rural Pennsylvania, my interest in sports was based on which team's logo my toddler synapses found most appealing (hat-tip to the late '80s Blue Jays and Dolphins). The 1992 move to Los Angeles introduced me to more than just my father. It transplanted me into surrounding excitements and distractions I'd previously only seen fuzzy glimpses of on our 11" television screen with its 8 stations, 3 of which were redundant local NBC's. In Linesville, I'd listened to Magic Johnson's HIV announcement on the radio of my mother's flower delivery van, and 5 years later I was sitting in the stands in Inglewood during his 1996 comeback, watching him go up against Michael Jordan one last time. Standard of living improved pretty dramatically too. My favorite food went from being my grandmother's confusingly-titled Colombian Dish (rice, hot dogs, ketchup, and frozen vegetables) to swordfish at The Palm. This was all newly possible because of my father, who was learning how to be a parent for the first time in his late 50s and compensating for the lost time.
As the CEO of an insurance company, he had not only access but first dibs on their corporate tickets. He'd take his small allotment for Lakers, Dodgers, and Kings games, have the other games cycle through the rest of company, and then get the leftovers that people didn't have much interest in. Which meant we inherited a lot of trips down the 405 from Santa Monica to the Great Western Forum while wearing silver and black.
Basketball was flashier and the Lakers far more successful, but the love for the game never stuck. Even if I wasn't processing these observations at the time, hockey's appeal was probably in that it was equal parts foreign and familiar. Hockey always came with a distinctively alternative rock soundtrack. The ice was the closest I was going to get to the true winters of Northwestern PA, the game inherently blue collar enough to appeal to the kid who used to wear hand-me-downs, still questioning how he had ended up with second-row tickets and all the intermission food he could eat. I'd never played hockey growing up, or even watched a game back in Pennsylvania, but NHL '94 was without question my go-to choice on Sega Genesis. At the games I was getting to see the 16-bit players from 16 feet away, with my dad by my side, his presence just adding to the surrealism. The preteen was too young to speak to the 61 year-old about Hemingway, so thoughts on how Luc Robitaille or Rob Blake was playing had to suffice. Aside from that, I don't remember what we talked about, or if we did much. Sports have a tendency to speak for themselves. Which maybe made it easier for both of us. Surrendering your emotions to the game in front of you and their extremes is always easier than creating those spikes organically.
Near the end of our father-son pastime, just 2 years before I moved away to college and he and I drifted apart, the Kings made the move from the Forum to Staples Center. For those few seasons, our trip to the game was a 5 block walk down Figueroa from his office to the arena. The games were a little less frequent, the corporate seats a section farther up, the conversations still frustratingly eroded from my memory. As for the Kings themselves, they were still the afterthought of both the city and the league and would continue to be for the next several years. The years in which I didn't talk to my father. The years in which I went to 1 or 2 games and even then felt unnatural at not having him by my side.
That exile changed this season. I sought out the Kings in October in New Jersey with a few Devils fans from my old job. Near the start of the season, the teams were both mediocre, the seats $25 with free food and a drink thrown in. I had tickets to see them in Long Island but a paralyzing hangover during a friend's visit got in the way (hat-tip to Nicole Alvarez, who can outdrink me but apparently not outvomit me). I watched them limp into the playoffs on the last day of the season, next to my Sharks fan best friend at a NorCal-themed sports bar, forced to listen to a roid-rager with frosted tips berate my 2 other fellow Kings fans for clapping at a goal. I spent the next week waking up at 3:30am for my morning news job, turning off my alarm and immediately checking my ESPN app for the previous night's Kings/Canucks score. As time expired in Game 4 to complete their sweep of the Blues, I screamed and lifted my nephew up in the air in elation. Against Phoenix, I fought pouring rain to find the one bar in downtown Boston showing West Coast hockey rather than the NBA playoffs, getting a mid-50s couple to look up from their PDA-ing to see what I was wildly clapping at. The Game 5 overtime clincher I celebrated with tequila shots shared with a random fellow bar patron who turned out to be an actor from Desperate Housewives, reminiscing about L.A. restaurants over beers in the Village. For the Finals I was back in the same New Jersey arena with roughly the same seats as 8 months earlier, but this time my ticket cost more than my rent. Beside me were Reed & Lauren, friends from college and die-hard Kings fans who had flown out for Game 2. Our reward was seeing Jeff Carter bury a game-winning wrist shot in overtime, and being among the 200 or so people out of 18,000 that that was good news for. A week later I was back again for a game 5 I was hoping would never happen, but fully anticipating the Kings to continue their flawless road record by winning that night and clinching the championship, fully anticipating seeing my favorite team raise the Stanley Cup in person. That my lucky number 11 would pull through as their 10-0 road record improved by one more. My row consisted of 5 Kings fans who had come down from Ottawa, ones whose love for the game was also birthed during the L.A. Gretzky years. 2 rows ahead were 4 fans in from Silver Lake with jerseys from each of the Kings' eras of uniforms. We watched every possible break go New Jersey's way, palpably feeling the series' momentum shift to the Devils as they defeated the Kings 2-1. Like them, I went home absolutely crushed, listening to Devils fans on the PATH brag they now had this series in hand. Were about to spoil the Hollywood ending. I spent the first period of Game 6 at Bleecker Street Bar and watched as the Kings clinched the game, the series, their first ever title, in a euphoric span of 5 minutes during a first period power play. Behind me were 3 girls from L.A.'s Koreatown, along the bar in front of me a row of seething Devils fans. The Kings won the first Stanley Cup in their history on June 11th, my lucky number coming through after all. Text messages of congratulations poured in from friends; I exchanged a few with Reed, who was at the game, seeing in person what I wasn't able to, but experiencing the same emotions from opposite coasts.
The next day I holed up in my friend's apartment and rewatched the full game by myself. The adrenaline and camaraderie of the revolving cast of those around me for the previous games absolutely became part of the astounding journey that this season's Kings' championship was. But this was the way I needed to end it. Watching it by myself, or more accurately with the palpable absence of my father. To share the elation, the relief, the innocent joy of an 8 year-old child over again. To go back to the emotions of the Forum for the final time. We never had a beer together. We never got to compare our experiences of running with the bulls in Pamplona five decades apart, or to discuss Hemingway. But seeing the Kings raise the greatest trophy in sports, my thoughts were on him. On the special times through the years that I look back at most centrally as us.
A lot of people hate on sports as a waste of money, a gross exercise in commercialization and egoism, a narcotic for the masses. That's fine, as long as you recognize that occasionally it can be a genuine unifier, of classes and generations. Storage into which to pour some of your best memories, apart from a rather expensive way to break your heart year after year.
My father didn't live long enough for me nor our beloved Kings to make him proud. But their victory parade on Thursday will take them down the same 5 blocks of Figueroa in Downtown Los Angeles that we walked together to attend games at Staples Center. And it will do so in an explosion of pure emotion and with the Kings' simple colors echoing my often broken, but currently jubilant black-and-white heart. My inheritance.
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