Big McLargehuge
Fragile Traveler
Downtown LA is weird...it's not downtown. I mean, it's where the big buildings are...but it's not where everyone works. It's where certain types of jobs are for sure, but LA ain't famous for its financial district. I've been to far worse downtowns, but if you're coming to LA for downtown then you're doing it wrong. Nobody does that, all of the interesting things are scattered throughout the endless sprawl. Even when a couple miles down the road from LA Live I basically never went downtown except for LA Live. My friends who lived downtown came to my part of town (then Koreatown) to do things, not the other way around.
As for the Rams popularity...guys, it's been 6 years, most of LA already had existing fandoms (I was born a Steelers fan and I'll die a Steelers fan), and the Rams were Orange County's team the last decade and a half or so before the move to St. Louis. Prior to the moves back I guarantee that I saw a dozen Raiders logos for every Rams logo I saw. That's changing, but most Rams fans I know are newly minted fans or folks adopting them as a secondary NFC team, not folks dusting off their Eric Dickerson jerseys.
I'm here for each and every joke about the Chargers having no fans because they do not have enough damn actual fans to fill a stadium themselves, I still see more Steelers shit in the wild than I do Chargers. The Rams are definitely building a base, however. They may have a lot of history in LA, but this remains a transplant city so there's a lot more people here without roots dating back to the Jack Youngblood era than do...and those with longer roots tended to be/remain Raiders fans.
As for parades...we are all aware of how giant and utterly clogged with traffic LA is, right? Especially on weekdays. Even if I was a fan that's a headache I wouldn't deem worth it unless I lived in that part of town...same reason I still haven't seen a game at the Rose Bowl...spending half a day fighting parking and gridlock goes a long way to make even the best experiences frustrating and infuriating. To fans of long-suffering teams or in places less sprawling/giant it appears ridiculous, but the threshold to get people to do things is just higher here...and you'd get it if you lived here or another city of this scale. Trust me I had my preconceptions about LA as a sports town as a Yinzer coming from a part of the country where sports are the local identity. Some of those preconceptions are based in reality, but the culture aspect was just way off. It's not that people don't care, it's that they have 50 other things to care about and you have to pick your battles. I used to be an LA Galaxy season ticket holder...but once I moved even further away from the stadium it just stopped being worth 4-5 hours of sitting in my car to watch something for 2 hours. Torturing myself so people view me as a 'true' fan seems pretty silly when I can just watch the games on TV.
As for the Rams popularity...guys, it's been 6 years, most of LA already had existing fandoms (I was born a Steelers fan and I'll die a Steelers fan), and the Rams were Orange County's team the last decade and a half or so before the move to St. Louis. Prior to the moves back I guarantee that I saw a dozen Raiders logos for every Rams logo I saw. That's changing, but most Rams fans I know are newly minted fans or folks adopting them as a secondary NFC team, not folks dusting off their Eric Dickerson jerseys.
I'm here for each and every joke about the Chargers having no fans because they do not have enough damn actual fans to fill a stadium themselves, I still see more Steelers shit in the wild than I do Chargers. The Rams are definitely building a base, however. They may have a lot of history in LA, but this remains a transplant city so there's a lot more people here without roots dating back to the Jack Youngblood era than do...and those with longer roots tended to be/remain Raiders fans.
As for parades...we are all aware of how giant and utterly clogged with traffic LA is, right? Especially on weekdays. Even if I was a fan that's a headache I wouldn't deem worth it unless I lived in that part of town...same reason I still haven't seen a game at the Rose Bowl...spending half a day fighting parking and gridlock goes a long way to make even the best experiences frustrating and infuriating. To fans of long-suffering teams or in places less sprawling/giant it appears ridiculous, but the threshold to get people to do things is just higher here...and you'd get it if you lived here or another city of this scale. Trust me I had my preconceptions about LA as a sports town as a Yinzer coming from a part of the country where sports are the local identity. Some of those preconceptions are based in reality, but the culture aspect was just way off. It's not that people don't care, it's that they have 50 other things to care about and you have to pick your battles. I used to be an LA Galaxy season ticket holder...but once I moved even further away from the stadium it just stopped being worth 4-5 hours of sitting in my car to watch something for 2 hours. Torturing myself so people view me as a 'true' fan seems pretty silly when I can just watch the games on TV.
