People's non-physical qualities are very hard to measure.
Hahaha, can't really argue with that. I've observed some qualities that a lot of people that I run into seem to have, but you're right, it doesn't make sense to extrapolate that to all of SoCal. It was a little bit of trash talk that escalated; not a verifiable statement or anything. Now let's all band together and make fun of Pittsburgh, or something. What a stupid city.
And as for there being no sports fans in San Diego, it's sorta true. They have some really hardcore fans, and then after that they have tons of "diehards", except they're the types that don't actually go to the games and lose interest as soon as the team loses. Of course, given the reaction on this board after the Miami game, it seems like a large percentage of our fan base is pretty much the same.
It's true that southern Californians don't seem to care as much about sports (Manny's commented on it a couple of times since he was traded, though his stance was that we New Englanders are obsessive and weird), and NFL seems to rank below basketball and USC. I could be totally off base on this, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that such a large percentage of Californians are first or second generation, as well as there being more stuff to do. When I look at why I'm a diehard Celtics, Sox, and Pats fan, it's because I grew up watching them and hearing stories about them from my dad and grandfather. It's a legacy thing, and it helps to connect families across generations. When I try to explain this aspect of it to other people, I typically get a blank, somewhat concerned stare that makes it clear that I just sound weird. For a lot of us, though, being a fan is about way more than the sport itself. To this day, when I watch a Sox game, I get nostalgic remembering how I used to watch them on my couch while my grandfather smoked his pipe and told me about Ted Williams. At the same time, so many other people in my hometown attached the same significance to it that it became the sort of thing where we all took it to a slightly obsessive degree, and that was just normal. For Southern Californians, I've personally seen more of this in how they follow USC football than the Chargers.
If I had grown up in California, with a father who was a transplanted Red Sox fan, I don't think I would be nearly as big of a fan as I am now. When you have bigger towns/cities with fewer people who care about the teams, the community factor just isn't there to the extent that it is in New England, and when you don't share it with your family, the legacy and the community don't really converge like they do for us. So, when we take it to perhaps a slightly unhealthy degree, it's worth remembering that being a fan, for us, goes beyond just the sport. This is kind of a rambling post, I realize, but I think that it might be that we're actually the weird ones. I'm not claiming that Boston fans are the only devoted ones in the country (I know that they're not, and that the legacy factor holds true for all sorts of fan bases), but devoted fans period, wherever they are, are the exception, not the rule.
