Anne Dowie

It was a friday night in September in New York, the time of the week when lights come on across high school football fields, in the time of year reserved for autumnal ritual. And in college stadiums from Massachusetts to Miami, crews were busy getting ready for the screaming masses that would descend the next day, when games featuring Notre Dame, Miami, and Ohio State would occupy television sets in millions of living rooms and bars.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Randy Gaw ’99 sat nearly alone in a bar. He and a small group of fellow Cal grads were there to watch Cal play New Mexico State—just one of six on Cal’s 12-game schedule that was televised nationally. “We have a lot of sympathy for each other because no one else cares,” Gaw says.

Such is the woeful existence of a West Coast sports fan in an East Coast world. It’s been this way for decades. And it’s going to be this way for a long, long time, because those who advertise themselves as sports experts are, with a few exceptions, completely ignorant of the quality of college sports on the West Coast. They study us from afar, choosing the warm blanket of familiar faces from Duke to Notre Dame over the unfamiliar but exceptionally talented ones in California. Besides, due to the time zone difference, watching the westerners would require them to stay up past their bedtimes.

But it’s more than an issue of bedtimes. Some easterners believe we are all a bunch of surfing, skiing, mountain-climbing airheads who wouldn’t know a delayed blitz from Wolff Blitzer, or a 2-3 zone from a calzone. “We’re marked as those silly Californians,” says Allison Moe ’05, a 23-year-old Cal graduate and devoted Bears fan living in Pennsylvania. “They know about USC and sometimes they know about UCLA around here, but they don’t seem to know anything else about the West Coast.”

But perhaps we should be more forgiving. We are Californians, after all, and tolerance is a value we hold very dear. So let us entertain, if just for a moment, the notion that football truly should be reserved for places where the leaves change colors by the third week of the season, and where entering a basketball arena is not only a way to cheer your team, but also a way to escape the winter’s scorn. Football = autumn. Basketball = winter.

Nah. The truth is, the Far West Region—based on the number of teams that play in the so-called “big time” conferences and those that have played in postseason bowl games over the past seven years—has just as many quality football programs as anyplace else. And despite what the people who hang out around the basketball courts of New York and D.C. tell you, the West is the capital of hoops. It is the home to incredible street ball in Oakland and Los Angeles, to the greatest college basketball program in history—UCLA—and to a handful of other top-tier programs like Stanford, Cal, Arizona, and those beloved scrappers from Gonzaga. “The West Coast really doesn’t get the recognition, even the schools that are doing well,” says Ayinde Ubaka ’07, Cal’s All-Conference point guard. “I watch ESPN every day, and we never get mentioned.”

“It comes down to the teams that people in the media capitals identify with,” says Dr. Harry Edwards, a renowned examiner of all things sport and a retired professor of sociology at Berkeley. “Nobody is from California, nobody is from Washington, nobody is from Idaho. This is the land’s end, and everybody came here from Chicago and D.C. and New York. When you grew up in these places and you identify with certain teams, that’s where your heart is going to be.”

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