http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap30...o-chargers-today-relocation-is-rife-with-pain
Past the politics, the referendums, the haggling over stadium space and cash flow; beyond the fresh new branding and pretty words about why this makes sense for the league and for Los Angeles -- I think of the Chargers fans.
Somewhere in San Diego on Thursday morning, a 12-year-old football fanatic woke from dreams to learn of a new reality: their team was gone.
Sure, the move is not into total oblivion -- just two hours north into the metal, seaside jungles of Los Angeles. But for many Chargers fans, this is the end, the bookmark to a painful, elongated tug-of-war between the team and San Diego voters over how to pay for a shiny, new stadium within city walls.
Instead of a peaceful resolution, the Chargers will play 113 miles up the coast at the StubHub Center, an intimate, 30,000-seat, Carson-based venue that shouldn't expect any guarantees when it comes to longtime fans making the traffic-clustered, two-hour trip north.
Two hours -- and too many broken promises -- will be too much for plenty of burnt fans who gave their loyalty, their money and their hearts to San Diego's football team.
No easy words for Chargers fans
The people of San Diego have a new ally this morning in anyone who's watched the team they adore ripped away in the thick of the night.
Browns fans, especially, have come out of the woodwork on social media to empathize with Chargers fans just beginning to process what this all means. The team you grew up rooting for is no more.
I grew up a Browns fan in the 1980s. My bedroom wall was adorned with hand-drawn sketches of Bernie Kosar, Frank Minnifield, Webster Slaughter and Earnest Byner. The obsession level was off the charts, enough to cause parental concern.
As a drifting middle-schooler, my secret home was notebooks filled with statistical printouts, bleeding-heart essays about Cleveland's playoff chances and every fact and figure I could muster.
At that age, all I knew was that the Browns were inseparable from the bloodstream of Cleveland. Even as someone who followed the team from a distance on the East Coast, it was impossible not to feel the powerful bond between that blue-collar Ohio town and its football team.
Inside the world of my adolescent mind, it went without saying that the Browns and Cleveland would be together forever.
How little I knew.
What's past is prologue
I was a junior in college at American University in Washington, D.C., when I first heard the news.
Nov. 4, 1995.
I remember wandering lazily into the shared kitchen space in our co-ed campus dormitory. Dirty pots and pans and ramshackle furniture everywhere. No sound, save for the television tacked to the white-washed brick wall -- with some news guy breaking into a sweat as he passed along the rumor:
Browns owner Art Modell was moving the team from Cleveland to Baltimore.
Wherever I was going, whatever wayward packet of Ramen noodles I was planning to boil, it all went away in a white-hot flash of stunned confusion.
"This has been a very, very tough road for my family and for me," Modell said days later during a news conference in the shadow of Camden Yards, where a 70,000-seat stadium would be built for Baltimore's new football team. "I leave Cleveland after 35 years, and leave a good part of my heart and soul there. I can never forget the kindness of the people of Cleveland, the fans that supported the Browns for years. But frankly, it came down to a single proposition: I had no choice."
If Chargers owner Dean Spanos can relate to Modell's plight, Chargers fans now know the fresh pain of watching an era splintered to the wind.
After all, no team besides the Chargers has spent more time in one city before pulling the plug. Fifty-six years of ups and downs reduced to nothingness for a jilted fan base that can't be asked to simply pick up and follow along like obedient little minions.
So glad we were spared this experience.
