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By Ron Donoho
(page 1 of 3)
Let’s face it. Professional football is really all about one thing: professional tailgating. On game days, six guys wearing backward baseball caps should be standing behind a pickup truck drinking domestic beer and watching burgers spit and sizzle on a dilapidated portable grill. So what’s wrong with this recently espied scenario? Well, it’s played out on a Saturday—not Sunday. It’s late spring—not early winter. And Joe Anderson and five friends from Santee are tailgating in the parking lot of the San Diego Sports Arena—not Qualcomm Stadium.Let the roving-eyed Chargers play politics. Anderson and posse are prepping for the 7 p.m. kickoff of a midseason football game between the San Diego Riptide and the Hawaiian Islanders. “It’s definitely cheaper at Riptide games,” says Anderson, who nonetheless still pledges allegiance to the Spanos family’s tenuous contribution to civic pride. “It’s more crowded at Chargers games—and hey, the Riptide know how to lose games just as well as the Chargers.”
The Riptide—which had more losses than wins before this June 1 contest—belong to the arenafootball2 league, the flashiest NFL wannabe since Vince McMahon sputtered the XFL to life for a failed season of cheerleader interviews and a player with “He Hate Me” sewn on the back of his jersey.
San Diego’s af2 entrant is a member
of the minor league to Arena Football, a step below the level where Kurt Warner played—for the Iowa Barnstormers—before being picked up by the St. Louis Rams and leading them to victory in the NFL’s 2000 Super Bowl. At the mention of Warner’s name, almost everyone affiliated with arenafootball2 sighs and gets a faraway look in the eyes. Warner’s ascent is viewed as proof of the legitimacy of this summer version of America’s winter sport of choice.
Gil Saidy is sweating. The Riptide owner is sitting with paying patrons in the lower loge section of the Sports Arena. Saidy leans his 6-foot-2 frame forward and launches a (clean) verbal assault on a referee’s call. Yes, shades of Dallas Mavericks maverick Mark Cuban.
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