It was late Sunday morning and my wife had to run out to a grocery store.
The parking lot was jammed, every space taken, even some spaces that didn’t exist. Why so many people out shopping on a late Sunday morning?
It turned out they weren’t shopping. They were watching. They were inside a restaurant in the same strip mall watching the NFL playoff football game between the former-but- now-Los Angeles Chargers and the Baltimore Ravens.
Don’t know if they were hate watching or loyal fan watching but it was surprising that…that many people would show that much interest in the team whose owner turned his nose at local Charger fans and bolted for L-A, leaving us without an NFL team.
Yet maybe it shouldn’t have been that surprising.
What with the cloudy and chilly weather outside, and having decided to sit down and watch the game on TV, the feeling of being abandoned by your team, definitely re-emerged.
With the team being the team your kids grew up with and the team you spent years watching it was easy to root against the L-A Chargers.
And yet it was hard not to root for them...at times anyway, a little bit anyway, but only because of Philip Rivers, the 37 year old quarterback with nine kids and who still lives in San Diego and who commutes to L-A to practice and play.
While it hurts to watch the team that turned its back on San Diego now in the playoffs after too many years of not making it, it’s hard not to root for a guy like that.
(Photo credit Getty Images)