The Five-Year Anniversary of Rivers Lake

When the Chargers moved north in 2017, they played home games in the StubHub Center (now Dignity Health Sports Park), the 27,000-seat home of the LA Galaxy.

The internment facility in Carson that the team shared with the MLS team was a punchline, but it was a pristine, sparkling punchline that did not subject the partisans to long lines that inched slowly towards troughs as they stood in rivers of piss. (It is also food truck friendly!)

The Chargers sold tickets to the tiny venue on the promise that it was a 'once in a lifetime' experience, and it was, for better or worse.

The outcome was disastrous for the Chargers. Ticket brokers made a fortune off of fans desperate to see their team in person for the first time in decades. Why not pay triple the price of a normal ticket if it was a one-off opportunity?

Even the Charger fans who bought season tickets realized that they might prefer selling them at a markup rather than attending the "home games" just to be treated like Syrian refugees.

My cousin and her husband were season ticket holders who attended the first handful of games in Carson. The last one was an October 2017 game against the Philadelphia Eagles. After four quarters of taunting and cursing from the partisan Eagles crowd, her husband had seen enough.

Cell phone cameras document what it must have looked like when Xerxes' Persian armies sacked Athens. The spirit of the mob desecrating the homes of their opponents is as present today as it was in 480 BCE.

"I'll never take her to another game," he said. "It's hard enough asking her to go just for me, but nobody needs that abuse. That's not what I signed up for."

Which means my cousin and her long-suffering Chargers fan husband have yet to stand next to the splendor of Rivers Lake.

Ask anyone. Rivers Lake, the human-made, 6-acre stormwater harvesting basin nestled on the south side of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, holds nearly 11 million gallons of water and captures 70-80% of the rainwater that irrigates the Hollywood Park complex. But it does so much more than that.

It might just hold the hopes and dreams of a growing community of fans.

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The officials spot the ball, blow a whistle, and the game resumes. The NFL is back in Los Angeles.

Here's a little secret: The owners don't care what color the jerseys are so long as your money is green.

I have been fortunate enough to attend Chargers games in many different cities. Though some host cities are more hospitable than others (thank you, Lambeau Field), I have yet to be taunted, nor have I taunted any of the home fans on my way to the parking lot after a Chargers win.

I try to behave in a manner that reflects honorably back on my hosts. Act like you've been there before, or better yet, act like you would like to be invited back. You saw "The Odyssey," right? This is Zeus's Law.

You can choose to be passionate about your team without behaving like a cretin. No, not the ancient Greeks who lived in Crete. The Persian navy never sacked that island.

At some point it was not enough to revel in your team's triumphs and travails on the field. Today's fans are active participants in the battle; every first down is an opportunity to gloat; every touchdown another chance to rub salt in the wounds of your neighbors. Salt water, though?

Seeking reciprocation for the time and energy that we have poured into our team is as apocryphal as a high school romance, and yet we do it every day.

"Rivers Lake is both well-named and environmentally friendly. But it could have more enticement, more significance, more meaning. Throughout history, bodies of water have represented sites of importance and change, particularly in works of religious and cultural literature. Could Rivers Lake do the same for Chargers fans? Could it mean something more?" -Doctor Nick Buck wrote about the significance of Rivers Lake back in 2022.

A​l Michaels has reached the point in his career where he does not feel the need to sugarcoat his opinions.

For a guy who has been broadcasting games for over fifty years, you could argue that Michaels has earned the right to back his 1962 Coupe DeVille out of the driveway without using the mirror.

There is no amount of pettiness that the 81-year-old Michaels can spew from his job at Amazon Prime that could tarnish his reputation. His famous voice is forever linked to the "Miracle on Ice" game in the 1980 Winter Olympics. You know? College-age hockey players from the U.S. upset the Soviet Union's squad of Communist Monstars? Disney made a movie about it.

So when the Las Vegas Raiders travelled to play the Rams at SoFi Stadium in 2022, Michaels and analyst Kirk Herbstreit amusingly wondered which team had more fans in the building.

“It’s hard to tell where the crowd is right now,” said Michaels. “I think mainly Raiders a little bit, but you have a P.A. announcer here who incessantly screams, ‘WHOSE HOUSE?’”

Herbstreit interjected, “You love it.”

“I hate it,” snapped Michaels.

“He wants them to say, ‘Rams’ house,’” continued Michaels, “but as far as the Raiders are concerned, well, this is kinda like their AirBnB.”

The NFL left LA in 1995 and did not return until 2016, when the Saint Louis Rams became the Los Angeles Rams once again. Born in 1936, the Cleveland Rams played for a decade in Ohio before owner Dan Reeves moved the franchise to Los Angeles in 1946.

If you think about it, teams have been either moving west to LA, or threatening to, since before the Potsdam Agreement.

In the late fifties, the Rams went from being the major professional sports franchise in Southern California to being one of five. The Los Angeles Dodgers moved from Brooklyn in 1958, the Los Angeles Chargers of the American Football League were founded in 1960, the Los Angeles Lakers moved from Minneapolis in 1960, and the Los Angeles Angels were awarded to Gene Autry in 1961.

In the decades that followed, the Kings, Raiders, Clippers, Ducks, Galaxy, Sparks, LAFC, ACFC, and obviously, the Chargers would join them. All the while competing with the two major universities' sports for eyeballs. Nobody could be a fan of all of them, so they choose.

When SoFi began hosting events in 2020, the lake did not have an official name. Members of the Los Angeles Chargers subreddit started a grassroots movement to name the lake in honor of legendary Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers. One particular fan gets credit for the origins.

"We took a tour of SoFi as soon as they allowed tours in 2021, and I just remember walking out of there being impressed by the building, but also struck by how soulless and branded every piece of it felt," said Corban Lester.

Lester—or as he's known in the tailgate community, Señor Snappy—and his wife Abi were taking some pictures around the lake when the inspiration struck.

"Everything down there is named after its corporate sponsor, and as soon as they stopped paying, the name would change," said Lester. "I thought, 'How can we coin something that makes SoFi feel more like home, and also give it a sense of history, which it didn't have.'"

How could Hollywood Park and the tycoons of pro football have forgotten to sell the naming rights to the lake when they sell exclusive sponsorship rights to the team's practice jerseys?

"And that's when I came up with Rivers Lake," said Lester.

By September 2021, over a thousand people shared reviews on multiple Google Maps markers dedicated to Rivers Lake. This ruffled some feathers, and an online war of legitimacy ("the Lake Wars") briefly flared up. Ultimately, Rivers won the day, and five years later, here we are.

Journalists have used it. Businesses used it. Even real estate listings have used the name. Last week, the name Rivers Lake was mentioned in an article on Sports Illustrated's website about the quirks of every NFL stadium.

Zooming out, you'll notice numerous markers for Rivers Lake, indicating that a plurality of users have used this name when looking for directions to the stadium.

The name has been referenced by Google Maps, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, and even ironically by the LA Rams' social media platforms. The name has just stuck with both Chargers fans and, perhaps more significantly, everyone else.

At some point, Rivers Lake stopped being something that Chargers fans had to convince Angelinos to say and simply became what everyone calls it.

Señor Snappy was onto something. Whatever jazzy new accoutrement the building bolstered, none of it had any connection to football history. It might as well be an AirBnB.

That is the real story of Rivers Lake.

Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the Spanos family would have no trouble selling their seats next to the lake. The NFL's popularity has not waned. Los Angeles, as a Petri dish, has proven that.

Since the NFL's big tent went back up, the same social experiment has revealed that tribalism, alcohol, and chutzpah produce boorish fan behavior we thought was reserved for soccer hooligans in Europe. At this point, it must be mentioned that people have drowned in the lake.

Picture an NFL owner in a luxury suite eating Beluga; we need to keep cashing those checks. If a sponsor balks at the price, then we find a new sponsor. If the unions threaten to strike for a living wage, we automate beer sales, or hire new people.

That's the soulless architecture that Lester felt on his initial tour. That's the whole point of claiming the lake for ourselves; to emancipate a cog in the machine in a declaration of humanity; of passion.

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The NFL was counting on this. All that mattered is that the interest in The Game continued to grow. The three-decade vacuum in Los Angeles didn't diminish any interest in the sport.

"First, the climate. There is none. This isn’t a Chargers town. This has never been a Chargers town. The Chargers had 21 years to woo us as an uncontested suitor and still couldn’t make it a Chargers town." —Bill Plaschke. LA Times

While Plaschke isn't wrong, he also isn't telling the truth.

Aside from the Dodgers and the Lakers, this isn't any team's town. The neighborhoods are too diffuse, the championships are too intermittent, the beaches are too enticing, and the streaming sites are pushing too much original content.

Except for the lake. The lake is ours.

Writing about the team is my own version of therapy. By framing my own emotions into writing, I can process the enigma of Chargers football and preserve it for the poor zealots who will eventually replace me.

The blog acts both as a conservatory for a team that once lost its fan base and as an education for one that is marginalized by the national media. We tell these stories in our own words out of an obligation: because we do not trust anyone else to.

Kinda like the lake.

It shows that a taxonomy by actual human beings surpasses any naming dispute. Don't take my word for it. Ask Google. When people use a specific name or keyword to locate a place on Google Maps, it enhances the validity of that name. In the case of Rivers Lake and SoFi Stadium, the public has made their choice clear.

"The main reason I named the lake is that the folks who built it and run it didn't bother," said Lester.

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Full Disclaimer: The Rivers Lake Yacht Club is an inclusive collection of Chargers fans from all over the world who cannot be told that they do not exist, SoFi Stadium is not their home, and that Los Angeles couldn't care less about them. At Rivers Lake Yacht Club, we reject the lazy and outdated narrative that the Chargers have no fans while celebrating the unique, courageous, and diverse voices of our own community who love the Chargers.