On a Wednesday morning in January, Dean Spanos was at a podium inside the Forum in Inglewood during the Chargers’ self-welcome rally when a bearded man began to shout vitriol laced with obscenities directed at the Chargers chairman.
The interruption caused Spanos to shift from his default personality of uncomfortably awkward to extremely uncomfortably awkward.
The scene went viral.
So mission accomplished, right?
Not. Even. Close.
This was no ordinary heckler.
Spanos ticked off the wrong fan, a guy who wanted to make sure he and the whole damn NFL knew they screwed over the wrong fan base.
“People are saying what I’m doing is crazy, (they) would never go through it,” Joseph MacRae said this week. “But after living here my whole life and being talked about as a bad sports town with bad sports fans, how about us now? We’re doing something. I feel good about what I’m doing.”
Go ahead and dismiss MacRae as some sort of jilted lover, a dude with too much time and misspent energy.
But give him this: he isn’t just sitting back and tweeting vitriol. He isn’t sitting at all.
Maybe you’ve heard by now, seen the pictures. Perhaps you’re even one of the 300,000 people a day who have passed the billboard message he arranged on the 405 up near Carson excoriating Spanos and the NFL.
At the end of May, the 31-year-old MacRae started a gofundme campaign aimed at raising money for the billboards. By the end of August, some 350 people had committed a total of more than $10,000.
On Wednesday, MacRae’s missives went live.
There’s the one of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell with a clown nose and the league’s well-worn slogan, “Football is Family.” The word “Family” is written over with a series of dollar signs. Below the slogan are the names of the two cities the NFL has abandoned and the one it will abandon shortly: San Diego. Oakland. St. Louis.
Another image shows Spanos and his two sons, John and A.G., accompanied by the text, “Fight for LA? LA doesn’t want you!”
There is Dean Spanos smirking next to this: “Pay. Your. Rent.”
One of Goodell with this to the right of his face:
No
Freaking
Loyalty
And, finally, there is the image like a comic strip. It might take passers-by a few times to fully absorb the supposed interaction as Spanos and Rams owner Stan Kroenke stand side by side. To the left of Spanos are the words, “Hey Stan, excited for our new stadium?” And to the right of Kroenke: “You mean my stadium? You’re just a tenant.”
Every 62 seconds, one of the five images is shown on the digital board, where it can be seen for six to eight seconds. Altogether, MacRae’s images will be shown 1,000 times a day through Oct. 3 on the board that sits in Carson, just west northeast of Main Street, facing west toward the 405 North.
Beyond that, his message went international — touted on the web pages of Sports Illustrated and Yahoo and Rolling Stone to the Daily Mail in England and a German sports web site called ran.
If you’re going to be bitter, go big.
“I am as salty as you can get,” MacRae acknowledges. “I am as bitter as you can get. I am as angry as you can get. I am every single word you want to say that will make you feel better. But everybody telling me to get over it and move on … that just makes me want to do more. I’m trying to just silence the critics.”
He’s mad that some media have depicted San Diegans as half-hearted fans who didn’t support the team or its stadium efforts. He’s mad that Spanos moved. He’s mad that the NFL facilitated it.
”Roger Goodell, the league allowed them to move,” MacRae said. “This is their fault. … I’m targeting them to make them not forget it was a horrible decision.”
Rarely is acrimony turned into such action or bitterness so creative. This is grassroots angry antagonism gone worldwide.
And still to come, it’s going airborne.
From 11 a.m. to noon, above StubHub Center, a plane will fly carrying behind it a banner, the message purchased with a leftover $1,000.
The banner will read: “Worst owner in sports? Dean Spanos.”
That won’t be the end of it either. MacRae will be at the game against the Miami Dolphins with signs he has made of paper, so as to fold and store in his pocket to avoid confiscation.
For all this, the guy who works as a server at an Italian restaurant is pretty rational. The answers MacRae offers are continually surprising in their thoughtfulness — and not solely because they’re delivered against the backdrop of his quirky crusade.
He knows what his cause is about.
He’s not saving lives or putting them back together. He never pretended this was turning back climate change.
“Look, a gofundme page is for a cause you want to promote,” MacRae said. “If someone wants to devote $100 for hurricane relief in Texas and Florida, there is nothing wrong with that. If somebody wants to donate $100 to put up an anti-NFL billboard, there is nothing wrong with that. … There is no doubt this money could technically go to a better place. I’m not going to say this I more important than hurricane relief. But this is something every San Diego sports fan would appreciate and understand. I believe people will actually see it’s for a good cause. This is something the people of San Diego can rally and say, ‘(Expletive), Dean Spanos.’ “
That’s all. After MacRae said it, literally.
“I’m glad I’m starting to be recognized as the guy who got the billboards done,” MacRae said. “Not the guy who flipped off the NFL owner.”
But it was that moment that prompted this monumental effort.
The notoriety MacRae got from his interruption sparked an idea. He’d long been about signs, taking them especially to Chargers games over the past couple seasons, imploring (shaming) Spanos as the relocation possibility hung over the team.
Said MacRae: “I consider myself a peaceful man. I’m just a really diehard San Diego sports fan. I’m also serving as the representative of San Diego sports fans who are getting that we aren’t diehard, that we’re laid back. I knew so many fans felt the same way I did, but they didn’t have an idea how to get back at the NFL and Spanos. They said, “I want to do what he’s doing. I don’t want to go through the emotional stress, but I’ll donate 20 bucks.”
Indeed, it seems many alienated Chargers fans felt like they couldn’t have said it better themselves.
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