The Clippers as Counter-Culture
There are two types of people in this world—those who would root for the Los Angeles Lakers and those who would root for the Los Angeles Clippers. It doesn’t matter where you live, if you’ve heard of either of these organizations, or if you’ve even heard of basketball. These two organizations are as class symbolic as East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby. The Lakers have trophies and Hollywood fanfare. The Clippers have cheap tickets and cheaper tickets. In that it was largely created by the people of Los Angeles, this dichotomous sports scene is a reflection of our cultural values.
In reality, the Lakers are a collection of really good basketball players, and the Clippers are a collection of really good basketball players. Each team plays in the same building of the same city. In other words, the two teams are substantially quite similar. However, substance means little to status-seeking humans. Somewhere along the line, the Lakers became a symbol for status. They won prolifically with Elgin Baylor and Jerry West in the 1960s and later with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson, and James Worthy. All this winning begat high-powered fans, and high-powered fans begat more high-powered fans. If you wanted to be considered somebody in L.A., it became a pretty good idea to be seen at a Lakers game, and the closer to the sweat the better. In economics, we call sitting courtside at Lakers games a likely “status signal” in that such an action is typically less about seeing and more about being seen. Courtside Lakers fans signal that they know how to choose and break into a high-powered group of individuals. For a signal to be effective, it must separate the individual from others in a desired way. Therefore, a signal cannot be accessible to all individuals. Courtside Lakers tickets are anything but accessible. At around $90, average ticket prices were 57 percent higher for the Lakers than for the Clippers in 2007-2008, and this number gravely underestimates the proportional difference for quality seats. Such a substantial price difference existed despite the fact that the Clippers garnered more combined victories than the Lakers in the three seasons prior to 2007-2008. It wasn’t the basketball game but the status game that drove up demand for (ticket prices of) home Lakers games.
Despite all of this focus on the Lakers, the Clippers do exist. I saw them play on television once. Moreover, the Clippers have people who attend their games. One might call such individuals basketball fans, but one wouldn’t be entirely correct. It seems that Clippers fans are a mix of basketball fans and fans of counter-culture. Counter-culturalists get a perverse thrill out of paddling upstream in the river of society. They like to do things so completely opposite of societal norms as to give the rest of society the proverbial middle finger. Counter-culturalists engage in what economists might call, “countersignaling.” Whereas attending a Lakers game typically signals that a person has status, attending a Clippers game might countersignal that a person wants to see some quality basketball and could care less about such associations or labels. This does not imply that a famous person could not be a Clippers fan. However, it does indicate that a famous person who decides to root for the Clippers places less value upon being a visible part of an established status club. Billy Crystal is a classic example of the countersignaling celebrity. Crystal roots for the New York Mets in baseball and the Clippers in basketball (In terms of status, the Mets are to the Yankees as the Clippers are to the Lakers). Crystal is proof that to have status is not necessarily to engage in superficial status games.
The distinction between the Lakers fan and the Clippers fan is as much about ideology as it is about position. One might take fan countersignaling as a form of rebellion from the oppression of status contest. It is a rejection of the notion that we should, or even can, love something selfishly.
-SS
(and everyone else who has rooted for the other set of really tall guys in L.A.)
