Ducks made Anaheim its own sports city

Before any forms of the Mighty Ducks were conceived, Southern California novelist T Jefferson Parker established an authoritative distinction between the neighboring Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

A childhood transplant from L.A., Parker invoked the expression “Orange Curtain” in a 1990 column for the Los Angeles Times. Favoring his longer-serving locale, he pulled no punches, sincere or facetious, on the ostensibly pretentious Hollywoodians.

The Orange Curtain, he argued, makes a pertinent partition between realists and dreamers. It marks a clearer line between those who are too proud of themselves and those embarrassed by the glitzy shadows.

“We know who we are,” Parker wrote of his adopted neighbors. As an example, he insisted that, unlike his L.A. counterpart, the archetypal O.C. boy “does not entertain dreams of movie making.” Likewise, he wrote, the O.C. girl “doesn’t secretly wish to be Michelle Pfeiffer.”

And Orange County residents adhering to Parker’s philosophy do not wish their home to be Los Angeles. Sure, Anaheim, Santa Ana and the like are part of the same L.A. metropolitan area. And yes, it is all technically the same media market.

But save for a few overlaps, they boast different area codes, different attitudes and, most crucially, contrasting cultures.

Imagine, then, the rush of refreshment three years after Parker’s column, when the third major team to hit Anaheim’s sports scene became the first to observe the Orange Curtain.

Granted, the official name “Mighty Ducks of Anaheim” broke tradition by putting the nickname ahead of the dateline. But that ploy was implicitly designed to pounce on the year-old namesake Disney movie, appealing to more prospective fans. It made sense given that Disneyland was Anaheim’s oldest marquee attraction.

But at least the 1993 expansion NHL franchise was showing unprecedented pride in the city limits. Across town, Anaheim Stadium was home to the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, as it had been since 1980. It was nearing 30 years of hosting baseball’s California Angels.

The hockey team could have easily taken C-cuts of the same nature. It would have been socially acceptable since it compensated the rival Kings with $25 million to share the region. And the L.A. dateline would have been exceptionally attractive at the time, since the Kings employed Wayne Gretzky.

Yet the franchise never identified as the Los Angeles Mighty Ducks, California Mighty Ducks or Southern California Mighty Ducks. It did not even go for the county dateline, or a gimmicky SoCal moniker.

Instead, America’s ultimate niche sport strolled on the scene and touted Anaheim as a standalone city. In so doing, it set a precedent that the Mighty Ducks’ sporting neighbors and brief Disney stepbrothers soon followed.

Effective in 1997, the Angels stopped hogging the state dateline from the Dodgers, Padres, Giants and Athletics. The newfangled Anaheim Angels brand had a smooth, solid ring to it, especially for the core fan base. With the Rams in St. Louis, Anaheim had two full-time teams each fully embracing their side of the Orange Curtain.

The choices looked even better during the 2002-03 hockey season. The year began with the Angels putting in their first World Series appearance, winning it over the Giants. It ended with the Mighty Ducks trekking to their first Stanley Cup Final.

The resultant reams of exposure for the city were surely amplified by Anaheim’s display on every TV network scoreboard.

But within three years, the Angels regressed. Starting in 2005, which would witness their third playoff appearance in four seasons, they answered to the clunky name Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Naturally, that did not sit well with the home crowd. At the 10-year mark of the change, the Orange County Register gauged the toll of reintroducing L.A.’s shadow to Anaheim’s ballpark.

The club has not suffered substantially at the gate for pushing its real city to the backseat. But while few fans are shunning the team, they are not hiding their sentimental wounds either.

The concluding quote in that 2015 Register report, courtesy of sports marketing expert Marc Ganis, is mildly ominous. Ganis opined at the time, “If they decide to move elsewhere, having changed their name a decade ago will make it easier.”

As it happens, the Angels jettisoned the secondary Anaheim dateline altogether the next year. They are now wrapping up their second consecutive season as the Los Angeles Angels.

The team is still in place, but Orange County baseball buffs can only hope the third-time adage comes true. They have already seen teams from the two other major leagues leave after operating in Anaheim with an exclusive L.A. dateline.

The Los Angeles Rams are back after a 22-year detour in Missouri. But they are back in their original building, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That will be the stand-in before they move into a new complex in Los Angeles County.

That same complex is slated to feature a new arena for the Clippers. For a time, the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim looked poised to fill that role. The Clippers played portions of their home slate there while continuing to use the hand-me-down Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena from the big-brother Lakers.

But Clippers management declined a 1996 offer to make the Pond their permanent home. They expressly preferred to wait for something in or closer to L.A.

Three years later, when the Staples Center opened, both NBA teams moved in as full-time co-tenants of the Kings. Now one of them could be looking at an even shiner new mansion in Inglewood.

So much for fantasies of the Anaheim Clippers. Too bad they didn’t think like their temporary Sports Arena minor-league hockey cohabitant.

In 1995-96, the IHL saw the San Diego Gulls transfer to SoCal’s bigger metropolis and resurface as the Los Angeles Ice Dogs. Their stay within city limits proved a proverbial cup of coffee, and they moved across the town border.

Accordingly, they began 1996-97 as the Long Beach Ice Dogs, playing in an L.A. County town that brushes O.C. (Some will tell you Long Beach is separate from both entities.)

The name stuck for 11 years, including seven as a WCHL and ECHL franchise. The franchise was subsequently replaced by the Ontario Reign, who continue as an AHL brand in San Bernardino County. Just more proof that preexisting name recognition does not matter much for puck franchises in this area.

You would think hockey does not know any better. The Ice Dogs, Reign and Mighty Ducks alike have stood apart from their hardball, hoops and pigskin peers. When other sports teams have stretched the truth to maintain a more glamorous moniker, they have been the arctic cod out of cold water.

Except the Ducks have adapted. By the time Disney left and took the “Mighty” element with it, Anaheim had been the franchise’s sole identified locality for 13 years. One year after the Angels’ perceived sellout, dismayed locals would not see a rerun at the Honda Center.

But within another year, they would see a championship, the most tried-and-true means of cementing a team’s name recognition. And the Ducks got that five years before the Kings franchise — 26 years Anaheim’s senior — claimed its first Stanley Cup.

But unlike the 2002 World Series winners, we still have not seen any Los Angeles Ducks merchandise. If anything, while the Disney ties are gone, the franchise keeps finding ways to scream Anaheim. The rebranded Ducks include orange in their color scheme, and acknowledge it as an homage to their home county.

Parker must surely approve. After all, as he concluded in his 1990 essay, “People in Los Angeles all want to be someone else because they’re miserable; people in Orange County are content to be who they are because they’re happy.”

By that logic, the Clippers and Rams are wretched, and the Angels only somewhat less so. If one did not know better, one might think they want to be the Lakers, Chargers and Dodgers, respectively.

All jabs aside, the Anaheim Ducks (nee Mighty Ducks of Anaheim) have clearly never wanted to be the Kings. By the end of this season, will have epitomized a Parker-esque O.C. spirit for a quarter-century and counting.