PRO FOOTBALL ’95 : A Brown Air Is Hanging Over L.A. : Who Says We Don’t Have Any Teams to Root for?

The cookies served on Sundays only look like dog bones, and doesn’t that beat wearing a melon on your head?

As for the colors--mud brown and orange--is that any less attractive than dressing all in black like some kind of Johnny Cash wanna-be?

The Rams and Raiders are gone, but for $25 you can become a membership card-carrying Brown fan and gain access to one of 27 bars in Southern California dedicated to showing Cleveland’s games on TV this season.

If you cheered for Marc Wilson or admired Jim Everett, it’s a natural progression to root for Vinny Testaverde.

“Why, sure, it’s a good time for everyone to jump on the bandwagon,” said Jeff Wagner, top dawg in the local Brown fan club. “We’ve got a pretty solid team other than the quarterback, and now there’s a glimmer of hope with Zeier.”

That’s Eric Zeier, quarterback and winner of the Maurice Bassett Award as the most productive rookie in training camp this year. Maurice Bassett? Never mind. . . .

“For $30 a year, you get an embossed membership card, a T-shirt, a signed thing from Michael McCaskey and discounts on rental cars,” said Jim Cunningham, state coordinator for the Chicago Bear Fan Club. “If Ram and Raider fans are searching for a team to align themselves with, here we are.”

The Browns, the Bears, the Pittsburgh Steelers: “We’ll take fans from anywhere,” said Anita Watts, local coordinator for the Black and Gold Brigade, the Steelers’ fan club. “Even Raider fans.”

Who will capture the fancy of rejected Ram and Raider fans? Start with “A” in the telephone book and move onto Z (John Zywocienski) and there is no consensus.

“I’m going to be a Bears fan,” said Kris Dotto, who answered the phone for “A,” otherwise known as AAA McKinstry.

“I’m going mountain climbing Sunday,” Zywocienski said. “Not having football here will change absolutely nothing for me. It’s just another Sunday.”

Imagine if the Browns left Cleveland, the Bears pulled out of Chicago or the Steelers abandoned Pittsburgh. “It would be like the crash of ‘29,” Watts said. “If the Rams and Raiders had a following like the Steelers, they would still be in [Southern] California.”

The Rams and Raiders had fans. “Well, I never sold any Rams stuff,” said Cory Billings, manager for Champs Sports at South Coast Plaza. “We sold more Patriots and Buccaneer things than Rams. I still have Jerome Bettis jerseys sitting on the rack.”

Billings said his store stocks shirts from all 30 NFL teams. Top sellers are the San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins.

“We stocked up on more Charger tickets,” said Jim Burress, manager of Murray’s Tickets’ Los Angeles-area office. “But I also think the hard-core sports fan might save his money for the Lakers or catch a baseball game.”

Eric Tracy, co-host of SportsTalk on KABC radio with Steve Edwards, said the show has asked its listeners to adopt a team.

“So far it’s been San Francisco, San Diego, Cleveland, Chicago, Miami, Dallas and a handful for Green Bay,” Tracy said. “As God is my witness, we have not had one single Rams call.”

Prof. Robert Schleser, director for the center of sports performance psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said that’s what he would expect from Ram and Raider fans.

“It’s the model for grieving,” Schleser said. “First there is denial. They aren’t going to leave. Once they are gone, there is anger. Then there is negotiating where everything is going to be better. I suspect L.A. is not there yet.”

Will L.A. ever get there? Do its fans care? Baltimore lost its professional football team in 1984, and Vito Stellino of the Baltimore Sun, who has detailed the city’s agonizing reaction ever since, said, “It’s different. With the Colts it was such an identity thing: The greatest game ever played, Super Bowl III, the movie, ‘Diner,’ and it was the fabric of the city type of thing,” he said. “The people in L.A. are just going to say, ‘Hey, we get more games on TV.’ ”

NFL rules prohibited this market from receiving most doubleheader games because the networks were not allowed to broadcast a competing game that might cut into ticket sales for local teams. Now NBC and Fox, in addition to each providing one game, will takes turns showing a second.

KTTV, the local Fox affiliate, has asked viewers to call in and vote for the game they wish to view Sunday: 49ers-Saints or Rams-Packers? “I understand it’s running 70-30 in favor of the 49ers,” said Lou D’ermilio, a Fox spokesman.

A spokesman for NBC said the Raiders will probably see a fair share of air time here this season. Sunday, the network will open with the Chargers’ game at Oakland.

DirecTV is offering the entire NFL Sunday schedule for $139, which also requires a $700 18-inch satellite dish. “I have never personally met a Ram fan, but I know a Raider fan, and if there are die-hard Ram and Raider fans, this is the way they can see all the games,” said Tom Bracken, vice president of DirecTV.

Somebody is to going to gain the favor of area fans, said Dr. Mari Womack, who teaches cultural anthropology specializing in symbols and American popular culture at UCLA Extension and Cal State Northridge.

“L.A. has to have a champion,” she said. “Our whole lives are filled with conflict, and people have to identify with a champion, somebody to fight the battles for them. You can’t batter your boss or shoot your husband, so you need to go out and watch somebody else do that for you. Most people choose a powerful image, and that’s why the Raiders have been so popular.

“Football teams are like opposing armies and people tend to identify with them; we lost a couple of armies here and we lost a way to work out social conflict. Fortunately, we still have UCLA and USC, but it’s not the same. Amateur athletes are like a volunteer army, and they give us idealism in solving conflict. Pro athletes are like soldiers of fortune and we’re going to miss that concept of all-out slaughter.”

Speaking of the Rams. . . . “I don’t think people are going to jump off bridges because their armies have left,” said Womack, who studied the Rams previously for some of her professional writings. “I’ll make a prediction. When the football season gets under way and everyone is watching it on TV, there is going to be a sense of loss. The fact no one paid attention to them when they were here won’t matter. It’s like a man who neglects his wife and then pitches a battle when she tries to leave. People will be angry at both teams--they betrayed us--and they will most likely switch loyalties to another team.”

Dr. Stephen Lerch, chairman of the Radford College sociology and anthropology department in Virginia, said, “Los Angeles is going to continue to be a major league town whether it has football or not.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see something again like the reaction when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. That was a death in the family kind of thing. Now it’s like what Seinfeld said on Letterman recently: You don’t root for a team anymore because there’s so much turnover; you cheer for uniforms; you’re cheering the laundry.”

The NFL has said football will soon return to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, “We’re looking for more business on Sundays,” said Jerry Randazzo, manager of Bay Shore Bowl in Santa Monica. “Not because the Rams and Raiders are gone--no one cares--no, we just had automatic scorers installed.”

TVs at the Stove Piper in Northridge on Sunday will be on, and tuned to the New England Patriot-Cleveland Brown game. The guy with the Browns’ cap that looks as if he has a dog bone coming out of his head will be there, and the folks who paint their faces will be there. As the sign over the front door says, “We have always called the Browns the home team--why don’t you?”

Just prepare for a lot of barking. “I think what we’re going to see in L.A. is everybody returning to their roots until we get another team,” said Jerry Mankin, owner of the Stove Piper. “People from Chicago are going to watch the Bears, the Eagles will get the Philly people interested . . . and one more thing: Go Browns.”