Joseph MacRae, a Chargers fan disappointed by the team’s move to Los Angeles for the 2017-2018 season, raised $10,000 via a GoFundMe page to display an anti-NFL billboard near the Chargers’ new home, the StubHub Center in Carson, CA, for the next three weeks, ESPN reports.
MacRae’s billboard ran during the Chargers’ first-ever homestand in LA, a three-game stretch during which the team will host the Dolphins on September 17, the Chiefs on the 24th and the Eagles on October 1.
MacRae designed all five of the messages that will rotate on the digital sign. One, which he posted on Twitter September 10, features the words “No Freaking Loyalty,” an alternative expansion of the NFL acronym, beside a picture of Commissioner Rodger Goodell standing behind a microphone and making a peace sign with his right hand.
MacRae’s tweet promised “a big surprise on game day.”
405 south next week! This is one of five images that will be up for three weeks on the digital billboard. With a big surprise on game day ?? pic.twitter.com/nX0O9j9QrC
— SD Sign Guy (@jmt619) September 10, 2017
The billboard stands at the intersection of Interstate 405 and Main Street, about a mile and a half from the StubHub Center. The owner of which has vowed not to allow the NFL to block the messages.
Some of the billboard’s slides, MacRae said on his GoFundMe page, will feature #STL and #Oakland. The hashtags are in reference to the Rams’ having moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles for the 2017-2018 season and the Raiders’ planned relocation from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020.
“This isn’t just for San Diego fans. This is for Oakland fans and St. Louis fans as well. Your cities didn’t deserve this and most importantly, you didn’t deserve this,” MacRae wrote on the GoFundMe page.
MacRae made local news in January when he heckled Chargers owner Dean Spanos at an invitation-only welcome rally the team held in Inglewood, CA, a Los Angles suburb 120 miles north of San Diego.
I did what I did for every SD fan that wanted to say something to Dean. No disrespect to the players.
— SD Sign Guy (@jmt619) January 18, 2017
The fan said in the GoFundMe announcement that some of the billboard’s messages will express anti-Spanos sentiments. He says Spanos had been planning to move the team for years before he officially announced the relocation in January.
The Chargers, MacRae says, declined an offer by the city of San Diego to pay half of the costs associated with replacing Qualcomm Stadium’s JumboTron (which SI said in 2013 was “so old that some replacement parts can only be found on eBay”) because the team was already planning on moving to LA. (No reports regarding the potential deal could be found.)
Publicly, Spanos has maintained that he did everything within his power to keep the Chargers in San Diego.
He said in an interview published on chargers.com in January 2016 that he and the team “never wanted to leave San Diego,” but that “the inability of the city at the political level to get any kind of public funding or any kind of a vote to help subsidize a stadium” compelled the move.”
SI explains the political dysfunction in San Diego, and the shabbiness of Qualcomm Stadium, at length in the article linked to above, and argues that “the fact that Chargers president and CEO Dean Spanos hasn’t packed up the team already [the article was written in 2013]…speaks volumes about his sincerity about keeping the Chargers in town, although many of his critics will refuse to accept that.”
405 north, exit Main Street. After you exit and go down the ramp it's right in front of you. Take a picture and share it! pic.twitter.com/6hzjsu34Xb
— SD Sign Guy (@jmt619) September 19, 2017
The last straw for Spanos and the Chargers came in November 2016, when Proposition C, a legislative measure which would have raised taxes and allocated public money and land toward the construction of a new stadium for the Chargers in San Diego, failed after 61 percent of citizens voted against it.
SportingNews notes that Spanos spent $10 million out of pocket in support of the measure.
Spanos, whose father Alex purchased a majority interest in the Chargers in 1984, has served as the team’s CEO since 1994. That year, the team went 11-5 and made its first-ever Super Bowl appearance. From 1996 through 2016, though, the San Diego Chargers made just seven playoff appearances and did not return to the Super Bowl.
The team made the playoffs just once between 2010 and 2016: in 2013, they earned a Wild Card spot with a 9-7 record but fell in the divisional round.
The lack of success is not due to a dearth of talent. Hall-of-Famer LaDainian Tomlinson spent nine years in a Chargers uniform. Linebacker Junior Seau made the Pro Bowl in 12 of his 13 years with the team and was named First-Team All-Pro six times.
Active quarterback Philip Rivers has posted over 4,000 yards in eight of his 11 seasons as the team’s starter. He led the league in yards in 2010 and in touchdowns as well as quarterback rating in 2008.
http://twitter.com/DerekNBCSD/status/908442118045106182
Given the talent that has come through San Diego and the lack of rings the city has to show for it, many fans—MacRae included—blame Spanos for their team’s relative mediocrity.
“Let’s be real – as long as the Chargers have a Spanos as an owner, they’ll never win a championship,” MacRae writes on the GoFundMe page. “How did The Chargers handle LT? Seau? Weddle?…Even if they [the Chargers] were still here [in San Diego], it’s a poorly run organization. If anything we should be uniting so that Dean [Spanos] sells the team and the Chargers have a real chance at success!”
But for MacRae—a lifelong Chargers fan who says he hasn’t missed a game in 25 years—and other fans, the real sting of the team’s move is that countless San Diego die-hards will no longer be able to don their colors every weekend, journey to the dump that is Qualcomm Stadium, and cheer on their team.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
