Updated 12.10.25: Scroll to the end of this post and see the running list of people, places and things so far assigned to numbers 00 to 99.
What if we told you the history of Southern California sports in the Greater Los Angeles area can be explained in unique bios, stories and essays that are attached to the 101 different numbers worn on the front, back, or elsewhere on an athlete’s uniform?
Let’s say this covers, perhaps, the last 101 years.
Take a jersey number like 32. So many who have worn it represent all the different aspects of SoCal history. Look here: Koufax, O.J., Magic, Walton, Marcus, Quickie.
Quick — who might generate the most compelling story for anyone who has worn No. 32?
It’s probably not anyone you might think, even if given 32 guesses.
This isn’t so much about who “owns” the number, or who wore it best. Those discussions over a few beers have their own amusement element and entertainment value. Ultimately, they come up to personal preference, nostalgic entrancement, and the first one of these athletes you may have encountered between the age of 6 and 11.
We will start by defining SoCal territory as what starts below the 35°45′ latitude line, stops short of our friends in San Diego, and unites the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara as kissing cousins. All are freeway adjacent, used to traverse the landscape fluidly. Otherwise, this becomes unremittingly sized up as a misunderstood gaggle of scattershot suburbs, all in search of a cohesive landmass.
Sports helps shape its boundaries, and its communities and neighborhoods.
Los Angeles, by itself, one of the most mythologized cities in the world, blurring a public idea of the city that blends fact, fiction and Hollywood; desert, beach and snow-capped mountains; landslides, earthquakes and floods. We all have some identify from it, via the prism of a traffic jam, a yoga session or plastic surgery. From high-priced villas to a beleaguered homeless population that can’t be blamed for just wanting to enjoy a warm day on the sidewalk tent not far from a local outreach facility.
We weather this storm as we can.
Modified over the years and attributed most notably to Dorothy Park, Aldous Huxley, H.L. Menken or Alexander Woollcott — maybe even Snoop Dogg — SoCal is far more fascinating than 88 surburbs in search of city. Plant that idea in its fertile desert soil, often in sorely need of watering, and it takes root.
But it’s not all that watered down.
“Los Angeles is a city built upon amnesia and denial,” Tom Curren wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2025, helping to introduce a multi-faceted project trying to predict the future success, or failure, of the region.
“Graded and paved, bought and sold, it bears little likeness to Tovaangar, the home for the first people who, for thousands of years, walked its valleys and chaparral-clad basins and paddled its broad shorelines.
“Eventually, they were overtaken, falling silent to the noisy ambitions of foreigners and settlers who set about transforming this vast floodplain with imported water and orchards and homes. Branding their creation paradise, they never questioned their improbable aspirations.
“Instead, they mythologized their works, borrowing from the past what was convenient and discarding the rest, so the picture of the Golden State in the early 20th century was romantic enough to persuade more and more Easterners to board the trains that crossed the deserts to arrive in this transformed pueblo.”
Sports fits mightily into this ambiguous narrative that has blossomed into folklore as a geographical punchline for those outside the civic dysfunction of it all and dispassionate for clarification.
Sports shaped the region’s history — from the 1932 Summer Olympics, to the 1984 Summer Olympics, to the 2028 Summer Olympics. To baseball’s World Series championship teams jammed into the football arena that would host the first Super Bowl, Coliseums and Forums and do-it-yourself home repair-sponsored mini stadiums.
“In an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, there are 88 municipalities, countless unincorporated areas, and almost 10 million residents, many of whom aren’t entirely sure what jurisdiction they’re in at any given moment,” Conor Friedersdorf once wrote for The Atlantic in 2011.
You be the judge.
Expand your idea of the boundaries we want to cover here. And figure in all its numerology.
Continue reading “SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Explain Our Greater Los Angeles Athletic Heritage”
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 