Updated 9.11.26: Scroll to the end of this post for the list of people, places and things so far assigned to numbers 00 to 99.
“Los Angeles is an idea as much as a city. A landscape of imagination and aspiration. Behind the idea of Los Angeles are stories of people, dreamers seeking fortune or reinvention, and those who saw the dream as an illusion. What’s the real history behind the fantasy?”
== Nathan Masters, opening to the PBS series “Lost L.A.”
Imagine Southern California as a place where you hop on a freeway and drive past whatever you’ve been told is disposable entertainment or superficial sunshine.
Outsiders, denying to have any sort of bias jealousy, can default to a theory that greater Southern California is inherently flawed. The sentiment modified over the years has been alternately attributed most notably to Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley or H.L. Menken. It’s engraved on a tag hanging from Snoop Dogg’s choke chain.
Creativity undermining stability.
What does the scoreboard say?
Sports, and numbers, can winners, losers and all the value in between.
Especially digits that have, with some real rhyme or reason, somehow get assigned to an athlete.
Los Angeles alone embraces 114 distinct neighborhoods and cities spread across 470 square miles — 10 times the size of San Francisco. Desert, beach and snow-capped mountains in one glimpse. A Hollywood sign looking over a South Central ghetto. All on terrain formed by seismic underpinning, drought, fire, flooding, sliding mud and loose asphalt.
Whose fault is it anyway?
“In an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, there are 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.
Does it really matter? Not if the palate keeps changing as the tectonic plates keep shifting under our feet.
We weather it all by mastering one, if not more, of the 220 languages available in the region, sometimes melding them together. It’s the beauty of diversity.
And a way that sports here seems to easily erase self-imposed boundaries and embrace unity.
Consider SoCal sports history as its own periodic table of 101 elements. Legend, pop culture, scandal. Dreaming dreams, and finding out reality can sometimes meet up and match it.
Star with the No. 32 on your SoCal off ramp, for an example.
Koufax, Magic, O.J., Walton, Marcus.
Quick — who wore that number best?
Who “owned” it? Who inspires the most recognition? Ultimately, a personal preference, linked to nostalgia and an impressionable connection.
That’s how stars and stories align, with numbers providing a language all their own. A love language. Numbers can be a romantic partner in life. They feed mythology, heroics and imagination.
No. 32 is a prime spot to point to not ride the stories of trailblazers, but head off onto some trails still a bit unpaved. Through our own history, we found a few No. 32s that reflect a more telling look. Ones you’ve not likely heard or read about before. That’s our goal.
For our purposes, SoCal territory starts with what falls below 35°45′ latitude. That covers the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, all distinguishable in their own right, with a connective tissue accessible by freeway, Metrolink or mountain e-bike.
In general typography, SoCal can stretch as far as the Mexico border. We’ll take attitude over latitude here and stick to this Thomas Guide. San Diego will get its own day in the sun. Just not so much here.
If you’ve experienced a traffic tie-up from the backseat of a driverless car, nursed a pulled quad from a yoga stretch and found a gently used pair of Converse All-Stars from the local thrift store, we’ll call it Tuesday.
Now spoil yourself with a $32 influencer-endorsed protein smoothie.
“Los Angeles is a city built upon amnesia and denial,” Tom Curren once wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2025.
“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 reflects that, and celebrates it.
A melting pot that has shown how a beloved entity like the Dodgers were inclined to leave a foundation set in Brooklyn and discover a new way of doing business.
The Lakers followed suit migrating from Minneapolis. The Rams once held down the region after leaving Cleveland, then, proving you can come home again, circled back after a purgatory in St. Louis. The team had already stretch into Anaheim to see how far “Los Angeles” as a brand could expand. The MLB Angels also took it upon themselves to confuse geography from Los Angeles to Orange County to … California?
The foundation for pro sports came from the two major university-driven successes in the University of Southern California’s private practice and the University of California at Los Angeles’ public persona. They once ruled the landscape. They showed the pros how it could work. They shaped the athletic region, going back to how they participated in the 1932 Summer Olympics, as well as the 1984 Summer Olympics and, now, the 2028 Summer Olympics.
LA28 chair Casey Wasserman said during a press conference in Paris when that city was hosting its version of the Olympics: “I think we are the place in the world where culture is made and culture is started … that’s our incredible history in the film industry or the music business. L.A. has become so much more about fashion and film and food … all of the star power and the opportunity to showcase that to the world, that’s authentically L.A.”
Sports has given the rest of the planet a nice glimpse of this landscape. But there’s far more subplot. We once jammed a baseball World Series championship team into a football stadium, the same place that hosted the very first Super Bowl within a few years afterward. We have imagination and can pivot to what’s needed.
Our Coliseum, perhaps spelled differently from that crumbling relic in Rome but up close not looking all that different, is a colossal community event center. Our Forum has been fabulous in various incarnations. Our modern facilities have taken the current currency of branding.
As long as we’re within 20 minutes from a double chili cheeseburger at Tommy’s Original, or willing to wait in line at an In & Out, we’re all in. We just figure out the numerology, by zip codes, area codes or iPhone QR codes.
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 