10-07-2025
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
When did S.F. fans start chanting ‘Beat L.A.!'? We traced the battle cry to its start
Tony Bennett was still singing and the seagulls hovered over Oracle Park in their pre-feast holding pattern, when I heard the start of a familiar chant.
'Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!'
As thousands of fans shuffled down the northeast ramps, in no hurry after a 4-1 San Francisco Giants win on April 5, the three-syllable battle cry echoed against the concrete. A few fists raised in the air.
'BEAT L.A.!'
The opposing team that night: the Seattle Mariners. The Los Angeles Dodgers — targets of the chant — were 2,850 miles away, playing the Philadelphia Phillies.
When the Dodgers return to San Francisco on Friday for the first time in 2025, they'll face the Giants, 42,000 fans and a four-decade-old mantra that has come to define Bay Area sports fandom. Players, ballparks and entire teams come and go. But this perfect percussive call to arms endures.
I've taken the communal power of 'Beat L.A.' for granted most of my life, but that walk on the Giants concourse early this year made me ponder a key question: How did it start? Could archive research pinpoint it to a season, a game or, by some miracle, a patient zero moment when the 'Beat L.A.' chant was born?
The answer, it turned out, was yes.
When San Francisco baseball arrived in 1958 — the Giants and Dodgers both moved from New York that year — the new Los Angeles team was already living in our heads.
The Giants had Willie Mays, but the Dodgers were coming off 13 straight winning seasons, and would win three World Series in their first decade in California. Our players sold insurance in the offseason. Theirs showed up on 'The Brady Bunch.'
So when the Giants won their first home game at Seals Stadium on April 14, 1958, with diminutive starter Ruben Gomez outdueling hulking Dodgers ace Don Drysdale, the response was a sign of the over-the-top atmosphere to come.
'WE MURDER THE BUMS,' the Chronicle's first post-game Giants headline read, splayed across the top of the front page in a text size equal to a moon landing or declaration of war. San Francisco's hatred of Los Angeles sports teams proliferated from there.
I remember my grandmother and San Francisco-born mother in the early 1980s framing the sports rivalries as something that went far beyond the games. L.A. gave us Ronald Reagan. L.A. built a city in a desert. We're putting bricks in our toilets to conserve water, while L.A. residents take long showers.
A stadium chanting 'Beat L.A.!' was catharsis, a release of those feelings of inferiority and inequity. 'Beat L.A.!' made us feel seen.
We chanted 'Beat L.A.!' on the SamTrans bus to Giants games at Candlestick Park. We chanted 'Beat L.A.' on the BART pedestrian walkway to Warriors Games at the Oakland Coliseum. We chanted 'Beat L.A.' at San Francisco International Airport, in the pre-September 11 days when feral kids could walk right up to the gates, greeting Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott after their latest triumph.
But it did not start in San Francisco. The 'Beat L.A.' chant can indeed be traced to its origin — born on the other side of the country in the rivalry between Larry Bird's Boston Celtics and Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers.
Joel Semuels was in his $19 seat on the upper deck of the Boston Garden on May 23, 1982, watching his sports life fall apart. The Celtics, with a young Bird and Kevin McHale, had won 63 games that season, the most in the NBA.
But Philadelphia 76ers stars Andrew Toney and Julius Erving combined for 63 points in a Game 7 rout of the Eastern Conference Finals. As Semuels sat in the oldest arena in the league, he was thinking about air conditioning.
'Boston Garden was a barn. It was used for circuses and auto races and boxing,' Semuels said, during a spirited video call earlier this week. 'We were jealous of the Los Angeles Lakers because they had air conditioning in the fabulous Forum. They had cheerleaders. We were the lunch bucket team against Hollywood style.'
With a minute left to play and the Celtics on the way to a 120-106 loss, Semuels and two friends stood up and did something unheard of in Boston: They started cheering for the opposition.
'We wanted Andrew Toney and Dr. J to beat the Lakers in the finals,' Semuels remembers. 'So we started saying, 'Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!' and it caught on. If we couldn't win, we wanted the Sixers to win that year.'
The chant became so thunderously loud, it was easily audible on the CBS broadcast.
'Do you hear the crowd chanting to the Sixers? 'Beat L.A.,'' analyst Bill Russell said.
'Beat L.A. That's great, let's listen,' play-by-play man Dick Stockton responded, as the final seconds ticked off the clock.
There's something about the rhythm of the chant that was built for a packed arena.
Just as some kids' names seem louder when yelled in a mall ('Matthew!' carries farther than 'Chad!' for example), those three syllables — 'Beat! Elle! Aye!,' with a short pause between each, all in one breath — are calibrated for a slightly buzzed and motivated mob to warble together with fists pumping in the air.
'It just has a cadence to it,' Semuels said. 'We noticed it right away.'
'Beat L.A.!' spread quickly that year. Sixers fans chanted it in their NBA Finals loss to the Lakers. Then it landed in San Francisco, where the Dodgers and Giants were in an improbable pennant race.
Former Giants pitcher Bill Laskey, who now broadcasts the team's postgame radio show on KNBR, was a rookie from Toledo in 1982, and good friends with catcher Bob Brenly, another Ohio native. After Laskey pitched nine innings and beat Dodgers phenom Fernando Valenzuela in a summer game, he dropped a casual 'Beat L.A.' in a post game interview. Then, someone brought him a 'Beat L.A.' T-shirt with his name on it; the first documented high-profile sign of the slogan in the Bay Area.
'Brenly and I thought, 'What did we walk into?'' Laskey said.
The Giants in 1982 trailed the Dodgers and Atlanta Braves for most of the summer, but had a mammoth September, winning 20 of 26 games to pull within striking distance. If they swept the Dodgers in the final three home games of the season, they would win the pennant.
The Dodgers shut out the Giants 4-0 in the first game at Candlestick Park, then bombed them 15-2 in the second. The Giants were out of the playoffs, but the Dodgers needed to win the last game to advance.
The Giants' hopes dashed, Laskey said he showed up to pitch that final game and found the playoff atmosphere remained. More than 47,000 fans packed the park. Before the game, Dodgers pitcher Valenzuela began gesturing at his neck and pointing at Laskey.
'He starts screaming at me in Spanish.' Laskey said. '... He said, 'You're going to choke today.' And I said 'OK.' That just fueled the fire.'
On the Dodgers side, where future Giants manager Dusty Baker was starting in left field and batting third, he could see the tensions rising.
'(Dodgers manager) Tommy Lasorda fanned that a little bit. He was blowing kisses at the Giants fans,' Baker remembers, laughing. 'I was like, 'Tommy, leave it alone. We've got enough people here against us.''
Los Angeles took a 2-0 lead after a Ron Cey homer in the second inning. But Laskey retired the next 15 Dodgers batters. 'Beat L.A.!' rang through the stadium in larger and larger crescendos, the Chronicle reported, until Giants second baseman Joe Morgan stepped to the plate with two outs in the seventh inning and broke a tie, knocking a three-run homer over the right field fence. Final score: 5-2. The Dodgers had lost playoff hopes on San Francisco soil.
Laskey said the crowd rushed in from the stands, celebrating the Dodgers' loss. It was a victory of spite. A victory of 'Beat L.A.!'
'There was pandemonium all over the field, so the Dodgers had to come through our dugout, through the tunnel, through our clubhouse and back into their clubhouse,' Laskey said. 'And here we were in our clubhouse just screaming at these guys coming through. When manager Tommy Lasorda came in there wasn't one player who wasn't screaming at him.'
The chant has been a Bay Area staple ever since.
When the Warriors met the Lakers in the 1987 playoffs, the team handed out cardboard 'Beat L.A.' signs for fans. After the Warriors went down three games to none, columnist Art Spander quipped: 'So much for dreams. For Game 4, the signs should read 'WE SURRENDER.''
The Lakers in Game 4 pulled ahead 102-88 after three quarters. But Eric 'Sleepy' Floyd went 12-for-13 from the field in the fourth, scoring 29 of his 51 points as fans carried their 'Beat L.A.' signs to a 129-121 Warriors victory that endures in local sports history.
Oakland A's fans chanted it against the Dodgers in the 1988 World Series. San Jose fans chanted it when the Sharks made it to the 1994 conference semi-finals. I was inspired and proud last year during Bay FC's inaugural season, when the team hosted Angel FC and the (otherwise polite) home crowd broke into a spirited 'Beat L.A.!' Our new team had arrived.
After living the 'Beat L.A.!' life, I finally got to see the other side.
I moved to Hollywood in 1995 for a courtroom reporting job and quickly learned (Don Draper elevator meme) the Dodgers don't think about us at all. I never heard a single 'Beat S.F.' chant from a crowd. My Giants hats mostly drew indifference. The Warriors hats drew pity.
Baker, who spent eight seasons with the Dodgers and is now an ambassador for San Francisco, has seen the same. 'Maybe it was because (Los Angeles) had the weather, they had the beach, they had the population, they had the money,' he said of San Francisco's fixation. 'When I got to the Dodgers I didn't hear very much about the Giants.'
And Baker has the best explanation for the lopsided animosity I've heard: For most of the first four decades of this 'rivalry,' the Giants simply weren't very good.
'We were focused on Cincinnati, Atlanta and other teams,' Baker said of the Dodgers. 'It's hard to have a rivalry when one team is so much better than the other team.'
But the Giants finally arrived, winning the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014. More recently, the Dodgers and Giants played a fierce and dramatic 2021 division playoff. Los Angeles arrives this Friday on a six-game skid with the Giants within striking distance and inventing new and thrilling ways to win.
There are signs that the rivalry may be getting, if not less intense, more civilized. Laskey remembers fights between Giants and Dodgers fans every other inning at Candlestick. Fans burning Dodgers pennants in the bleachers. Teens jumping out of the stands and rattling the outfield fence.
You rarely see that now, for very good reason. But the chant remains as strong as ever.
Beat L.A. is San Francisco at its grittiest. Beat L.A. is San Francisco at its most optimistic. Beat L.A. is San Francisco at its most petty. And Beat L.A. is San Francisco unified, hopeful and proud.
'The rivalry will always be there,' Laskey said. 'They'll always be thinking 'Beat L.A.!' … And when we're beating Los Angeles, we'll want to drive it into them even more.'
