Middle children on ice

A friend invited me to the Laker game the other night. We sat there waiting for them to win until they did. It doesn’t matter who they played. Seattle, OK?

With apologies to all their female fans, the Lakers are this city’s ultimate same-sex marriage. All over L.A., there are men -- otherwise emotionally unavailable men -- brimming with concern about whether the Lakers can pull it together and win another championship. Is Shaq OK with Kobe? Is Gary mad at Phil? Will Phil include Gary in the triangle? And how’s Karl feeling?

But there are other men in town, playing other games. I follow the ones who play ice hockey and who wear the jersey of the Los Angeles Kings.

Who, you might be wondering, are the Kings? Allow me to introduce them. In 1966, the NHL awarded a franchise to Canadian-born Jack Kent Cooke, who also owned the Lakers. Like the Lakers, the Kings, whose first season was 1967-68, played at the Forum, and, like the Lakers, the Kings wore purple and gold uniforms.

This is where the similarities end.

Being a Kings fan, it occurred to me recently, represents my longest commitment to anything other than eating, sleeping and showering. I say this as someone who grew up in Los Angeles playing the most pathetic kind of hockey there is, where you roller-skate on your driveway, alone, dragging a hockey stick, wondering why your father couldn’t have been a lawyer in Saskatchewan or Winnipeg.

And yet, if I am to be honest, I know why I became a Kings fan. It’s because I am a middle child. Middle children tend to be maligned, at least in our heads, which means we’re always in the market for vicarious suffering, because this offers differentiation and dignity. Behold, the Kings. Not only is their history a history of losing, but the Kings also lose at a sport that is obscure vis-a-vis other mainstream sports and that makes no climatological sense, here in Southern California.

As a kid, the Kings were the contrarian’s team in a city where everyone rooted for the Dodgers and Lakers and Rams. By contrast, some of the Kings had no teeth. Others had funny names that the local newscasters mispronounced: Syl Apps, Andre St. Laurent. The thrill of an ice hockey game, seen live, was known to us but not you. At the Forum, when the Kings scored a goal, the place would go nuts. All 7,230 middle children in the arena.

Oh sure, there were moments of glory. The mid-’70s with Rogie Vachon, Butch Goring and Marcel Dionne, 1982’s “Miracle on Manchester” (the ecstasy of which cannot be explained) and, I suppose, Wayne Gretzky, who led the Kings to the Stanley Cup finals in 1993. Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, arrived in 1988, traded by the Edmonton Oilers to the Kings for a few players and $15 million of then-Kings owner Bruce McNall’s stash.

Image-wise, Gretzky was ideal -- a superstar who was good-looking and polite, and who was married to a Hollywood actress, the former Janet Jones. The Kings entered into a period of jubilant self-denial. They abandoned their purple-and-gold jerseys in favor of a more marketable silver and black and welcomed the local glitterati -- Goldie Hawn, Sylvester Stallone -- into the building.

To the long-suffering middle-child as Kings fan, however, something was terribly amiss. Seeing the team remade as a trendy winner was like discovering that your parents have converted the basement into a nightclub; they would like you to meet their new rock star friends.

Gretzky left in 1996, and owner McNall went to prison for bank fraud, among other kinds of fraud. Blessedly, being a hockey fan in Los Angeles is again a lonely, dignified business.

Nowadays the Kings are owned by a faceless corporation called AEG. Nearly every game is televised, the logo and color scheme changed again. The games sell out, but go to Staples Center and you’ll see the empty luxury boxes owned, I supposed, by Kings fans who decided to have dinner at Pinot instead.

On the ice, the Kings have been plugging along this season, an injury-riddled team with a coach who preaches honest, up-by-the-bootstraps effort, that most un-Hollywood of ethos. The team is above .500, but sports anchors still can’t pronounce names like Lubomir Visnovsky, and the season will most likely end in April, either with no playoff appearance or a first-round pummeling by the mighty Detroit Red Wings.

Just in time for the Laker playoff push and the beginning of the baseball season. “Think Blue,” it will say, in big Orwellian letters on the hills of Chavez Ravine. Talk is, the Dodgers are terrible this year, and the new owner doesn’t know what he’s doing. Maybe this is true, but people are talking, and it will still say “Think Blue” on that hillside. The Kings? The players will go home to whatever former Soviet bloc country they come from or hang out here on the beach for the summer, anonymous as middle children.

Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.