Entering the Court of Last Retort

SACRAMENTO —  What are the top 100 reasons you hate L.A.? That’s the cheeky question posed this week to listeners of Sports Talk 1140, the radio home of this city’s beloved basketball Kings.

Loathing poured forth with the sharp-elbowed enthusiasm of a playground pickup game: O.J. lived there ... Valley girls ... Televised freeway chases ... They steal our water ... Stupid giant stars on sidewalks ... No change of seasons.

Insults aside, more than mere basketball seems at stake these days in this realm of Kings and cowbells.

For residents of California’s often overlooked capital, today’s National Basketball Assn. showdown with the world champion Lakers for the Western Conference title is a rare chance to step outside the Shaq-sized shadow cast by the nation’s second-largest city.

Up here, trash talk isn’t just about the big guys in purple and gold. It’s about the perception of civilization south of the Grapevine as bawdy and brain-dead. It’s about Los Angeles as the unruly megalopolis. It’s about what Sacramento doesn’t want to become.

“It’s good against evil, it’s David against Goliath,” said Mark Friedman, a Sacramento developer whose in-town building projects are the antithesis of Southland sprawl. “It’s a frank disgust with what Los Angeles is--and a fear that if we continue to spread and grow, we’ll look as bad as they do.”

The best-of-seven series also marks a chance for Sacramento--and the cosmopolitan mix of 1.8 million residents in the greater metropolitan region--to puff its chest and show the world that Los Angeles isn’t California’s only important place.

Like other smaller capital cities--think Albany, N.Y., and Springfield, Ill.--Sacramento suffers from inevitable comparisons to the state’s more famous destinations. In a universe of heavyweights that includes San Francisco and San Diego, Sacramento has always felt like the 98-pound weakling--at best ignored, at worst disrespected.

Rivalry Goes Beyond Basketball

Kings versus Lakers “goes well beyond the court,” suggested Tyler Bleszinski, a 30-year-old refugee of the Bay Area dot-com bust who has unabashedly embraced Sacramento. “The confrontation will pit a mid-sized, growing region against a mammoth city of glitz, glamour and a blase, nihilistic attitude about everything that’s not beautiful on the outside.”

Such zingers sting Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, though he’s heard it all before. While attending a year of law school in the north, Hahn discovered that his beloved hometown is perceived as a loathsome menace.

“They live and breathe this hatred--it gives some kind of meaning to their existence,” Hahn said, resignation in his voice. But, among Angelenos, “I don’t think the feeling is mutual at all. We’ve come to the conclusion it’s got to be jealousy.”

Although any self-respecting King fan will happily lapse into La-La-Land diatribes, Sacramento has itself been cursed by its own municipal image problem--that of a sweltering cow-town. It’s a stereotype the region struggles to overcome, despite a dramatic change in the economy, populace and array of attractions.

Phil Jackson, Laker coach and the NBA’s Zen master of the head game, best summed up such thinking two years ago, dubbing cowbell-clanging fans in Sacramento’s Arco Arena “semicivilized,” just a bunch of newfangled “rednecks.”

The characterization clanked like a Shaquille O’Neal free throw.

Sacramentans don’t practice civic pride as religiously as San Franciscans. But a King conquest would most certainly exact a delicious element of revenge, said Howard Dickstein, a local attorney. “It would be great to make Phil Jackson eat his words.”

As if basketball weren’t enough, the capital’s civic leaders hope the world will pause awhile to learn a few things about their leafy hometown this time around:

* Sacramento finished 18th on Forbes magazine’s list of best places for business. Los Angeles was 100th.

* Los Angeles has Hollywood glamour, but America Online ranked Sacramento the nation’s best place for singles.

* Runner’s World magazine rated it one of the top four cities for a jog.

Cleaved by two scenic rivers, Sacramento boasts what it bills as the world’s largest traditional jazz festival, and is reportedly second only to Paris in per capita tree coverage. “Sacramento is a great place to raise a family,” said Doug Elmets, a public relations consultant who has lived in both cities. “Los Angeles has smog, high crime and lousy schools.”

Cow-Town Image Hard to Lose

Though farm fields are gradually succumbing to housing tracts, the nickname “Sacra-tomato” sticks like thick spaghetti sauce. But high-tech is the cash crop. Intel has as many employees in Sacramento County as it does in Silicon Valley. The town has a bigger percentage of business executives and professionals than Los Angeles, and faster job growth. Meanwhile, the price of a home in Sacramento is half that of L.A. The cost of living is 21% less.

But let’s not get carried away here. Sizing up Sacramento and Los Angeles is in most instances like comparing a tomato with a watermelon.

Sacramento has the Crocker Art Museum; Los Angeles boasts the Getty, Norton Simon and the County Museum of Art’s 150,000-piece collection.

Sacramento International Airport is just now living up to its name, finally getting a foreign nonstop flight (to Guadalajara starting July 1); at LAX, you can fly to nearly any spot on the globe (though getting to the airport is another matter entirely).

Sacramento has 15 Starbucks coffeehouses; Los Angeles boasts 56. Did we mention the weather? In a typical summer, Sacramento has 77 days above 90 degrees. Los Angeles averages five.

To many Angelenos, Sacramento is merely a place to send state lawmakers, a summer pit stop on the road to Tahoe, air conditioner cranked. The town has a civic inferiority complex, they say, and is worthy of no more than a yawn.

“It ain’t L.A.,” said Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles), who has spent many a sweltering summer in Sacramento. “If it’s not 100 or something degrees, then there’s a flood. And if there’s not a flood, then it’s tule fog.”

Even the conciliatory Hahn can’t resist dishing a little smack. Without the Kings, he said, “all they’d have for entertainment up there is the Legislature.”

Hahn has engaged Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo in the traditional wager on the outcome, putting up 34 jumbo tacos from East Los Angeles’ King Taco chain. “It seems only fitting,” he said in a letter to Fargo, “to send the number our star center Shaquille O’Neal wears on his jersey, since we already sent you your center, [former Laker] Vlade Divac.”

Fargo countered with several cases of Sacramento River bottled water, a bow to the rapacious thirst of the Southland.

“Los Angeles wants our water so bad,” she quipped, “I’m a little afraid this may make them want to lose.”