Gene Simmons and KISS Are Bringing Pro Football Back to Los Angeles, Kinda

Photos by C.T. Kovalik

LA sucks, but I’m allowed to say that. I’ve lived here my whole life. I love LA. I fucking hate LA. Our town has all the pitfalls of a gigantic metropolis with few of the benefits. Sure it’s improving, but we still have a laughably inadequate public transit system. Bars and restaurants charge big city prices, even though they're situated in a suburban-looking strip mall. And perhaps most astonishing of all, in a city that is built upon the idea of distraction, we don’t have a professional football team.

It makes no sense. Football is the Los Angeles of sports: brutal and painful and dazzling and captivating. Both have so many obvious problems that appear to have easily implementable solutions, yet both are so goddamned slow to acknowledge, let alone attempt to fix, any negative. Football players, like Angelinos, are quite literally killing themselves on the off chance that they will beat the overwhelming odds and achieve fame and glory.

At one point, LA had two NFL franchises, yet it’s been 20 years since the NFL had a base in our country’s second-largest media market. Why is that? There are a lot of reasons, but it all adds up to greed among NFL owners. If a struggling team in some lunch-meat/sadness factory that we still politely call a “city” wants to extort the taxpayers into funding a multimillion-dollar eyesore of a new stadium, LA is the perfect negotiating tool. “Oh, you don’t want to pay for this wildly unnecessary sports palace? No worries, guess we’ll just pack up and move the team to Los Angeles. What’s that? You’ll pay to keep this football team, a.k.a. the only thing to distract from the suffocating depression that envelops your pathetic lives? Good.”

As a diehard football fan, I’m torn. I’ve already sworn my allegiance to a team over 2,000 miles away because my mom had a crush on their pill-popping quarterback—I live and breathe Green Bay Packers football—but when pressed, I think I would be absolutely willing to root for my beloved Packers as well as cheer for the hometown boys. In every other sport, I'm your typical LA fan. I’m interested only if we’re in the playoffs, and sometimes not at all. (Do something to make me like you, hockey.)

For a town that has perhaps the smallest attention span in America, the short seasons and constant immediacy of the National Football League seem to be a perfect match. Yet we've gone 20 years without a home for America’s true pastime.

Enter Gene Simmons. Yes, aging-rock-harlequin-turned-unabashed-capitalist Gene Simmons, the IRL Krusty the Klown with the makeup, unrepentant branding, gravelly voice, and Judaism to match. Gene fucking Simmons is bringing pro football back to Los Angeles, along with Paul “Starchild” Stanley… and two other guys.

Let me be clear: KISS is not bringing the NFL back to LA. Not even close. They’re bringing back pro football, in the form of the widely-ignored Arena Football League. I’ve heard of the Arena Football League before, but I’ve never watched more than a paltry SportsCenter highlight. So in an effort to be fair, I watched a four-minute video of top AFL plays.

It featured your standard highlight reel fare along with some admittedly hilarious and creative touchdown celebrations, plus a child and/or midget scoring a touchdown. Is this, a gimmick-laden knockoff of America’s Game brought to us by 60-year-olds in face paint, what LA sports fans deserve? Could it possibly be as bad as it sounds? I needed to find out. I got in touch with the team through a PR firm, and they arranged an interview, tour of the team offices, and a walkthrough of the soon-to-be home of the LA KISS, the Honda Center in Anaheim.

Wait, Anaheim? Yes. Fucking Anaheim. The LA KISS aren’t even the LA KISS, they’re the Los Angeles Kisses of Anaheim. On the ugly drive down the freeway, past the depressing outlet malls, and somehow-more-depressing faux-opulence of the Commerce Casino, I wondered why they agreed to go along with this. Had anyone involved in this decision read VICE? They had to know what I was up to. Sure, I didn’t email them saying, “Hey, my editor is doing a series on misery in Los Angeles, and I figured your low-rent football circus would perfectly encapsulate that. You free on Thursday?” But come on, is there really such a thing as “no bad press”?

I walked into the offices and was met by a nervous-looking young man who laughed too loud and too quickly at almost everything my photographer and I said. In fact, everyone around was a little on edge. The guy worked for the PR company that had brought me there, and while he was nothing but kind, he sat next to me during every interview and obsessively scribbled onto a notepad.

I walked through the mostly empty cubicles to a corner office, where I was introduced to Brett Bouchy, the only owner of the team who isn’t directly involved in the b(r)and KISS. As I stepped into his office, he and his assistant were futzing with his computer, trying to set up his Outlook email. He informed me he was an AOL man, and that made perfect fucking sense. I swear I don’t mean that as an insult.

Brett Bouchy (left) and Schuyler Hoverstein (right) clearly love KISS.

A former investment banker, Brett described a chance meeting with the former commissioner of the Arena Football League as his impetus for organizing a group to purchase the Orlando Predators in 1997. He said his main job over the 17 years he spent in Orlando was to “spread the gospel” of the AFL, which he said was a truly great “product.” He used the word “product” several times to describe the sport. I guess this is probably normal. I don’t know, I don’t spend much time with high-level sports executives, but it irks me to hear the game I love described as a commodity.

Both he and team president Schuyler Hoversten used buzzwords in this way, with Hoversten even having to correct himself after calling the team "the brand.” This may come off as a nitpick, but it does bother me. We fans pour so much emotion into these leagues, and hearing soulless corporate terms like “brand” and “product” crystallized my opinion that people at the top of the executive food chain don’t view the game the same way we do. It’s impossible for me to say for certain that they don’t care about it like we do, but that’s how it seems.

Brett went on to hammer the point that KISS is more hands-on with its team than any other celebrity owner has been before. He called it a “brand extension like no other” that is “sending shockwaves through the music industry.” He claims that they are going to “fuse the worlds of sports, entertainment, music, and theater into a two-and-a-half-hour event like no one has ever seen.” How? He explained that there would be stages in or around the end zone where bands would be playing during the lulls in action that regularly accompany football. Additionally, they’re working on a way to get the players themselves to descend from the rafters during a massive pyrotechnic display. They are also considering ending each game with a celebration of fans and athletes on the field.

When I asked him what he expects the fanbase to look like, he went with the typical answer of “a cross-section of the city”—families, young men, and fans of sport and music alike. He made sure to inform me that although KISS is known for demonic blood-spewing stunts, they are a family-friendly band; through two dozen albums, they haven’t ever sung a single cuss word. Both Brett and Schuyler stressed that their product would be exponentially cheaper than the average sporting event, citing the player salary structure as the main reason they’d be able to keep ticket prices down.

The next day, I drove back down to Anaheim for a hilariously pointless walkthrough of the empty, barely-lit Honda Center. Again, I wondered why anyone would agree to let me take pictures of a desolate arena that has absolutely zero advertisements, merchandise, or banners for the LA KISS. Yet I found myself waiting at the ticket booth along with the divorced dads who were buying motocross tickets.

A glossy photo of Billy Joel.

The stadium is, unsurprisingly, a stadium. It has seats, and a stage, and a place for rich people to eat food designed by a corporate chef for astronomical prices next to a glossy photo of Billy Joel.

As I sat in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way back to LA, I thought of all of the people who chose to help me write this story about how lame they are. I felt bad—like really, truly bad. Nobody involved in this endeavor is evil. They just want a little press for the thing they’ve been pouring all of their effort into, and here I am, shitting all over it. That sucks. I don’t know them, but I’m sure that like all of us Angelinos, they aren’t spiritually content or creatively fulfilled.

They probably moved to LA with big dreams, wanting to make something good that people could enjoy—something to drag people out of the malaise that comes with a life full of compromise. Yet they were the ones who had to compromise their dreams for the banal realities of life in Los Angeles. Nobody moves to LA to be in PR, but they had to settle for jobs with decent salaries to support themselves and their families.

Here are ostensibly nice people dreaming of bringing top-tier entertainment to the City of Angels who have to toil away at bringing decidedly second-tier entertainment to the "City" of Anaheim. That’s not their fault, it’s LA’s, and that is true misery.

Josh Androsky is a writer/comedian/karaoke enthusiast. See him and other VICE west coast contributors at ENTITLEMENT; Wednesday, Februrary 5, with headliner Greg Proops at Los Globos on Sunset Blvd. in Silver Lake. Also, follow him on Twitter @ShutUpAndrosky