Success Quote by Leigh Steinberg

The little shrug in "so of course" does a lot of work. Leigh Steinberg frames fandom not as a thunderbolt of identity but as a predictable side effect of proximity: you arrive at UCLA, the culture recruits you. It’s casual, almost throwaway phrasing, yet it reveals how institutions manufacture loyalty through daily immersion - the campus mythology, the shared rituals, the social rewards of belonging. Steinberg isn’t confessing some sacred sports devotion; he’s describing how devotion gets installed.

There’s also an honest hierarchy embedded in the timing: "a huge Bruin basketball fan... and later came to football". At UCLA, basketball historically offers a cleaner, more cinematic on-ramp - packed arenas, a legacy brand, a season that feels like a series of decisive moments. Football, by contrast, asks for a longer apprenticeship: tailgates, traditions, patience through variability. Steinberg’s "later" signals that fandom can be cultivated in phases, not declared once and forever.

Context matters because Steinberg is a businessman best known for sports representation and the theater of big-time athletics. Read through that lens, the line doubles as origin story and soft credentialing: I’m not just adjacent to sports; I was formed by a major program’s gravitational pull. It’s a neat bit of social proof, but it’s also a candid admission that allegiance often begins as environmental branding - and only afterward gets retrofitted with emotion.