Love Quote by Leigh Steinberg

Nostalgia is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence: it turns a professional sports franchise into a first love, a formative imprint, a story you can’t quite outgrow. Leigh Steinberg isn’t just reminiscing about a team; he’s marking a hinge year when identity gets welded to spectacle. “Then” makes it sound like fate, as if history arrived on schedule and handed him a lifelong allegiance.

The context matters: the Los Angeles Angels were born in 1961, a shiny expansion-era product dropped into a postwar Southern California booming with new suburbs, new TV habits, new appetites for civic belonging. Falling in love with them in their inaugural year is a claim to origin-story authenticity: I was there at the beginning. For a businessman best known as a super-agent, it’s also a subtle résumé line. He’s signaling that sports, for him, weren’t an industry first; they were an emotional education. That matters when your public persona involves negotiating millions while selling the idea that athletes are more than commodities.

The subtext is the tension at the heart of modern sports culture: devotion and monetization sharing the same bloodstream. Steinberg’s career sits squarely in that contradiction, so the phrasing functions as a kind of alibi. The simple, almost boyish “fell in love” insists on sincerity before the hard edges of business enter the frame. It frames fandom as the original sin and the original justification: the dealmaking came later, but the attachment came first.