Laker Fans Line Up; Forum Pulls a Lottery

Hundreds of basketball fans jammed the parking lot of the Forum Thursday morning as tickets for Games 3 and 4 of the Laker-Celtic NBA championship series went on sale.

By 5:30 a.m., about 100 people had lined up outside, many expecting the tickets to be sold on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting at 10 a.m.

However, Forum officials had decided otherwise. At 8 a.m., they distributed at-random cards numbered 1 to 500 for a lottery establishing the first buyers for the 3,000 tickets to each game. They also reduced the number of tickets each person could buy from six to four.

Some of the unlucky arrivals grumbled, but Claire L. Rothman, vice president and general manager of the Forum, said: “We did this to try to accommodate as many people as we could.”