Lakers Break a Jinx

We did not watch the basketball championship series between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics through the practiced and professional eyes of sportswriters.

We watched it from the Twilight Zone. We knew about the jinx. Eight times, the teams had met for the championship. Eight times the Lakers lost.

We watched Boston shots mysteriously change course in flight to swish through the net. We watched as unseen forces made Laker balls roll around the rim and fall outside when they should have fallen inside. We wondered, after the Celtic blowout in the first game, whether a Lion ever lost to a Christian in the Colosseum in Rome and decided that this rivalry probably was under the same spell as were those.

In the end, gloriously, the sorcery, if any, turned greyhounds into pit bulls, a 38-year-old professional basketball player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, into a one-man youth movement and the Lakers into national champions.

The Lakers will ride in a parade through downtown Los Angeles today and acknowledge applause from representative fans whose total number approximates the population of Southern California. We will remember them as the team that fought its way out of the Twilight Zone and back into the list of the country’s truly great sports teams, where they belong.