Winning Team: Inglewood and the Lakers

Scratch “Los Angeles” from the name of the winningest team in basketball over the last decade.

It’s the Inglewood Lakers, thank you, in the city where they play.

Inglewood and its National Basketball Assn. franchise have a sweet, symbiotic relationship that extends from the complementary seats at the Forum provided to the City Council, to the anti-drug talks that players deliver at local schools, to the plum court-side security work assigned to off-duty Inglewood police officers.

“I introduce the team wherever I go as the ‘Inglewood Lakers,’ ” said City Councilman Danny Tabor, who once worked at a soda fountain at the Forum. “The biggest coup for the city was to persuade (announcer) Chick Hearn to mention Inglewood instead of Los Angeles every time he mentions the Forum.”

Both sides benefit.

The Forum gets a municipality that cooperates on such issues as traffic congestion and police protection. Forum and Laker owner Jerry Buss knows that his sports empire will never suffer the municipal cold shoulder that gave the chills to Al Davis and his Raiders.

The hometown connection has paid dividends on the hardwood floor as well, where standout guard Byron Scott and rookie center Elden Campbell live off moves they polished as students at Morningside High School a few blocks away.

For the city, there’s a public relations bonanza; none bigger than today when the Lakers face the Portland Trail Blazers in a Western Conference championship game on national TV.

Mayor Edward Vincent, whose office walls are covered with Lakers memorabilia, said he hears the same thing again and again when people spot his name tag at the annual National Conference of Mayors: “You’re where the Lakers are.”

Finding the Forum on a map of Inglewood--the self-described “City of Champions”--isn’t too difficult. It’s right off Kareem Court, a street dedicated by the City Council to ex-Laker center Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

City budget planners pay their own peculiar homage to the team’s fortune. They assume in their annual budget projections--which include taxes of up to $15,000 a game on sales, admissions and parking charges--that the Lakers will be in the finals every year.

It wasn’t always such a lovefest.

Back in 1966, the city spurned a suggestion by former Laker owner Jack Kent Cooke that the city pay for a new arena and, in exchange, he would move his team from the Sports Arena in Los Angeles. Cooke built the 17,505-seat Forum anyway, with his own money.

Local eyebrows were raised when Jerry Buss, who bought the Forum, the Lakers and the Kings for $67.5 million in 1979, turned the arena into an advertisement for Great Western Bank in 1988 by agreeing to rename it the Great Western Forum for an undisclosed fee. The tag has yet to stick.

City Atty. Howard Rosten said having a major sporting arena in the center of the city, one right next door to Hollywood Park racetrack, is not all roses. Residents have grumbled repeatedly about traffic tie-ups and parking problems on the streets around the Forum.

“Everything they do creates big problems,” he said, “but we love those kinds of problems.”

“I think it’s in their interest to be cooperative,” Rosten said. “Likewise, it’s in our interest to help them do what they do.”

Recognizing the importance of the Forum and its teams to Inglewood, Councilman Garland Hardeman, who attended Michigan State with All-Star guard Magic Johnson, has been floating the idea of building a bigger Forum to compete with the grander 20,000-plus-seat facilities in other NBA cities.

“We never want them to leave,” Hardeman said, of his informal plan.

Forum officials, for their part, are pleased with having made Inglewood its base for the past quarter century, said Bob Steiner, who is an Inglewood resident and the Forum’s director of public relations.

“We don’t derive any great ticket strength from the city of Inglewood,” he said. “We need all of Southern California. We do the things we do to be a good neighbor, not to make money.”

The court-side seats at the Forum--the domain of Jack Nicholson, Arsenio Hall and Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz--cost $19,350 a season, not including playoff games; that’s almost double the average annual income of an Inglewood resident.

The gratis tickets that go to the mayor and four council members are many rows back in the loge. Although they pop up as a campaign issue from time to time, they continue to flow.

Lee Weinstein, the mayor who preceded Vincent, said, “Every year I would get a season ticket book in the mail and every year I would return it to Dr. Buss with a note” explaining why he would not accept them. “As a mayor, I was in a taxing position; I could vote on traffic control or the use of police. There is a perception of a conflict by taking the tickets.”

The current council members accept the free passes, but they also give them away to school children and community groups when they are not going themselves.

When ticket sales are sluggish, the Forum also distributes free passes--frequently to youth groups, schools and churches in Inglewood.

“Granted, they are not on the floor,” Steiner says, “but they are free tickets.”

The Lakers, their wives and others associated with the team also speak at area schools and make benefit appearances, more so in Inglewood than other parts of Southern California. The marquee outside the Forum is now advertising the annual Inglewood Police Department open house, along with the Laker playoff games.

“The Lakers consider themselves a part of this community,” said city spokesman Truman Jacques. “We don’t wear this out. We know that the Lakers belong to the United States, but they realize that this is their home and charity begins at home.”

Team members and their wives have led anti-drug rallies and visited sick kids at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital. The players interrupted a recent lunch hour at Kelso Elementary School to have the team portrait for a Laker poster shot on the school playground. The Laker Girls, when not rousing the Forum crowd, preside at an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway in the city.

Police officers, like most every one else in Inglewood, are big-time Laker fans.

Every game, a select few get to monitor the parking lot, control the crowds and escort the sometimes unpopular referees from the court to their locker rooms.

Not surprisingly, that overtime duty is popular, and to avoid charges of favoritism it is assigned by lottery.

The question of which city actually lays claim to the Lakers comes up most sharply in years when the team wins the NBA Championship, as it last did in 1988. Where do you hold the victory celebration when officials in Inglewood City Hall are lobbying hard for a parade on their turf and the folks at the other City Hall up north are doing the same?

Facing admittedly not the worst dilemma for the owner of a professional sports franchise, Buss did the chivalrous thing: He held two parades.