KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : Money Spent on Games Could Be Put to Better Use

I was going to do this column about the battle for the soul of basketball that’s going on right now.

You know what?

Right now I’m not as worried about the soul of basketball as the soul of Los Angeles, or America.

All the little currents of sports history we deal with--Laker gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds, Clipper rebirth, Mike Jordan’s foibles, Charles Barkley’s outrages--are lost in the tide of real history washing over us.

Games that seemed important as recently as noon Wednesday looked like trivial, over-celebrated children’s exercises by Thursday.

This happens over and over to us--and it never happens at all.

Magic Johnson contracted the AIDS virus.

We said it could never be the same again.

Within weeks, it was the same, except without Magic.

This is known as “Life goes on,” which we all recognize to be necessary.

Then Los Angeles goes up in flames. Along with the ashes in the street are the ashes in our mouths. Our cheers die in our throats.

OK, we need our trivial pursuits but tell me this:

How can 18,000 people fork over $900,000 every night the Lakers play, and TV networks pay millions more, and my newspaper spend thousands and thousands annually in salary and expenses to cover it, and I devote my life to chronicle it--how can we expend all these resources on a game . . . with so little money and attention left over to find ways to ease the disparity between rich and poor?

Because that’s what did us in. Whatever you think of the verdict or the rioters, this is the product of an economically polarized society.

And it was like that last week and the week before and 10 years before that, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to pay attention to it, or devote resources to it.

It wasn’t just “the politicians.” As Pogo said, in the wisest words ever uttered in a comic strip or anywhere else: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Wednesday night, I covered Game 3 of the Laker-Trail Blazer series. The verdict in the Rodney King case was in. Crowds were gathering on the street.

I went into the Portland dressing room before the game to see if Buck Williams would say anything entertaining I could use in my game story.

What he really wanted to talk about was the verdict. Williams is from the South, a sharecropper’s son. He has lived all over but never here. He’d always thought of Los Angeles asdifferent--progressive--and he couldn’t understand this.

Then I asked my questions about the game, got my quotes and plugged them into my story.

I wrote nothing about the real backdrop of this night--the hurt, the bewilderment, the fear--and for that I’m ashamed. That’s the occupational hazard of sportswriting. You spend your life covering games, you think they’re important.

But they’re just games.

Pretty soon, they’ll start again and that’s OK.

The players will play, mixed emotions or not. It’s their job.

I’ll cover it. It’s my job.

You may or may not pay attention. That’s your option. It’s just entertainment, which is great, as far as it goes.

When this season is over, win or lose, Byron Scott will go back to his life--his wife, his kids, his friends. Win or lose, he’ll deal with it. The important thing is, he played, he did his best . . . and he got paid richly for it.

Buck Williams will go back to his life.

You’ll go back to your lives.

And if all of us can remember this week and decide we never want to see it again and find the time and money but most of all the will to forgo our escapes long enough to begin to attack our society’s core problem, then maybe we’ll make some progress.

Otherwise, it’ll be bread and circuses and painful intervention by real life, over and over and over.