NBA’s Show Must Go On, and Orange County’s the Place

Well, Anaheim is getting the Clippers, all right.

Not for long, and not the way anyone could have ever wanted or imagined, but 20 miles outside the Los Angeles County ring of fire, the Clippers and the Utah Jazz are booked into the Anaheim Convention Center Sunday afternoon because the games must go on, even if the games can’t go on anywhere near the corner of Martin Luther King and Figueroa.

Where does the sports world fit within a real world of firebombs, charred department stores, all-night police sirens and terrorized neighborhoods?

Where does an NBA playoff series figure when races are rioting, cities are burning and a country’s system of values are being re-examined under the light of a Molotov cocktail?

Those are some questions, and the best answer our national pastimes have been able to muster is to take their games and move them out of the war zone. The Clippers and the Jazz had already delayed Game 4 of their Western Conference quarterfinal once, originally pushing it back to this afternoon, in broad daylight, but still at the L.A. Sports Arena, in one of the most besieged areas on the map.

Today was still too early, still too dangerous. The NBA, however, needed results--got to keep those playoffs moving--so the Clippers had to spend Friday contemplating alternative sites.

Pauley Pavilion made sense. It was close enough and big enough to accommodate the 11,000 ticket-holders, but how could the Clippers justify pulling L.A. County policemen off the street so they could work a parking lot of Danny Manning fans?

Long Beach Arena? The downtown area continues to smolder.

The Bren Center at UC Irvine? Safe enough, but seating capacity is just an Anteater-ready 5,000.

Through process of elimination, the Convention Center became the compromise solution. The old half-dome from Tomorrowland hasn’t seen much dribbling since the ABA’s Anaheim Amigos left town, and its capacity of 7,400 still leaves the Clippers with a ticket shortfall of 3,600, but aside from junketing to Las Vegas with the Lakers, it was the best option on the Clippers’ board.

So, for the moment, Anaheim is sanctuary.

It is, at most, a tentative, tenuous claim. The violence of the past three days has had the spread pattern of an oil spill, and Friday, the seepage touched Orange County.

As a precautionary measure, the Santa Ana Unified High School District postponed almost all sporting events scheduled for Friday afternoon. Mater Dei at Loyola and Orange Lutheran at Brethren Christian baseball games were postponed, as was UC Irvine’s men’s tennis match at UCLA. Chapman University had to scratch a three-game baseball series with Nevada because the visitors’ flight into LAX was canceled, and Cal State Fullerton had to postpone a softball game when Fresno State considered the bus ride down the coast too risky.

From the first fist raised in anger over a verdict rendered in a Simi Valley courtroom, the Orange County experience during the riots has been almost surreal--so isolated from the rage, and yet so near.

I work in Costa Mesa, but I live in Long Beach, in the Wrigley district, in a neighborhood of shaded, tree-lined streets and 50-year-old Spanish-style homes. Thursday at the office was no different than any other, except for the clusters of reporters studying the ugliness as it played out on the television news. Outside, people went about their daily routines, went to the beach, went out to dinner.

Hours later, less than 20 miles to the west, I stood in my back yard watching orange flames flickering above rooftops from the furniture store four blocks away, the same store my wife and I walked to two years ago to purchase a sofa set.

Friday morning, we awoke to billowing smoke from the other side of the neighborhood, near the corner of Willow and Pacific, where the local DMV office had been torched. Across the street, the windows of a delicatessen and a convenience store were being boarded up. Thick clouds of black ash filled the sky, the wind scattering it along our block and upon our driveway.

Neighbors huddled on the sidewalk, hugging their children, comforting one another, shaken by the sudden sense of vulnerability.

“Maybe I’m naive,” said one man as he swept up some strewn litter behind his house, “but I never thought it would get here.”

No homes were damaged and by sundown, the fire appeared contained. But the sense of fear never settled.

It could get here.

It did get here.

Viewing experiences seldom get more bizarre than watching “City Under Siege” telecasts and seeing a live remote--talking head in front of hustling fire fighters--from basically your own back yard.

It is here where sports enter the picture. The games go on, because the games are diversion, release. Spend a night and a day worrying about your family and fielding phone calls from concerned out-of-state relatives and friends and “How about those Clippers?” becomes a welcome, if fleeting, respite.

So the Clippers will play Sunday in Anaheim.

Anaheim ought to consider itself lucky.

It could get there, too.