Players Go to Anaheim and Bring Cheer to L.A.

Thank you, Anaheim. Thanks for the use of the hall. Thanks for the home away from home. Thanks for everything, especially when the problems of a couple of basketball teams don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Of all the gym joints in all the world, the Clippers appreciated walking into yours.

Doc Rivers hardly knew whether to laugh or cry Sunday at the Anaheim Convention Center when he said: “This was more than a basketball game. People in L.A. have been let down enough lately. This one was a way of lifting everybody’s spirits. This one was for everybody--blacks and whites and greens.”

Thanks, Doc. We needed that.

Thanks for Clippers 115, Utah Jazz 107, a game that, as Rivers’ teammate Ron Harper bluntly put it: “Gave people a chance to see something besides people in L.A. being shot and beaten and killed.”

Who would have dreamed that the Clippers, of all people, could help awaken Los Angeles from its worst possible nightmare?

“I’m happy for L.A.,” Clipper Coach Larry Brown said. “Since the incidents, there hasn’t been much of anything positive to rally around. The Lakers lost. The Kings lost. The Dodgers couldn’t even play.

“For two hours, at least, maybe we gave a few people something to feel good about.”

That is why a confrontation in South Central Los Angeles with a gang of angry greens would be welcome, if what it meant was that the Seattle SuperSonics would be wearing their colors to the Sports Arena for Round 2 of the NBA Western Conference playoffs. It could happen, provided the Clippers somehow could overcome the Jazz tonight in comparatively peaceful Salt Lake City.

Nearly 20,000 Jazzercisers will be exercising their lungs, very few of them--for two hours--sympathetic to the troubles of Los Angeles.

Yet no matter how much noise they do make, no matter how much encouragement Karl and Jeff get inside Home Malone, these noisemakers could scarcely be any more influential to the outcome of tonight’s game than the 7,148 who convened at the convention center Sunday in Anaheim, where professional basketball hasn’t really been seen much since the balls were red, white and blue.

It was like a college crowd, several of the principals said. Loud, proud and compact.

“Reminded me of Marquette vs. Notre Dame,” said Rivers, who did not attend Notre Dame.

Truthfully, there might not have been more than 6,000 who occupied seats when the game began, with another 5,000 ticket-holders electing to stay home for one reason or another. (Some obviously feared there would be a shortage of empty chairs, which, as it turned out, there was not.)

Ah, but those who were there had something to say. Some of them sent a message that if the Clippers felt like dropping around more often, it was OK by them. Consider it an open invitation: Move to our county, change your colors to orange.

They really got into it.

These people did everything but hang a shingle outside that said: OPEN HOUSE. Fans waved small white towels--Anaheim Hankies. The acoustics were such that whatever noise they made reverberated like amps at a concert. And then there were the three dudes who set out to distract Karl Malone before every free throw. How? By waving in his face full-color posters of women in minimal-fabric bathing suits.

Nice try, but neither woman nor rain nor snow kept Mailman from making 22 of 24 from the line.

“I’m married,” Malone said. “That stuff don’t bother me.”

When or where this game was played never seemed to have much effect on Malone. Once his teammates grew tired of goofing around--after six minutes they had eight points--and started lobbing him the ball, Malone thrust forward those blacksmith arms of his and went excuse-me, pardon-me, comin’-through, excuse-me all the way toward the basket, with enough full-body contact for two Steven Seagal movies and a rugby scrum. He scored 44 points . . . with 11 baskets.

The Clippers put everybody on him but Ralph Lawler. Fortunately, on the other end of the court that they U-Hauled to Anaheim, board by board, Danny Manning was doing dipsy-doodles of his own, the starting lineup was racking up all but nine of the team’s 115 points and the crowd should have been singing the new Randy Newman song: “Anaheim, We Love It.”

This definitely was not the same team in Game 4 that got floored in Game 1.

“We grew up in Game 1,” Rivers said. “Then we grew up some more in Game 2. Then we grew up some more in Game 3. Then we grew up some more in Game 4. By the time this season’s over, we’ll be 100 years old.”

Everybody felt a little older after last week. Everybody feels a little better today.