Some Guys in Inglewood Want to Play Some Ball

Brian Taylor, junior point guard and co-captain of the Inglewood High basketball team, has his foot in a cast for a few weeks. But his mouth is still working, nonstop.

So Taylor is able to yell encouragement to his hard-working teammates during practice one afternoon while explaining that Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers is his favorite NBA player and trying to fool a visitor into thinking that Paul Pierce, former Kansas star and future NBA rookie, is his cousin.

“He is not,” several other players yell at Taylor and Taylor ‘fesses up. No, Pierce isn’t really a relative. But Pierce prepped at Inglewood too, so that makes him kind of related, doesn’t it?

Inglewood Coach Patrick Roy has gathered his team for a pre-practice discussion of the NBA lockout. Inglewood High is half a mile from the Great Western Forum, where the Lakers play. Paul Stewart, a senior, has season tickets. Gerrod Jenkins has a friend, a single mom who sells peanuts at the Forum to try to support her child.

Skip Esene, a senior forward, doesn’t say a word until Roy prods him, points and says “Skip follows the NBA closely.”

“Yes,” Esene says, “I do. This all makes me sad.”

Fifteen kids sit cross-legged on the floor or lean against a wall and maybe you’d be surprised by their opinions of this folly-filled lockout. These kids do not automatically take the side of their high-paid career models.

Certainly every one of these high school juniors and seniors would love to be an NBA player someday. They speak in wonderment of watching the Chicago Bulls work as a team and what they see as too much selfishness from the Lakers.

And as to who is right and who is wrong in this labor situation, the consensus among the Inglewood players is pretty much “Who cares?”

Terry Sharieef Davis, a skinny senior forward, speaks up:

“I feel real sad that the two sides are arguing about money. We might not be as good as them as players--they’re blessed with all that talent--and it makes me sad because it’s not about the love of the game any more.”

Jenkins nods in agreement and says, “I can’t believe it when a guy like Kevin Garnett goes out there and says it’s not enough money for him. I mean, he’s not teaching kids in the inner city, he’s not out there curing cancer or being a preacher and bringing God to people.”

Rickey Freeman, a senior guard, says, “I feel bad for the fans.”

Freeman has raised his hand before he speaks, evincing a politeness adults are always thinking is absent among teenagers.

“I love the game of basketball,” he says. “The game of basketball. Both sides, they’re taking away the love of basketball from a bunch of people.”

Sandy Fletcher, also with his hand raised, wonders if “either side thinks of the people who aren’t millionaires who are losing all this money.”

A couple of Fletcher’s teammates giggle and look puzzled and Fletcher says, loudly, “There are those people. People who work at the Forum parking cars and selling tickets and stuff like that. Look, even the Sizzler up the street, they’re losing business because of this.”

Jenkins glares at his doubting teammates and says, “I know a person like that. She’s a peanut seller. She’s got a child to raise on her own. She’s hurting, man. Nobody thinks about those people, do they?”

It is the apparent willingness of the players to stay away from the game that seems to puzzle these high school players.

“If I had no team to play on, I’d be down at Rogers Park, playing all day by myself,” Davis says.

“Yeah, we’d be out there eight hours a day just playing,” Taylor says as everybody nods.

“These guys, they all just trippin’,” says Michael Owens, a senior. “All this over all that money, man. There’s so much money that they should all be happy. They all got more money than you can spend in a lifetime and they want more. They all trippin’.”

Stewart, the season-ticket holder, laments, “I don’t have nothing to do on Wednesdays and Fridays now.” He is the only Inglewood player to declare agreement with the players.

“The players are right,” he says. “If you got the talent to play the game at that level, that’s what the league is about and that’s who should get paid. Without the talent, you got nothing.”

But some of his teammates shake their heads, wave their hands and hoot about “guys making millions who won nothing, done nothing.”

And then Taylor perks up. Even standing there in his cast and whispering that the doctors tell him two more weeks--”But I’ll be out there sooner, you’ll see”--Taylor figures out an upside to this lockout.

“You know,” he says, “we play most of our games on Fridays. No Laker games on Fridays so we should get more fans out. They got nothing else to do around here now. They should come out and see us. We’re gonna be good. You tell people that. We’re gonna be good. And we’re gonna be playing. No matter what.”