The Land That Time Forgot

The fundamentals will never change.” So proclaims the Nike slogan silk-screened across Steve Edwards’ T-shirt. But the fundamentals of professional sports are more fickle. When Steve, a student at Inglewood’s Crozier Middle School, gets the news that the Lakers have abandoned his city for the Staples Center, he is inconsolable.

It doesn’t matter that the new arena is only 10 miles away; if the Lakers are leaving Inglewood, they might as well be leaving for Duluth.

Trudging home with his friend and classmate Rubin Lamb one recent afternoon, it occurs to Steve that this change will impact the very shirt on his back. After all, he’s the proud owner of Shaq, Kobe Bryant and Travis Knight tank tops, but don’t expect those to see the light of day any time soon. “I’m not wearing any more jerseys, not after that,” Steve says. “They moved now. It’s not the L.A. Lakers. It’s . . . what do they call it again? Staples . . .” “The Staples Lakers!” Rubin guffaws, unwilling to cut his friend some slack. But Steve persists: “My mom is going to be mad! When she finds out they moved, she’ll be hot! My mom loves the Lakers.”

For three decades, the Kings and, more significantly, the Lakers were a dominant presence in this blue-collar city of 130,000. “Showtime” lured Armani-clad coaches, Oscar winners in Ray-Bans and, above all, generations of basketball giants. For more than 30 seasons of basketball, these luminaries plowed through less-blessed cities like Gardena, Lennox or Lawndale just to reach architect Charles Luckman’s perfect circle of an arena: a fanciful whale-blue expanse embraced by 80 columns, where Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson worked so many miracles that, at the end of their storied careers, their retired golden jerseys ascended to immortality high above the court.

While his arena was under construction in the late 1960s, entrepreneur Jack Kent Cooke mused: “Perhaps 200 years from now, or maybe 2,000, people will say that the Forum was one of the fine buildings erected during the 20th century.” But archeologists of future millennia may instead marvel at the Forum’s short shelf-life in the American marketplace. Unlike the enduring coliseums of ancient Rome and Verona, the Forum lasted only 31 years before being declared obsolete and emptied of its gladiators.

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Inglewood city hall is permeated by all the mixed emotions of a jilted lover: bitterness, some understanding, the realization that not much has really been lost, the prospect of better suitors. Mayor Roosevelt Dorn, with a copy of “God’s Little Devotional Book” resting at his elbow, speaks about a singular lack of devotion. Professional sports teams have an obligation to the neighborhood, Dorn says, “but obviously they don’t take that obligation very seriously at all. The fans and the residents adopt them, they make them a part of their lives, and to just up and move without any real consideration--I think it’s irresponsible.”

From a business standpoint, Dorn, a retired Superior Court judge, can understand why the teams’ owners left. “It’s a great opportunity to develop some cheap land downtown that was sitting there and make it very expensive land.” And Dorn is not about to write Inglewood’s obituary. The city will still have Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital and Centinela Hospital, its casino and thoroughbred racing at Hollywood Park, recently purchased by the company that runs Churchill Downs. The mayor sees no reason to change the town motto on those grand banners that line Manchester Boulevard, advertising the Sparks, jockeys and the former Inglewood professional Shaquille O’Neal.

Despite losing the team of Shaq and and Magic and Worthy, and the team of Wayne Gretzky, Rogie Vachon and Marcel Dionne, Dorn assures that “we’ll still be ‘the City of Champions.’ We will have champion racehorses here, and above everything else, we have champion people.”

The city fathers’ very failures in building an economic base around the Lakers and Kings may minimize the small-business impact. “They didn’t create shopping for the fans,” says Dorn, elected only two years ago. “They didn’t create sports bars. They didn’t create entertainment for the fans, top-flight restaurants so that the fans would love to come in early.” Nor did the vanished champions exactly overflow Inglewood’s coffers. For the 1998-99 fiscal year, all events at the Great Western Forum, including an entire season of Laker and King games, brought in a projected $1.2 million in gross income for Inglewood. The city gleaned only 58 cents in revenue per Laker ticket, whether for an $850 court-side seat or a $10 perch in the nosebleed section.

Inglewood City Councilman Jose Fernandez would welcome future teams only if they make economic sense. “I can’t have some guy working 10 hours a day, or a single mom, subsidizing a corporate suite for an executive. That’s ridiculous.” The councilman is looking forward to the construction of two less-glamorous sources of sales tax revenue: a Home Depot and an auto-dealer megaplex.

At the Sports Section, Inglewood’s longtime Lakers and Kings team gear and memorabilia store, clerk Brian Smith worries more about the city’s heart than his sales, which, he says, remain brisk. “What are you going to call Inglewood now?” Smith asks. “The City of Gambling? The City of Horse-Racing?”

Manager Casey Valentine of Arena Liquor won’t sorely miss the sporadic business of the sports fans. No, he’ll be more nostalgic for the scalpers: “When they’ve sold out and make money, they come in and buy whiskey.”

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“Sparks will fly!” by late summer, this team rallying cry, flapping against the Great Western Forum colonnade, seemed more like a threat, and, indeed, the Sparks are expected to leave here for the Staples Center within the next couple of years. Inside, two months before Bruce Springsteen would open Staples, the Forum’s ticket-takers, ushers, merchandise vendors and janitors labored under uncertainty. These 400 unionized service workers, many of them Inglewood or South Los Angeles residents, most of them part-timers, had filled out applications for the new arena and been interviewed. Despite a pact between the Staples Center developers and the L.A. City Council that mandated priority consideration for Forum workers displaced from the publicly subsidized arena, not until late August were management and Service Employees International Union Local #1877 able to reach a tentative agreement.

Dave Stilwell, the SEIU Southern California director, enumerated the sticking points. Management wanted to increase the time on the job necessary for health and welfare benefits to kick in, to lower the wage ceiling for ticket-takers, to eliminate time-and-a-half pay on game-days before and after holidays, and to have employees absorb a $2 parking charge. “Everything there reeks of luxury: luxury suites, luxury boxes, fancy clubs that drip with conspicuous consumption, high player salaries,” Stilwell said, “while the workers are struggling just to maintain the standards that existed at the Forum.”

Lee Zeidman, vice president of operations for the L.A. Arena Co., which runs the Staples Center, confirmed management’s demands. “Certainly there are other ways to drive into downtown,” he suggested, discussing the $2 parking fee. “They can carpool and split that.” As of press time, the Arena Co. and the SEIUhad reached an oral pact under which management had dropped all its demands except for the lowered ceiling for newly hired ticket-takers. Forum ticket-takers would be employed at their current wages. Stilwell, cautioning that “the devil is in the details,” was awaiting the paperwork.

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As he nears home, Steve Edwards has apparently recovered from the shock of discovering that the Lakers have left. Although it’s likely that Inglewood town pride will still keep him from donning his Shaq jersey, the Laker fan in him has selected an exemption. “I’ve still gotta wear Kobe.”

Then he announces: “I don’t think I can make it to the Staples Center.”

“It’s not that far,” Rubin reassures him. “I’m still going, but I don’t think they should move.” Rubin’s parting advice for the men who built the Staples Center? “Tear it down.”