It’s a Small Window of Opportunity

All of the other lines move briskly at the Staples Center box office on 11th Street.

But not the one at Window 15.

All of the other lines, and they are barely lines, are for will-call tickets. A hello, an ID, a handful of tickets, away they go. The whole thing takes a minute, tops.

Then there’s Window 15.

Above it, a sign: “TICKET SALES.”

For the NBA finals. Game 2. Lakers-Pacers. Shaq-Reggie.

Right.

But, there they stand, dozens of people, curled around a palm tree, talking, leaning, sighing, sweating, rocking.

Waiting.

Every game night, an undetermined number of tickets are released to the public, through Window 15. They are leftovers from the NBA, NBC and other organizations that receive blocks of tickets for each game. The unused portions are slid through the slot at the bottom of Window 15, a few at a time.

Tanya is first in line. She drove in from Oakland early Friday morning. A little after 6 p.m., five hours after she arrived, Tanya pushes $158 to the gray-haired gentleman on the other side of the green glass.

“I’m a Laker fan,” Tanya said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Got tickets: “We were in the area,” said a woman leaning on her boyfriend.

An hour later, they still were.

In fact, an officer asked them to move around a little. Their feet were leaving impressions in the hot cement.

The people standing before Window 15 are the kinds of people who drive all day with the fuel light on. They take chances. They live with the consequences. They teeter on their feet for an entire afternoon, knowing the end result could be a walk to the parking lot or, worse, a trip into the den of the scalpers.

Actually, there are scalpers among them. At 4:15 p.m., there are 40 people in line. That there aren’t thousands speaks to the enormity of the odds against them.

Of the 40, “about half are scalpers,” said one veteran of Window 15, a man in a Brooklyn Dodger cap and Jerry Rice jersey.

A well-dressed woman, about 20th in line, pointed at two shady characters in front of her. She mouthed the words, “Scalpers. They’re scalpers.”

Then she lifted her eyebrows and nodded.

Trading places: The people of Window 15 stared glumly at the will-call windows. The will-call people shoved past, then minutes from their seats, from a cool drink, from Laker basketball.

The will-call people greeted each other happily. The people of Window 15 stared at the same creases on the neck of the guy in front of them, four hours running.

“Some of these guys are hustlers,” Dan, a surfer-type from Corona del Mar, said. “Some want to watch the game.”

It is 5 p.m. The scalpers are asking $250, “just to get in.” The worst seats in the house. Dan, who bought five released tickets Wednesday and traded up with a scalper for better seats, looked warily at the hordes of security and police officers milling around.

“There’s a lot of heat out there right now,” Dan noted. “You don’t want to be hanging around scalping.”

Dan has some hustler in him.

He is asked how you trade up. “You just do,” he said and shrugged. “You just do.”

By 6 p.m., in the moments before Tanya skips away with her ticket, there are hundreds in a line that might only yield a handful of tickets.

“It’s crazy,” Tanya said, then looks at her watch and smiles. “I gotta go.”

The big finish: Recording star Montell Jordan sang a striking national anthem Friday night, in part because of his pro-Laker statement toward the end of it.

The Def Jam recording artist known for the song, “This is How We Do It,” among others, Jordan hit the words, “land of the free,” and stopped.

Right then, Erikk Aldridge, Laker community relations director, knew he had lost $50.

Jordan unbuttoned his jacket and tore it open, revealing a Kobe Bryant jersey. Then he threw the jacket to the ground.

The Staple Center crowd roared as Jordan finished, “and the home of the brave.”

Aldridge and Jordan were friends at Serra High in Gardena. They saw each other Friday afternoon, Jordan showed Aldridge the uniform top, and Aldridge dared him to reveal it during the anthem. “Fifty bucks,” Aldridge told him.

Two hours later, his wallet was that much lighter.

“I’ve already paid up,” Aldridge said, laughing.

Overheard: Biff Henderson, the David Letterman lackey who sometimes does these events, stood in the Laker locker room and leaned toward a friend.

The conversation went like this:

Biff: “You know who that guy is right there?”

Friend: “Who?”

Biff: “Him. Being interviewed.”

Friend: “Brian Shaw.”

Biff: “Who?”

Just as we suspected.

Seen: Guys in big, yellow afro wigs on the sidewalk in front of Staples Center, screaming things like “Lakers No. 1!” and “Pacers . . . “ at camera operators.

At still photographers, that is.

At the buzzer: Jeff Christensen, a 32-year-old network administrator from Marshfield, Wis., made a $25,000 layup at halftime of Game 2.

That was the good news.

The bad?

He missed three shots--a 12-footer, a free throw and a three-pointer. Had he made them all, he would have earned $1 million in a contest sponsored by AT&T.;

“The first shot was no big deal,” the affable Christensen said later. “It was a blur from then on.”

Christensen and his wife hope to use the money to adopt a baby.