A Great Win Despite the Hooligans

As everybody in Los Angeles knows, long and hard droughts eventually end. On Monday the L.A. Lakers finally played rainmaker, beating the Indiana Pacers in a 116-to-111 come-from-behind victory for the National Basketball Assn. championship and bragging rights as the baddest round-ball team on Earth. Even the idiotic and violent criminals who took to the streets--these people have no right to call themselves Laker fans--cannot take away the team’s accomplishment.

Believe it or not, the Lakers cemented the win with free throws, usually one of their weaknesses. Once again, Shaquille O’Neal led the team in scoring, with 41 points.

The hodgepodge of communities that is Los Angeles and its environs hadn’t had a professional champion in 12 years, not since the Dodgers won the 1988 World Series. The achievements of the old Showtime Lakers, guys like Magic and Kareem and Silk and Worthy and Rambis, seemed forever beyond reach.

Some Angelenos weren’t convinced by the Lakers’ great regular season. As an online Laker fan club put it, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that [championship] ring.” But Monday the doubters were proven wrong.

For some, there may be something curious about all the joy and hoopla. Grown men playing their way through early adulthood, earning more in a year or two than many of us will earn in our lifetimes. Isn’t it a bit much? Arguably, no. The Lakers, just like award-winning actors or renowned musicians, are skilled entertainers. That’s what they did this season: entertain better than anyone else in their business.

A championship season provides something intangible. A region can have the best medical center, the top orchestra, but who will stop a stranger on the street or at the water cooler to talk about that?

From last fall through Monday night, the Lakers took Los Angeles and basketball fans across the nation on a joy ride. They brought brief respites from thoughts of foundering stock portfolios and rising interest rates and life’s other cares.

The Lakers could take a group of people like those in Section 318 in the nosebleed rafters of Staples Center, Americans of all sizes, shapes and colors, and bring them all to their feet with cheers and high-fives, none of them thinking for a second that they were anything but Laker fans. For all of those things, the city stands with pride for its newest champions, the 1999-2000 Lakers.