Lakers Fever Is a Slam Dunk for Civic Pride

At the TGI Friday’s bearing Magic Johnson’s name, they’ll begin lining up this afternoon long before the Lakers begin to play, knowing it will take hours to get into the bar, never mind getting a beer or finding a seat with a view of the game on TV. These, a regular tells me, are die-hard fans who never miss a Lakers game.

Across town, at my neighborhood version of the chain, the crowd last week was considerably more eclectic, maybe less sophisticated, but certainly just as much in love with this team, this game.

A pair of blond women were perched at the bar, accepting the good-natured ribbing of a buddy, who said they wouldn’t know a jump shot from a jump ball. Along one wall was a group of Latino men wearing soccer jerseys, lining up empty Coronas on the windowsill behind them. Outside on the smoking patio, a stocky black woman in a backward cap and a Lakers jersey lighted a cigarette for a guy with spiky blond hair, nose and eyebrow rings and a skateboard resting near his feet.

And I found myself appreciating the spectacle almost as much as I enjoyed the game.

The parties are as much a reflection of our passion this season as purple-and-gold flags on cars and a jam-packed Staples Center on a day when the game is actually being played in a gym 3,000 miles away.

On days like today, as the Lakers try to take the third game of this championship series, a city threatening to splinter into pieces jams together with its own unruly version of civic pride.

USC professor Todd Boyd ran into the phenomenon last Sunday as he was rushing through the Dallas airport to make his plane back to L.A.

“I encountered this mass of people crowded outside the bar in the concourse. I knew what they were doing, and I tried to avoid them because I was taping the game [at home] and didn’t want to know what was happening.” But once the game ended, everyone filing onto the plane seemed to be crowing about the Lakers’ win or babbling into a cell phone, replaying the basketball game with friends. Even the pilot announced the score of the game.

Boyd has made a career of studying sports, particularly basketball, and their influence on our culture. He teaches in the university’s film school, has edited two books on sports and culture and is writing another, to be published next spring, on basketball and American culture. To hear him tell it, our communal preoccupation this playoff season reflects not just our affection for the Lakers but our collective longing to bond, to be part of something that is larger than a game.

“Sports is one thing in society today that tends to cut across lines of race, class, even gender,” said Boyd. “It’s one of the few things we can rally around that reflects a city’s identity.”

So during the playoffs, public places where we watch the game “become the equivalent of a town hall meeting, an old school community center, at least for the moment. People from all walks of life are in the same space, their attention focused on the same thing. It feeds our desire to be part of the crowd, to be connected to something in a city where everyone tends to go their own way.”

If last weekend is any example, Staples Center will be filled today with thousands of fans who have stood in line for hours to buy tickets to watch the arena’s giant TV screens as the Lakers play in New Jersey. “Obviously they can’t see it as well as they could if they were watching their own TV at home, but people want to feel like they’re participating,” Boyd said.

In arenas, airports, restaurants, bars, the crowd makes the contest more than just a basketball game, more even than an exercise in civic pride. “It’s entertainment,” Boyd says. “A party, a celebration, a chance to release some anxiety.” And it doesn’t even matter if you understand the game.

Real basketball aficionados won’t likely be perched on bar stools today to watch the game, but holed up alone or with a few friends in front of their TVs. You can count Boyd among them. For him, basketball is not just a subject of study but a personal passion. And a game is a “solitary experience,” best enjoyed alone.

“When people are around, they tend to talk and distract me from my mission, which is to see the game,” he said. “It’s just not the same when you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who are there for the beer or the camaraderie or the public celebration and don’t know that the reason the Lakers [struggle] is their inability to defend the pick-and-roll.”

For Boyd, that unfamiliarity “sort of kills the vibe.”

For the rest of us, it’s an ignorance that lets us believe, for a few hours at least, that we’re one big, happy family. And that may not keep the Valley, the Harbor and Hollywood in L.A.’s grasp, but it certainly keeps the vibe alive.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. She can be reached online at sandy.banks@latimes.com.