Lakers’ Ceiling Fans

They came. They saw. They watched from the upper terrace, Section 319, a dozen rows from the back wall, as the Lakers conquered the San Antonio Spurs, 93-87, on Tuesday night, advancing to the Western Conference finals against the Sacramento Kings. And now Annette Toledo (“as in ‘holy,’” she said) and her friend Mary Gallardo were ready to turn their attention to more pressing issues.

“I want to see Rick Fox naked!” yelled Gallardo, a criminology student at Cal State Northridge with an unabashed love jones for the Lakers’ ultra-suave forward. Toledo, looking chic in a wig made of purple tinsel, had a more circumspect view of the respective merits of the Lakers’ starting lineup.

“We also have to give credit to the other guys too; Shaq, Kobe,” Toledo said. “We want to give ‘em their props.” Gallardo was having none of it. “I want to see Rick Fox naked,” she pouted. “She wants to see him naked,” Toledo affirmed. Oh.

It wasn’t the sort of observation you tend to hear in the lower, pricier echelons of the Staples Center, where waiters scurry about serving Chardonnay and chocolate cake, and the fans are so polite they sometimes don’t remember to stand up until the fourth quarter of a tie game--provided they’re not cutting three-picture deals on their cell phones.

But here in the nosebleeds, almost anything goes. Passions seem to run higher as you ascend the escalators past the luxury boxes. The number of gold chains and pierced noses per capita goes up exponentially. An informal camaraderie takes possession of people waving banners instead of valet parking passes and tossing off unfiltered opinions, not air kisses. Especially these days, as the Lakers hunt for their third consecutive NBA championship.

“You’re sitting with the real fans up here,” said Jose Azucena, 26, a professional body piercer who works at In the Skin Tattoos in Pasadena. “These are the loyal fans that buy the cheap seats. All those others are corporate-owned.”

Of course, blue-collar solidarity is a relative sentiment when you’re paying $47.50 per ticket. Knothole gangs and the idea of sports as the working stiff’s refuge from dog-eat-dog daily life pretty much went out with 50-cent beers.

But the territorial imperative of upper-tier seating is never to be taken lightly. From the dingiest small-town ballpark to the most lavish, state-of-the-art athletic palace in a major metropolis, the “cheap” seats (or what passes for them nowadays) are where fans still go to let their hair down and their inhibitions out.

And in an epoch of ever-rising ticket prices and social stratification, upper-level seating may be the one place where ordinary fans can feel at home among the dot-com millionaires and the famous people in expensive eyewear who make up a good chunk of contemporary pro sports audiences. “I’ve sat three rows from the bottom, and I think this is much more wild than the bottom,” said Rosanne Menez, 22, who’d come to the game with her friend Azucena. “You get to be yourself, get to enjoy the game,” said Marcus Dixon of Long Beach, juggling a tray of margaritas as he paused to shout encouragement at the figures dribbling and shooting far below--as abstract and remote, at times, as GameBoy dots.

At some sports arenas, the cheap seats areas are famous for developing their own unique rituals. These are practically an art form among the bleacher bums of Chicago’s Wrigley Field, who like to sun themselves in the outfield while making disparaging and usually well-deserved remarks about the home team’s performance.

Nothing that colorful exists in the upper confines of Staples Center--an inverted pyramid, like most modern sports complexes, where the elite are treated like pashas and the hoi polloi are tucked away at an altitude normally reserved for pigeons and police helicopters.

At Staples, the social strata are as cleanly delineated as in Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” and the upper seating decks are so steeply raked (to make room for all those luxury suites) that, looking straight down, you can feel like Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo.”

But the benefits of sitting higher speak for themselves, partisans say, not the least of which is privacy. Let the beautiful people mug for the TV monitors. Leah Perroti was quite happy to be watching the game decked out in a yellow and purple Afro wig, matching Mardi Gras beads and a Lakers jersey as she sat with her husband, John, in the tippy-top row of section 315.

“You’re not going to write that, are you?!” said Perroti, a Los Angeles elementary school principal. Her students know that she likes the Lakers, Perroti said, “but they don’t know I dress up like this.” Actually, Perroti and her husband, who’ve been attending Laker games since the 1970s, seemed not to care much who knew. “You know how L.A. gets the bad rap for not getting excited?” Leah Perroti asked. “Well, we get pretty excited up here.” Added John: “And we can stand up and not be standing in front of somebody.”

So that means they wouldn’t trade places with Jack Nicholson, right? Well, ah, maybe. The couple has thought about upgrading their seats, to get a few rows closer to the action. “The hardest part” about sitting high up, said Leah Perroti, is that it takes a while to get on the escalators after the game ends because you have to wait for the people in the lower sections. “We take the stairs,” she said.

For some top-tier fans, Tuesday’s game seemed almost beside the point. Jeff Gates and Gary Brooks, who’d driven in from Claremont, were in no big hurry to take their seats, choosing to spend most of the first quarter eating greasy meat sandwiches at the City View Grill on the outdoor upper deck adjacent to the cheap seats.

Gates, who vaguely resembles the actor Brian Dennehy, said he dug the view of the downtown L.A. skyline, its facades resplendent in the twilight. But he did have one concern.

“You know what, dude? I thought that being in L.A. they’d have [TV] screens out here,” he said, gesturing toward a wall above a series of multiple double doors. “Dude, if I ran this place we’d have a screen right here.”

Truth to tell, you wouldn’t have missed much excitement if you watched the game’s first two periods on television. Falling behind early on, the Lakers played just well enough to hang close to the Spurs, trailing by six at halftime. Taking their cues from the players, the fans kept their enthusiasm in check. Only one banner flailed in the air in Section 304, while a single pompom was waved in 306.

But as the Lakers snatched the lead in the third period, the clapping and whooping rose through the rafters like thunder. Banners and signs sprouted like Himalayan wildflowers. Chants of “Three-peat! Three-peat!” drifted out toward the concessions areas. When Robert Horry sank a three-pointer with 56.2 seconds left, it was all over but the shouting--lots of shouting, with the cheap seats leading the way. “The people are just louder up here,” said usher Lakeisha Johnson, fighting to make herself heard above the din ricocheting down from the roof.

Like L.A., Staples may be a house divided. But every few years, for a few weeks in early summer, the Lakers become the great leveler. Down in the locker room, Horry was facing a battery of microphones and cameras, assessing the Lakers’ chances against the red-hot Kings, whom they meet Saturday in Sacramento. “We’re going to go in there and quiet them down,” he said softly.

Good, Robert, good. Just don’t expect quiet from Section 319 anytime soon.