SIDELINE CUT:Los Angeles Lakers fans must have known that the end was nigh when Jack Nicholson walked out.
Film fans will have noticed a marked decline in Jack’s big screen appearances in recent years but he has remained a ubiquitous front row presence for Hollywood’s favourite basketball team, the undisputed number one fan since his days of turning in era-defining turns as JJ Gittes and Randle McMurphy.
Jack has seen the rise and fall of several Los Angles Lakers dynasties but he is always there, front row, smiling his inscrutable smile and occasionally behaving like an unpaid coach.
But the current season has turned into one of bitter underachievement for the Lakers and the sense is that the team is in long-term decline. Jack’s decision to leave the arena with seven minutes remaining in a recent game against Oklahoma was an explicit show of disenchantment with how the team was playing.
On Thursday night, things turned blacker than Jack’s shades for Lakers fans when they lost their third game of the season to the LA Clippers. The brand leader in world basketball suddenly finds it is not even the best club in the city any more.
For decades, the existence of the LA Clippers seemed like a dark joke.
What hope could any club have of co-existing in a city of illusion, chutzpah and hard glamour, the very qualities that had come to define the Lakers?
The story of the Clippers might have been dreamed up by Nathanael West: the club spent several decades drifting fruitlessly towards the west coast and ended up in Los Angeles via San Diego. Some years they produced dreadful teams. Many other seasons they were merely mediocre. In 1997 they actually made it to the NBA play-offs and in a macabre postscript, four members of the team who played that season have since died, two from illness, one in a car accident and one by murder.
Mostly, though, the Clippers just existed in an NBA twilight world where the only Los Angeles team that anyone knew or cared about was the Lakers.
Getting traded to the Clippers was a kind of jail sentence for a player and countless promising ballers have enjoyed fruitless seasons there. There are endless Clippers jokes: Why don’t the fans fall asleep at Clippers game? Because they might get hit with a pass.
The most interesting thing about the Clippers has always been their fans: those people who actively turn their back on the success and beauty that the Lakers represent, preferring to support this underworld team. There can’t be more than a handful who have supported the Clippers through the various chapters of Lakers greatness – the Showtime era of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Lakers-Celtics rivalry that defined American sport in the mid 1980s, the arrival of Shaquille O’Neal, the indomitable period of Kobe Bryant and O’Neal and the unprecedented run of success under Phil Jackson, part basketball coach and part legend.
Full house
In recent years the Clippers shared an arena, the Staples Centre, with the Lakers, and the only night they drew a full house was when they played the Lakers. How could the Clippers ever be expected to compete?
Whatever about the joys of being a Clippers player (what do you call a bunch of millionaires watching the NBA play-offs on TV? the LA Clippers) the joys of being a fan were tangential. Billy Crystal counts as their best-known (and perhaps only) celebrity fan. And maybe that is the appeal. Clippers tickets cost half what the Lakers’ do. The crowd was there to watch basketball and not to point at Denzel or Cindy or any of the iconic stars.
With the Lakers, the basketball was just part of the show: often, there was as much happening at courtside. (During the revival of the Lakers-Celtics finals rivalry in 2008 and 2010, Phil Jackson, tiring of Matt Damon’s exuberant support, turned around and told the Bostonian to “Sit down and shut the f*** up.”).
Now, everything has changed. The speed of the decline of the Lakers reads like yet another moral tale of the mercilessness of showbiz. As the saying goes, everyone in LA keeps a bag packed. Just in case. Overnight, the Lakers seem to be heading fast towards skid row.
And to make matters worse, the Clippers have roused themselves and are genuine NBA championship contenders this year. Their history of being everything the Lakers weren’t was turned on its head when they got the number one pick in the draft lottery (giving them first choice of the best players in America not already playing in the NBA) and selected 6ft 10in Blake Griffin (23), and looks set to become the new brand leader of the NBA.
In addition the club’s management has put together a string of successful trades to surround Griffin with a team of experienced All-Star calibre players such as Chris Paul and Jamal Crawford.
And now they own the Laker house.
They didn’t so much beat the Lakers on Thursday night as cruise by them as if they were an irrelevance. It was a complete inversion of what Lakers fans were accustomed to watching when the teams met.
This isn’t the same as Manchester City suddenly rising to eclipse Manchester United either: it is more akin to Wigan suddenly becoming the hottest football property in England.
It leaves Lakers fans in a bleak place. Kobe Bryant still has competitive fire and brilliance, but at 34 he can’t dominate games as he used to. He looks frustrated and sullen in a team that, while glittering on paper, simply has no chemistry. The Lakers are falling out of the sky.
When they meet the Clippers for the final time in the regular season in April, their chances of even making the play-offs may have passed. And if that happens, the lowly Clippers, for decades the team that could never get a break from Hollywood, will become the only show in town. And if they deliver on their potential and win the championship, they will leave Tinseltown in a dilemma. Will the stars continue to follow a washed-up team? Wasn’t it Jack who said: “What’s beautiful is all that counts, pal. That’s ALL that counts.”
