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There are few moments in sports quite like the moment when your pal the True Believer suddenly realizes that his (or her) love for the local team far exceeds that of the employees of said team.
This is the moment animation buffs remember as the moment when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff, turns to the camera as he hovers motionless and embarrassed in midair, turns into an all-day sucker for a moment, then returns to his original manifestation and plummets to the ground.
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| Good to know: Commissioning a painting of a player about to become a free agent, bad idea. (Getty Images) |
• The Clippers offered 5 years and $65 million to the Warriors' one year and $17.8 million.
• Los Angeles is a lot closer to Los Angeles than Oakland.
It wasn't about winning, or more playing time, or loyalty to the people who pulled him out of his difficult situation in New Orleans. It was business, pure and simple, and love had nothing to do with it.
We all understand this lesson when it's some other guy on some other team going to a new team that isn't our team. We all understand the cold, hard world when it happens to someone else, but never when we're the ones in the barrel.
While most Warrior departures over the years have gone unnoticed and unlamented over the years (the Latrell Sprewell saga notwithstanding), a lot of nonaligned basketball fans fell in love with the Warriors last year when they violated every convention of modern professional basketball and took their gloriously mutant show not only in to the postseason but past Dallas and into Utah.
There were lots of reasons -- Monta Ellis' can't-buy-booze-but-can-sing-the-blues precocity, Stephen Jackson's effervescent volatility, Matt Barnes' tattoo collection and conscienceless shooting eye, Andris Biedrins' goofy resoluteness, and of course His Diabolical Avuncularity himself, the unmade bed that is Don Nelson.
But more than anyone else, it was Baron Davis and his beekeeper's beard, his absolute competitive arrogance in the face of low percentages, his ability to bitch about every call -- even the ones that went in his favor -- and his all-around presence. He was the face of the weirdest franchise ever, a high-octane version of Gomez Addams.
And now he's a Los Angeles Clipper. Wow.
Now we have nothing against the Clippers. We rather approve of everything but their reflexive penury and their mega-bland uniforms. Next to the Warriors in 2007, the Clippers in 2006 were the oddest playoff team of the decade.
But they are lower on the Los Angeles oscilloscope than usual, because the Lakers own the town again, Southern California is preparing for another investigation-and-victory-filled football season, UCLA has Rick (Doublin' Down For Your Love) Neuheisel, the Bruins and Trojans are national players in basketball again (the Bruins way more than the Trojans), the Galaxy are showing exciting new ways to betray David Beckham's talent, and the Kings ... well, we have gone one step beyond now, haven't we?
