Till Next Year--City May Get It Together by Then

So, I’m sitting there in Staples Center, watching faces in the crowd, the little kids with hair dyed yellow or violet, a barefoot woman dancing atop her chair, a round dude in a Kobe Bryant jersey who resembles three Kobe Bryants, a blindfolded woman on the hardwood floor at halftime trying to win a free trip on Southwest Airlines, a pep band playing its instruments in a distant balcony higher than Southwest’s flights fly.

I am watching a home team from Los Angeles laboring to win a championship, something no pro team based in the L.A. area has done since Ronald Reagan was based in the D.C. area, something that could compensate us for having to endure the sight of the “St. Louis Rams” winning the Super Bowl football game, something we could share for once as a community, in towns from San this to Santa that.

I am watching Shaquille O’Neal, a young man with a Superman tattoo and a torso the size of the Daily Planet cafeteria, dunking a basketball through the basket with the force of someone splitting an atom, unable to hit the broad side of a Hoosier farmer’s barn from two footsteps away, but a marksman from anywhere closer.

I am watching a fine team from Indiana trying to forestall the championship celebration, led by Reggie Miller, who shoots a ball better from 30 feet than Shaq does from three, and coached by Larry Bird, who in his prime shot the ball the same way Miller does but never dunked one the way O’Neal does, because it was never conclusively proved that Bird could dunk, or for that matter jump.

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And as this war of nerves and skill continues, drawing nearer and nearer a conclusion, with matrix clocks ticking off hundredths of a second, something else suddenly materializes in front of all of us there in the crowd . . . or, more accurately, appears above us, on Staples’ jumbo overhead four-sided Orwellian we-see-everything scoreboard.

It is the scene outdoors.

It is a closed-circuit camera angle on what’s happening outside of the arena, in the plaza, on the sidewalk, up the alley, down the block, by the parked cars, out there in the balmy downtown summer’s-eve air.

It is a pan ‘n’ scan television shot of several thousand “fans”--virtually everybody not wearing an actual uniform of some kind (player, referee, vendor, police) getting branded with the sobriquet of fan--milling outside, flocked there in the courtyard like pigeons, a roving pack of Staples marauders, viewing the game on an outdoor screen.

“Whose bright idea was THAT?” I think to myself, having been to one too many overheated athletic contests, having been aware for years that the thing to dread most at a championship game is a championship post-game.

There was that Midwest city on the night a World Series baseball game was played, when we looked out after the last pitch and saw flames licking from dumpsters, car hoods being stomped, windshields cracked with souvenir bats, passing cars rocked and rolled by pedestrians like something you’d expect to see on the nightly TV news from a combat zone or a Third World revolution.

And the home team had won that night.

I still remember going into a bar two hours later, for an unfortunately needed drink, and spotting a woman I knew doing the same. When her eyes met mine, one of hers was blackened, from having been punched while her purse was snatched. And then there was a drunken punk identified as “Bubba,” with a face as sweet as Huckleberry Finn’s, freely confessing to having set his share of cars on fire.

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There have been so many unruly aftermaths over the years, so many triumphs followed by civic unrest, that it is hard to believe L.A.’s “fans” were encouraged to mass at the arena--fans who had literally been left out, provided with free TV and a place to assemble unsupervised, to consume alcohol and abuse substances on arena property, to cut loose with little or no law there to bother them.

Now it is calm here again, a few days after the fray. Shaquille O’Neal has publicly promised a repeat episode for next year, giving Los Angeles 360 days or so to learn its lesson.

You do not trap 20,000 or more people inside a building by letting a few hundred loiterers set up camp. Either you seal off the area so the athletes and customers can come and go, or you ring the premises with cops and security guards, not with ya-hooing, dope-smoking, fire-starting “fans.”

There is a phrase often used in sport: “Wait ‘til next year.” But it is usually used when your teams lose, not when they win.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com