CHAMPS!

"The stoic guy with the shaggy hair screamed, and a city screamed with him.

The tough guy with the constant glare wept, and a city danced in his tears.

The stern superstar skipped across the court like a child, and a city is still bouncing along in his wake."

Bill Plaschke of the L.A. Times wrote those lines this morning. The long season is over and the Lakers are World Champions for the second year in a row. They managed, somehow, to beat the dogslobber Beantown Crybabies and that just makes it sweeter.

Yeah, it's only sports, not life, and yeah these are incredibly wealthy children who get to play with a ball for a living, and yeah kids in Africa are still starving and basketball really doesn't matter. Yeah Yeah Yeah.



While we're quoting John Lennon let's have another three Yeahs for Bill Russell, the greatest player of the 1960s, who is handing that trophy to the greatest player of this generation, Kobe Bryant, while looking on in back is one of the two or three greatest players of the 1980s Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

Kobe puts one of his two kids on his shoulders. He has these two chubby cheeked daughters who, like Obama's kids, have learned to keep their mouths closed while being interviewed in front of millions of people.



And here we get to see the other greatest player of the 1980s: Magic Johnson, in the blue suit. In back of Magic is Jerry Buss, who owns the Lakers, and in back of him is Kobe's wife. Which is to say Mrs. Bryant has more pull than any other woman in the organization, including Buss's daughter Jeannie, who just happens to be married to Laker Coach Phil Jackson.




The Duck came in to the worry room for the last quarter, just in time to spark the Lakers to their final rally. (Today they are the Lakers. Yesterday, and tomorrow, they'll revert back to their real name The Shmlakers.)

This morning Duck asked Plotnik if it wouldn't be better to just record the last five minutes of all 82 regular season games and the 23 playoff games the Lakers had to compete in, edit them together and then sit down and watch the whole season in a day or two?

It's a great idea, IF you've already watched all the other games first in their entirety.