Goldstein and Gasol: An Introduction
““I often reminded the players to focus on the journey rather than the endgame, because if you give the future all your attention, the present will pass you by.””
““People don’t stop eating, and they don’t stop drinking coffee.””
Large stack of money, Anthony Davis, LeBron James (L-R)
The Lakers did it. Of course they did.
In June 2019, after six publicly mortifying months of front office failure, the Lakers finally acquired New Orleans Pelicans superstar Anthony Davis for a bounty of young players and future draft picks. When the deal was announced, a phrase that comes up in conversation with Lakers haters and supporters alike immediately popped into my head.
“It’s very easy to be a Lakers fan.”
It’s true. Forget those six months. Run it back six years. Even as the Lakers put up the NBA’s worst winning percentage and the front office dug up nadirs that the league had never seen before, it remained very easy to be a Lakers fan.
It didn’t matter that Jim Buss -- candidate for the top-right-corner photo of the Wikipedia page for Nepotism -- was so inept that his sister Jeanie banished him from the family business when he tried to steal the team from her in a feckless coup. It didn’t matter that his replacements were a Rob Lowe looking ass ex-agent hated by nearly every GM in the NBA and a former Laker legend more interested in his sprawling billion dollar investment portfolio than actual front office duties. And to be totally honest, when it was reported that Kawhi Leonard used the Lakers as a pawn to force the Clippers to acquire Paul George, I wouldn’t say I was crushed. These were just speed bumps, ones we took in a BMW Z4 at 80 mph, on the way to our entitled return to relevance. So when LeBron James and Anthony Davis pulled into Staples Center in that Beemer with a fucked up suspension and a missing front bumper, I felt renewed excitement knowing that we’d finally be back in the playoffs after over half a decade. But what I didn’t feel was joy.
See, while it’s very easy to be a Lakers fan, it’s often not very fun.
That’s not the case with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the other civic institution I’ve spent my life obsessing over. It’s not always easy to be a Dodgers fan, but it’s always fun. Those who know me personally know how much the Dodgers mean to me. The stadium is a 57 year old jewel that will thrive for at least another 57 more, not an easy feat in a city that only recently learned to respect its architectural past. The lore is rich, brimming with players and events historic not only to the game, but also the history of race in America. The stands and nearby bars are packed with loyal, rambunctious die-hards raised on Koufax, Valenzuela, Piazza, and Bellinger, along with fresh transplants about to discover their new favorite summer hangout. Even now, after seven straight division titles and 2 straight World Series appearances, you can get tickets for about $20. The Dodgers are fun. Let’s have some beers and go to the ballpark and have some fun.
Two Dodger fans having fun at Dodger Stadium
I’m not saying taking the subway Downtown and hitting up a Lakers game isn’t fun, but it’s going to cost you a day’s pay. And that’s for a throwaway, regular season game that LeBron might sit out to rest his aging body. I’ve been to approximately two Lakers games as an adult. Nosebleeds cost an obscene $100, not much higher than it was during the aforementioned losing seasons. The Staples Center nosebleeds are perched above three levels of luxury boxes that are themselves placed above two additional seating levels. You’re better off watching the games from the peak of Mt. Baldy than the 300 section of Staples Center. But StubHub fees and regressive stadium planning are not the only reason that rooting for the Lakers doesn’t spark as much joy in me as it once did. Why is that?
A big part, of course, is that I was spoiled with championships. At age 10, I experienced the ultimate thrill of victory, the version that eludes many sports fans in their lifetimes. By 12, I, we, the city of Los Angeles, had added two more rings. After a brief dry spell caused by the breakup of Shaq and Kobe, I watched The Black Mamba give himself a nickname and celebrate back-to-back champagne showers before I was of legal drinking age. Then factor in my lonely teenage years spent watching grainy ESPN Classic broadcasts showcasing the Showtime Lakers, a team whose showy dominance in front of showgirls and showbiz types defined the NBA in the 1980s. We were winners and we still are winners. Don’t let the pathetic ways we lost over the last six years fool you. We’re winners.
90,000 fans pack the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to celebrate the 2009 title. Squint and you can see me near the end zone.
It’s that form of extremely stupid entitlement that served as the Lakers’ roster blueprint these last two off-seasons. Over those six years of losing, the Lakers used the draft to build a young, energetic, FUN team of players I wanted to watch grow for years, ballers like Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, Kyle Kuzma, Julius Randle, and Brandon Ingram. But then they signed a 33 year old LeBron, which meant Father Time had flipped from coddler to disciplinarian. Early last season, it seemed like the young guns were growing at an alarming rate, spurred on by the Gamma radiation emanated by King James. But then he went down with an injury, ruining any chance for a postseason run. So, in came Anthony Davis and a collection of championship-hungry vets on team-friendly salaries. All it took was shipping off all of those players, minus Kuzma, and three 1st round draft picks to New Orleans. Six years of growth and development stymied just to do it the old fashioned Lakers way.
To paraphrase the NBA’s old slogan: (Do) I Love This Game! (?)
In 2002, Julie Powell, a secretary living in Long Island City, Queens, was working a dead-end job in a Manhattan call center. Everyday she took phone calls from bereaved family members of 9/11 victims and egregiously rude New Yorkers screaming about how they thought the gaping hole in the ground should be rebuilt. She studied theater in college and wanted to be an actress, but that dream had slowly shriveled on the vine. As she spotted her thirties on the horizon, she looked back on her life and did not like what she saw.
Not knowing what else to do, she decided to start cooking recipes out of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She eventually started a blog in those nascent days of Web 2.0 challenging herself to cook all 524 recipes in 365 days. By the end of it, she rediscovered the moments in life that gave her joy and had also gotten a book deal (neither were exclusive). They even made a movie about her blog/book starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Chris Messina, and Stanley Tucci. It’s on Netflix. You should watch it. It’s pretty whimsical for a movie that constantly references the death of 3,000 people.
Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep discussing 9/11.
So, that brings us to Goldstein and Gasol.
Sidenote: Why Goldstein And Gasol and not Pablo and Pau?
1. I think it sounds better.
2. It makes for a cleaner Lakers logo parody.
3. I’ve always wanted to be a Last Name Guy. Pablo is a great first name, but Goldstein is a top tier last name. If my name was David or Ben or Josh, I would go by Goldstein. EASY.
Just visually speaking, 111 - 100 is a beautiful final score.
In 1985, after eight NBA Finals losses against the Boston Celtics, the Lakers finally broke through and defeated their hated arch rival. The road victory in the sweltering Boston Garden exorcised decades of 2nd place finishes, not just for the players battling Larry Bird and ghosts of Celtics past, but also for the players’ families. When interviewed in the cramped road locker room after the game, Charlina McAdoo, wife of All-Star forward Bob, told the Boston Herald “Now we don’t have to say we’re sorry anymore. It’s sort of like that line from the movies: Winning a championship means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Like many wives of athletes, the spouses of the Showtime Lakers leaned on each other for support during the trying times and embarrassing indignities that can come from being married to famous athletes. While their husbands were busy at practice or on weeks-long road trips, the wives had to take care of the home and their children, juggling matriarchal duties with punishing loneliness and thoughts of inevitable infidelity. Not just in hotel rooms in Phoenix and Milwaukee, but also in the notorious Forum Club, a post-home game haven for cocaine and groupies that was off-limits for wives.
Despite these affronts, these women were the backbone of the team. The NBA season is a grueling marathon and Lakers owner Jerry Buss was said to tell the wives that they needed to ensure that off-court distractions did not affect things on the court. In a sense, he was telling these women how to deal with the overgrown boys they called husbands. If a 5-game losing streak made players angry, the wives were supposed to pamper them. If a player’s extramarital dalliance became known, she was not to throw him out of the house. Why, Buss would suggest, that might make him lazy on defense the next game! It was one thing after another, but these women knew that by symbolically taking charges off the court, they were justifiably entitled to the riches their husbands earned on the court.
No Laker wife exemplified that Season 4 Carmela Soprano mentality better than Charlina McAdoo. In fellow Laker wife Angela Worthy’s book Powerful Mate Syndrome: Reclaiming Your Strength and Purpose When Your Partner Is the Star of the Relationship, Charlina was described as someone who was “intelligent, ambitious, effervescent, kind, and funny” and “not about to be any man’s trophy wife.” In that book, Charlina recommended that wives horde a stash of cash they could touch at any moment if things went sour. But Charlina wasn’t just a leader of the Laker wives in terms of financial planning. She was also one of the driving forces behind the creation of the team’s charitable arm: Forum Community Services Inc. AKA The Laker Ladies
The 1985 Laker Ladies were Charlina McAdoo (president), Linda Rambis (secretary and treasurer), Marilyn Baumeister, Solveig Bertka, Wanda Cooper, Adrienne Erickson, Marge Hearn, Rachel Kerlan, Mary Lou Liebich, Linda Lombardo, Sondra Nevitt, Chris Riley, Claire Rothman, Mary Jane Steiner, Christine Vitti, Karen West, Valerie Wilkes, and Angela Worthy.
Following a Christmas toy drive for needy Angeleno children, Charlina, Linda Rambis, Karen West, and the other wives decided to leave their own mark on the city. They put on charitable fundraisers, created youth outreach programs, and even got their husbands to record an anti-drug rap song -- co-written by Angela Worthy and produced by 70s jazz master George Duke -- that was distributed to local high schools. But the raison d'etre for this blog you’re reading is a cookbook they published after that historic 1985 NBA Championship: World Champion Los Angeles Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook
Published under the Laker Ladies -- firmly separating themselves from the marital bonds that brought them all together -- the cookbook doesn’t just contain recipes from Lakers players and wives. There are dishes from coaches, announcers, and training staff. From A-list courtside celebrities to self-proclaimed “superfans” who ran manufacturing companies. The longtime mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, has a dish, as does Jerry Buss’ secretary. It’s truly a family cookbook from a team that to this day remains one of the last family-owned teams in American sports.
I bought this book on eBay for $8. One of my hobbies is collecting esoteric Los Angeles memorabilia. Among my treasured possessions are an unused ticket from a Dodgers game cancelled by the Rodney King Riots and a McDonald’s coupon offering free Big Macs to victims of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. As a tool to examine Los Angeles’ past, this book is a captivating look at what Angelenos ate in 1985. Today, LA is rightfully considered by many chefs and food critics as the best food city on the planet. But this book was published only a decade after the California Roll was invented; sushi was still foreign and scary to many Angelenos. The seeds of Koreatown were only just freshly planted; kimchee and pajeon wouldn’t become staples in the diets of non-Korean Angelenos for several generations. Latinos, at only 25% of LA’s population in 1980, hadn’t yet replaced the hamburger with the taco as the city’s culinary symbol.
I’m lovin’ corporate benevolence.
That doesn’t mean the recipes within aren’t a diverse culinary spread. There are Southern recipes from African-American players, classic 1950s style casseroles, and whitebread America approximations of Mexican and Chinese cuisine found within this cookbook. There’s also something called a Honeymoon Salad from the team’s dentist. It calls for “lettuce, no dressing.” I’m very excited to cook the Honeymoon Salad.
And why am I making that salad? In a nod to/rip-off of Julie & Julia, I will be cooking 82 recipes over the course of the 2019-2020 Lakers season. Jerry West’s stuffed potato skins. Jack Nicholson’s soft scrambled eggs. Wilt Chamberlain’s shrimp curry. Angela Worthy’s pan fried fish. Dr. Larry Paben’s Honeymoon Salad. While I’ll be cooking in tandem with every game, I won’t be regularly writing about the games themselves. No recaps or predictions or analysis, except for a few exceptions. There are other places for that type of writing. Instead, I’ll be writing about the person who contributed their recipe -- people like Laker Lady Linda Rambis, actor Henry Winkler, Governor George Duekmejian, and announcer Chick Hearn -- and their place in both Lakers and Los Angeles history. And unlike LeBron, I’m not allocating days off to rest my aching knees. Hence, the reason why I’m really looking forward to that dry salad.
But why -- Pablo, for the love of God, WHY? -- am I undertaking this culinary and literary marathon? Well, there are several ways that this season ends. LeBron and his new teammates might struggle for months, until hitting a groove that puts them on a collision course with the Clippers in the playoffs. Perhaps Kuzma’s ankle troubles and LeBron’s nagging injuries in his 17th season sink the Lakers’ run for a 17th championship before the team even learns how to play with each other. Or maybe there’s simply a ceiling for what LeBron, AD, Kuzma, and a bunch of desperate veterans looking for a ring can do in the NBA, even in the first wide-open (read: no Warriors inevitability) NBA season in half a decade.
Whichever way this season ends, I want to rediscover the fun in being a Lakers fan. I’ve experienced championship parades and watched historic moments, but that’s not exactly pushing me to follow them anymore. The 2019-2020 Lakers feels like we’re trying to win the championship with other team’s players. Despite all the losing, I had a lot of fun over those six years watching the Kobe era finally close and seeing that young core grow and mature as basketball players. Like playing sports, watching sports isn’t always about winning or losing. 2017 was the first time the Dodgers made the World Series in my lifetime. When Kiké Hernández hit a grand slam against the Chicago Cubs in the NLCS to help clinch the pennant, I literally couldn’t stop myself from jumping with joy. A grown man, jumping out of his seat at work. But I also look back on 2017 as the year Yasiel Puig, my favorite player, finally learned how to draw a walk in pressure-packed at-bats instead of wildly swinging at the first two pitches. It took five seasons, but the satisfaction of consistent plate appearances felt almost as good as a pennant.
He also did stuff like this in 2017.
That’s how I watched Lonzo’s janky shot and Randle’s throwback brute force post play and Ingram’s toothpick-like physique that made me wince every time he drove the ball. It wasn’t easy, yet it was often… you know. But now that young core is over in New Orleans with Zion Williamson. So after six years of looking to the future, only to be jarringly interrupted by a trade that screamed THE FUTURE IS HERE AND WE GOT LIKE TWO YEARS TO DO SOMETHING REAL QUICK BECAUSE WE LITERALLY TRADED AWAY THE FUTURE AND, SURE, LEBRON IS GOING TO KEEP PLAYING UNTIL HIS SON ENTERS THE LEAGUE BUT HIS BODY IS FADING FAST, I’m looking to the past to rekindle my passion for the present. I wish I didn’t need a cookbook to make me fired up about watching a generational talent team up with arguably the greatest player of all time. But that’s where I’m at as a Lakers fan. Hired gun title runs may do it for some, but not for me. I want a substantial relationship with my team. A Phil Jackson + Jeanie Buss type love. Because right now, it’s just Dr. Jerry Buss and a Playmate whose name he already forgot.
Whether you’re a Lakers neophyte intrigued by this year’s team or a die hard fan with a weathered car flag hanging out your rear window, check back here 3 to 4 times a week for a new post and recipe. Goldstein and Gasol officially begins on Tuesday October 22 with the Lakers on the “road” against the Los Angeles Clippers.
That game’s dish: A sweet potato pie as prepared by Christine Johnson, mother of Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
