Posted 1:59 PM by Alfred

A lot of people (ok, nobody) ask me why the hell I like the Clippers so much. I grew up in LA, Magic & the crew were winning championships left and right, why the hell the clipper love? Well let me explain, I have this bad habit of rooting for the underdog, especially when I’m at down points in this journey called life. And my love affair with the clippers began at a point where a dirty dog scratching its hairy ass in a fly infested dump looked like an envious lifestyle compared to the warped view of my own existence at that particular moment.

I was just out of college, living in my grandparents’ poolhouse, which in and of itself was a pretty phat setup. It was just my mindset. I had no vision of my future. I was stuck in a warp of warped warpness. The magical Disneyland of dollar bills getting thrown everywhere and beautiful spokesmodels standing next to lamborghinis that I had imagined must be the post collegiate degree holding lifestyle had never transpired. Maybe my decision to stay in Berkeley and buck tradition by delivering pizza rather than kissing ass at corporate get-togethers like the rank and file of the business school grads wasn’t the best call in the world. But I wasn’t ready to leave b-town and enter corporate craphood. I had this strange idea that holding onto my “alternativeness” was much more valuable than slurping suits at martini luncheons and discussing the economy. Yet after a few months of drifting in the nether I eventually packed up and moved back to la-la land.

And there I found, after a while, a corporate zombie job at this huge company in the entertainment industry, that from the name of the company, which I shouldn’t tell you but it was Warner Brothers, was not nearly as glamorous as you might think. It was full of people that seemed depressed and beaten down by life under their shells of snappy comebacks and office politics. It was social misfits and social butterflies. It was a microcosm of society but seriously distorted by greed and manipulation. It was Ronco hair spray paint and people stuck in neutral and jealousy and mediocrity.

While in Berkeley I’d kind of become a Golden State Warriors fan. This was during and right after the whole Run-TMC thing with Mullin, Hardaway, & Mitch Richmond, when the Warriors were actually good but always choked in the playoffs. I really only turned into a sports fan in college, which explains my nonchalance at the whole Lakers dynasty. I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to root on the team that people actually liked, I wanted to be that annoying fuckbag at the party hogging the dip and spitting out epithets against the popular choice. I wanted to be the guy that no one really understands what the fuck motivates him, they can’t figure that guy, he’s one leg short of a walrus but damn if he doesn’t swing a mean two-by-four.

Anyway I got back to LA and the Lakers were cool, but I needed a team I could identify with. A team of misfits. A team of losers. I found the Clippers. They were so, kitschy, if that’s a word. I mean who else has Bill Walton as their official color commentary guy? Who else brings in the human highlight reel Dominique Wilkins for one season just to boost ticket sales? What other team is owned by such a wackjob that really doesn’t give a fuck if his team wins or loses as long as he has something cool to take his friends to?

So that’s why I’ll be rooting for the clips when they go up against the lakeshow this week. Even though Elton Brand likes to pull his shorts up real high like Pee Wee Herman when he’s throwing it down on Robert Horry.

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