SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – Honored for his devotion to a basketball team that doesn't have a Hall of Fame history, Billy Crystal couldn't help but note the irony.
“How strange to be getting a ring before any of the Clippers,” he said.
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The actor is being added to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s James F. Goldstein SuperFan Gallery and took part in a ceremony Sunday along with fellow entertainer and filmmaker Spike Lee and Philadelphia businessman Alan Horwitz. Longtime Lakers fan Jack Nicholson is also being added but the three-time Academy Award winner was not able to attend.
Crystal wore a sports jacket and slacks, while Lee and Horwitz dressed as if they were sitting courtside. Lee, with an orange vest over a New York sweatshirt and topped by a black Knicks bucket hat, sparred with the opposition as if he was in his seat at Madison Square Garden.
“I saw some Boston Celtic green. Uh-uh,” he said, before showing the fans that he had brought coach Red Holzman's 1973 NBA championship ring, the last one won by the Knicks.
“It’s been a long time, but I think this year it’s going to be orange-and-blue skies,” Lee said.
Horwitz, known as the 76ers' Sixth Man, wore a 76ers sweatshirt, a blue Sixers hat and blue-and-white colored sneakers. He got choked up while thinking about how proud his mother would have been had she known about his honor.
Their time as basketball fans goes back more than five decades. Horwitz watched the Philadelphia Warriors when Wilt Chamberlain was a rookie in 1959. Crystal was in high school a couple of years earlier when he was drawn to another high schooler, Larry Brown, who would later be enshrined after winning championships as a coach in college and the NBA.
Lee was in the arena when the Knicks won their first championship in 1970 and Crystal was at MSG plenty of times himself, having started out as as Knicks fan. He went to Lakers games when he moved across the country, before someone recommended he check out a Clippers game.
“And I said, ‘Why?’” Crystal said.
But he enjoyed it and has remained with them ever since, even though the team has never rewarded him with a championship. Lee has had Knicks season tickets since 1985, when they drafted Patrick Ewing, though it took a while to get to the prime real estate he occupies now.
“Every film I moved down,” he said.
While Lee is talking title this season, Crystal doesn't have such high expectations for the Clippers. But he noted that the devoted fans stick with their teams no matter what.
Not that it's always easy. A baby started crying as he spoke.
“That’s how we felt for the last 30 years,” Crystal said.
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