Investing
How The Lakers Taught Me To Look For What’s Missing In Order To Invest Successfully
At the age of thirteen, my son, Lucas, was not only a rabid sports fan but also a shrewd negotiator.
So when I dragged him to Los Angeles for the opening of Kip Fulbeck’s show, MIXED: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, at the Japanese American National Museum, Lucas made sure he got a good deal.
Now, mind you, he was IN the exhibit and got to see his picture projected onto a screen the size of South Dakota. He even got a shout-out from Kip himself during the presentation to a packed house.
And yet, I STILL had to bribe him.
In this case, “pay-to-play” meant two things …
First, we attended a Lakers game, in which we sat directly behind Uncle Jack (Nicholson, that is).
Unfortunately, we were about a thousand feet up in the air — albeit directly behind Uncle Jack — sitting in (I’m not kidding) the very last row of seats at the Staples Center. (Final score: Lakers 106, Timberwolves 94, Nosebleeds 2)
Second, we bought tickets to attend the Lakers Fan Jam; an event held the following day at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
These tickets were even harder to score, but luckily, we were given the heads-up by a West Coast friend and had purchased them weeks before.
Lucas couldn’t wait to get to the Fan Jam, and that morning I had to assert a full-court mom press just to make sure we got breakfast. We arrived at the convention center soon after and joined in with the yellow and purple throngs.
True to its name, the Fan Jam was jammed with fans.
We queued to enter, and then we queued dutifully to sign waivers. There were ropes and stanchions everywhere for crowd control — at the dunking station, the free throw station, the bungee-running station.
Everywhere we looked, we saw nothing but people standing in line.
The line to take your picture with the trophies was longer than the TSA line at Newark Airport on a Friday afternoon, as was the line to take your photo with a cardboard cutout of a Lakers player. There was an even longer line for an autograph from…
