If you’re a massively successful individual with plenty of disposable income, and you also happen to be a rabid sports fan, one of the best investments you can make is to be a courtside season-ticket holder for your favorite team.
Big-market teams like the Knicks and Lakers have their share of celebrity fixtures at their home games, such as Spike Lee and Jack Nicholson, who have been holding things down as two of the most high-profile stars regularly in attendance at their respective arenas. But the Lakers also have real estate mogul Jimmy Goldstein, he of the colorful ensembles and glorious silver locks flowing out from under his snakeskin fedoras.
But if you haven’t been paying close enough attention all these years, you might have mistaken him for a devoted Lakers fan. That apparently is not the case at all, as he explained in a recent interview. Goldstein, by his own admission, is a die-hard Clippers fan, and he mostly attends Lakers games to root for the other team, so he isn’t shy about his schadenfreude for the team missing the playoffs for the sixth straight season.
Via Arash Markazi of The Los Angeles Times:
“I am a big Clippers fan and I have always been an anti-Lakers fan,” Goldstein told me before taking in the Clippers’ win over the Pacers on Tuesday. “I’m always rooting for the visiting team. Everywhere I go, all over the world, people walk up to me and say, ‘Go Lakers!’ I tell them, ‘I’m not a Lakers fan.’ They look shocked. They say, ‘But you go to all the games?’ And I say, ‘Yes, to watch basketball, not to root for the Lakers.’”
Goldstein, who is not an L.A. native, has been attending Lakers games since he moved to town in the early 60s. He went on to explain that one of the reasons for his anti-Lakersism is the fact that they’ve always been blessed with an excessive amount of talent throughout franchise history and that he prefers rooting for the underdog.
Goldstein also believes Lakers fans to be overly biased, so the next time you run into him at Staples Center or anywhere else in public, think twice before screaming “Go Lakers!” at the 79-year-old hoops fanatic.
