My Next Chapter
Valid sums, things of that nature.
You’re reading Unstatable, a weekly newsletter about the 2019-20 LA Clippers, written by Louis Keene. It’s good to have you. To support the work that goes into this newsletter, sign up below.
Unstatable, a Newsletter About the Clippers (Arena)
Last night, I did what I always do when I sit down to write: check Twitter instead. Awaiting me was this viral aerial footage of a line of thousands of people in cars waiting to pick up their rations from the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.
The clip’s opening frame (above), in scale and orientation, delivers heavy Tiananmen Square vibes. It does not get better from there. The lens pulls back and pans eastward, tracing the line of cars, and you see we are in Inglewood, in the parking lot of the Forum, the old home of the Lakers and the thorn in Steve Ballmer’s ambition whose extraction cost the Clippers owner $400 million.
The line of hungry people — you notice it’s actually four lanes, hungry strangers side by side, inching forward together — spans the width of the lot. It bends at a corner, then switches back and wraps all the way back around the block. The camera pulls back even farther — the cars are just dots now— and you still cannot see where the line of hungry families ends. It stretches south from the Forum all the way down Prairie Avenue past a big dirt lot where they are building SoFi Stadium, the future home of the Chargers and Rams.
If the line goes south another half-mile — and it looks like it will — it will reach the site of the proposed Inglewood Basketball and Entertainment Center, the future home of the LA Clippers.
There is no such thing as a billion-dollar building with a small footprint. So it follows that the announcement of a new basketball arena generates loud response. There’s a lot of boosterism around them — jobs! development! the word vibrant! — as well as fear and outrage (gentrification!). Maybe all we really know about them is that they’re a Big Deal. Plus it’s sports, so everyone gets weirdly emotional about it.
The Clippers, and a lot of Clipper fans, see opening their own arena as the final hurdle in a campaign for basketball legitimacy that is going on its second decade. Lots of Inglewood residents see it as a nail in the coffin of their displacement, and have organized an effort to stop it. Two compelling narratives in direct conflict with each other, both meriting strong reporting and vivid storytelling. I’m weirdly emotional about it.
Maybe you’ve already figured out where I’m going with this: The Inglewood Basketball and Entertainment Center (IBEC), will be the primary focus of Unstatable moving forward. We’ll be looking at the IBEC plans, diving into local arena history, and covering the still-unfolding court cases surrounding the Inglewood development. We’ll be examining some of the claims made about the arena by its opponents and by the team. We’ll be talking to people who are involved in this project and people from projects past. Most of all, we’ll be learning as we go.
My hope is that the newsletter format offers not only a more readable way to do all these things, but also a more honest approach to a project of this scope. The answers to the big questions about arena building can’t be put in one email — even a “deep dive.” I’m going to try to keep each bit short enough to keep you wanting more, and lively enough that it still reads like Unstatable. The first hit is about a watershed moment following the construction of Staples Center that changed how arenas got negotiated. It drops next Monday.
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I am going to write about the IBEC development critically, which means not taking something like the Clippers’ job estimate of 1,500 full-time employees at face value, but not dismissing it outright, either. With that said, I’m not sure contemporary dynamics are as simple as an old but functional basketball arena and a new, 1.2 billion-dollar basketball arena, owned by the same man, being connected by a line of thousands of starving people. But the optics aren’t great!
Blog Roll
No Context NBA ∙ Sideshow Books (We Deliver to LA!) ∙ Stealing Home ∙ Same Old Clippers Pod ∙ Take It Or Break It ∙ Bad Photojournalism ∙ Sports Stories ∙ Bachletter ∙ Basketball Feelings ∙ RealGM Analysis ∙ The Second Arrangement ∙ Crane In Search Of Man ∙ The Shocker ∙ My Motherfucking LinkedIn Page ∙ Roundball Rock ∙ Fastbreak Breakfast ∙ Mouse House Books ∙ NBA4Free ∙ Giri’s Racquet Newsletter ∙ Amazing Blaze ∙ Dreem Team Survivor Recap ∙ In Good Faith ∙ Unstatable on Twitter ∙ Entrepreneurship Today