Allah and the Los Angeles Lakers

On June 17, 2008, I turned 28. I also got to watch the Lakers get spanked in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a 39-point shaming by the Boston Celtics. Nothing can more deeply wound a Lakers fan than to see his (my) team lose to the Celtics, let alone for the ninth time in the NBA finals, never mind by nearly 40 points in Boston. It's not tremendously unlike watching Gollum get out of Mount Doom with the Ring, while Frodo and Sam's Fellowship team bus gets attacked by Mordor's drunken citizens. I watched the Lakers' humiliation wearing my wife's birthday present to me -- the Lakers warm-up jersey in their home white. Fat lot of good that did. Don't even ask me when I next had the courage to wear it. (I still love you, babe.) These great franchises have now met 12 times in basketball's greatest championship, and between them they have won more than half the NBA's titles: L.A. has won 15 in 31 tries, the Celtics 17 out of 21. They are meeting right now, as you read.

I was born in Massachusetts, raised between there and Connecticut, and have lived practically all my life in the American Northeast. I love it here, and as much as I enjoy visiting new places, I'm reaching that homebody stage where a vacation in Maine embodies the best of all possible worlds. Growing up, I was ostensibly part of a liberal society, a place that often tolerated but rarely embraced. I was an academically successful, culturally alien, metaphysically tragic individual outpost, distant from my parents, weirdly unrelated to my friends and left out of my local mosque, since there were so few in my age group and no durable connection to an elder generation. My too-tanned skin color, my funny name, my incomprehensible religion, my taste for American food and grunge music -- these were all sources of amusement, puzzlement or, at times, harassment. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar meant the (dream) world to me. Nor was it just me: If you visit the Muslim community of Western Massachusetts, you'll find that they and their children, some of us now scattered across America and even other countries, feature an unlikely number of Lakers fans.

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