For those of us who loved the Minneapolis Lakers, there’s a little hurt in our souls this week. The Los Angeles Lakers are in town tomorrow night to play the Timberwolves, and Laker players are wearing a logo this season to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the franchise. The logo includes the words Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Lakers.
The franchise moved to Los Angeles in 1960. In the survival guide of what’s important in life—health, family and security—the departure of the Lakers from Minneapolis is trivial. But those who care about sports do so because it arouses our passions and loyalties. The more invested emotionally, the greater the highs, the lower the lows.
The Dodgers vacated Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1958. Fifty years next year, the pain, anger and disappointment will still linger for older generations of Dodger fans. No doubt the Dodger fans in Brooklyn have us outnumbered, but our regret over losing the Lakers is no less heartfelt. Not for those of us who care about the franchise that relocated here in 1947 as the Detroit Gems and left Minneapolis in 1960 after winning five pro basketball championships.
As a kid, I was too young to see the title teams, the last championship coming in 1954. My time was the franchise’s last couple of years when the Lakers had fallen on hard seasons at the box office and sometimes on the court. The franchise was rebuilding mostly around a young acrobatic forward named Elgin Baylor who hung in the air as if time stopped, habitually twitched his head while dribbling the ball and just as routinely put up 25 to 30 points per game.
Baylor was a deserving replacement to the team’s star of the championship years, George Mikan. The Lakers’ great center was known as Mr. Basketball and recognized by the Associated Press as the best player in America for the first half of the 20th century. Fittingly, his statue is located in the lobby of Target Center, only a few blocks from the old Minneapolis Auditorium where the Lakers played most of their games.