Go back home to Ohio, LeBron James.

Yes, as a fan, I’m happy to see the world’s greatest basketball player relocate to California and join my favorite team, the Los Angeles Lakers.

But as a Californian, I fear LeBron is the last thing our state needs.

His arrival is a high-profile symptom of one of our state’s big problems: California tends to favor flashy outsiders who are older, proven, and wealthy over our young, homegrown compatriots who haven’t succeeded yet.

Comparing LeBron to his young new teammate, point guard Lonzo Ball, demonstrates the problem—and shows that the stakes for the state go beyond whether the Lakers can deny the Golden State Warriors another championship.

In recent decades, California has been very good at recruiting people like LeBron, who received a $154 million, four-year contract to leave his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and to revive a losing Lakers squad. A Stanford study shows that, despite its high taxes on the wealthy, the Golden State attracts more millionaires than it loses, since one advantage of being rich is not having to worry too much about taxes or other costs when you’re deciding where to live.

The trend holds even among those who are merely upper-middle-class. People moving to California have more education (the state has seen net gains in graduate degree holders) and income ($110,000 annually or more) than the average Californian. They need the money to afford our expensive housing.

But, at the same time, California has been struggling to develop and retain people like Lonzo Ball, a 20-year-old L.A. native who grew up in the Inland Empire community of Chino Hills. Younger Californians who were born and raised here have struggled to find their footing and have been leaving the state for cheaper places like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. This is especially true for those who make less than $55,000 a year, don’t have college degrees (like Lonzo, who attended UCLA for just one year before joining the NBA), or want to start families.

Lonzo himself may be on his way out the door; the sports media are reporting that he could be traded in exchange for older and proven players who can help LeBron win now.

This makes sense in 2018, when LeBron is far superior to Lonzo. But in the long term, LeBron’s value to Lakers could be less than Lonzo’s. LeBron, at age 33, is old for a pro basketball star, and he is likely to be injured and in decline, perhaps ready to retire, by the time his new contract expires in 2022. In contrast, if Lonzo realizes his potential, he could help the Lakers win games into the 2030s.

At this point, I’ll leave the basketball debate to the hoops experts. But in the larger context of California’s changing demography, the Lonzos are indisputably more important to our state’s future than the LeBrons.

That’s because so many more of us are Lonzos.

This Lonzo-ization of California represents a sea change. From the Gold Rush until 2010, we were mostly a state of LeBrons—people who had migrated here from some other state or country. As a state, we were very much like the Lakers, traditionally a franchise dependent on free agents from elsewhere, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and Shaquille O’Neal. There were great advantages to our free agent past; California didn’t have to develop as many of our own taxpayers by paying for their schooling and health care, because so many of our people just showed up from someplace else.

But in this decade, as immigration levels have fallen, we’ve become a state of Lonzos.

Now, more than 54 percent of Californians were born and raised here. Most of our adults are originally from someplace else. But Lonzo’s rising cohort of millennials is so homegrown—at more than 70 percent—that it will be California’s first homegrown generation.

With this shift, California needs to develop and educate more of its own young people, so that they can replace the immigrant entrepreneurs who have been responsible for starting so many of our innovations and businesses. “Homegrown Californians are the anchor of our economic future,” Dowell Myers, the USC demographer who has detailed the rise of the “homegrown majority,” has said.

In other words, we desperately need our Lonzos to succeed. Too many haven’t. Some are leaving the state. And those who are staying are contributing to our highest-in-the-nation poverty rate. Education levels have stagnated among California’s young—a huge problem since today’s youth will have to be more economically productive to support our aging population.

Yes, the LeBrons of California help subsidize the Lonzos by paying taxes under our progressive system. But the LeBrons also retard the growth of the young. Arriving LeBrons help run up the price of housing—LeBron already has two homes in L.A.—making it harder for Lonzos to buy houses and start families.

The LeBrons of the world tend to be expensive—and less innovative, since younger people are responsible for most inventions. Even more important, California’s Lonzos are far more loyal to the state; they are about three times more likely to stick around California and make their lives. When LeBron tires of his new Hollywood friends Leo DiCaprio and Al Pacino, with whom he recently lunched, he can go back home to Ohio. But Lonzo’s family—including a father who may be sabotaging his career (that’s another story)—is here.

The Lonzos’ loyalty has real value to the Golden State—it will help California retain its labor force as baby boomers retire in greater numbers. Polls also show that the Lonzos are far more supportive of taxing themselves to support public investments than the LeBrons are.

In this context, the Lakers are sending precisely the wrong message to their fans, and to all Californians. So cheer for our superstar import if you’d like. But don’t forget that our future depends on Lonzo.

The post LeBron, Take Your Ball and Go Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The time: December 5, 1982. The place: Los Angeles. The storied Showtime-era, Lakers, coming off an eight-game win streak, were facing the Philadelphia 76ers for the first time since defeating them four games to two in the previous season’s championship series. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar opened up scoring with a signature sky-hook before Dyan Cannon had even reached her seat. It might have been a normal Sunday evening at the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood. But it wasn’t.

Moments after the first-half buzzer had sounded and Magic Johnson & Co. had disappeared into the locker room, the Laker Girls, led by a 19-year-old Paula Abdul, took the floor clad in headbands, tube socks, gym shorts, and T-shirts. Emerging onto the court after them were nine little men in gold basketball uniforms. On their backs were fractions in place of whole numbers, and on their chests in big, blue lettering were the words “HOLLYWOOD SHORTIES.”

Movies may have paid the bills, but for the Hollywood Shorties, hard work paid off on the court.

 
The Hollywood Shorties baseball and eventually basketball teams had been founded in 1949 by legendary dwarf entertainers Billy Barty (a renowned character actor) and Jerry Maren (of Lollipop Guild-Wizard of Oz fame) as a rare opportunity for little people to gather publicly. As their athletic skill increased, so did membership and their popularity. By the early 1980s, the Shorties had created a niche in entertainment akin to the Harlem Globetrotters, playing exhibitions from Gladstone High in Covina to the Fabulous Forum with their signature blend of comedy and basketball prowess.

The Shorties’ baseball team preceded their basketball stardom.

 
On December 5, 1982, the Shorties’ lineup included rebound king Mike “Pebbles” Gilden, fireplug Kevin “Animal” Thompson, and Adonis-like Chris “Bam-Bam” Romano, who would go on to become the reigning powerlifting champion in the Dwarf Athletic Association of America. But the main attraction was Tony Cox, known simply as “T.C.” At 3’6” his arms barely encompassed the basketball, yet he could hit long-distance three pointers with astounding accuracy.

The Lakers would lose 114-104, but ask anybody who was there and they likely won’t remember that. What the crowd would remember is that at halftime a basketball team of dwarves ran circles around the Laker girls in the wackiest basketball game they had ever seen. But even more than that, those who had the great good fortune to bear witness to that game would remember the shot.

This was not a playoff game. Technically speaking, this was not even an NBA game. This was a five-minute spectacle, an exhibition basketball game between quasi-recognizable dwarf actors and the Laker Girls. This was halftime entertainment of the most frivolous variety, perhaps better suited for a vaudeville stage than a professional basketball arena. But when Tony Cox’s underhanded three-pointer swished through the hoop, none of that mattered.

“Did you see that?!” “How did he do that?!” “Was that underhand?!?!” Laker fans were stunned and thrilled, and let out a roar so loud the Lakers themselves heard it in the locker room. “Who in the world are these guys?”

Who in the world were the Hollywood Shorties? A fair question. The fact that they had been making the scene throughout the Southland for over 30 years at that point had failed to make a strong impression on the general public. Their most widely publicized events had been charity matches versus the moms of Galaxie Little League, or the leaders of the Azusa Chamber of Commerce, or the inmates of the California Rehabilitation Center in Corona, or the student-faculty all stars of Lawndale High—none of which had made them household names.

Charity matches against the moms of Galaxie Little League and Azusa Chamber of Commerce didn’t quite make the Shorties a household name.

 
For anyone, a moment such as the Shorties experienced would be wonderfully exciting. But for a group of little entertainers, who had suffered all the indignities and more of Tinseltown, and when they did book a show were forever hidden behind another monster mask, or elf mask, or leprechaun mask—for these men, the chance to show their natural talent in such a dramatic and public way amounted to nothing less than a mountaintop experience.

More than three decades later, the Hollywood Shorties talk about that day as if it were yesterday. “Ohh, it was just so big,” says Joe Gieb.

A native Texan, Gieb caught the first train to clown college upon graduating high school. After traveling for several years with the circus, he landed in Los Angeles where he was immediately plugged into the dwarf community, which, for an able-bodied young man, inevitably meant the Hollywood Shorties. By 1982, Gieb had played in dozens of basketball games with the Shorties, but of only one of them does he say, “I’m still high on that one.”

A new documentary on the Hollywood Shorties details the team’s formation, fame and lasting legacy.

 
George Rossitto was involved with the Shorties from age 8, when he was brought onto the baseball team as a batboy. The son of short stature actor Angelo Rossitto (of Beyond Thunderdome, Master Blaster fame), Rossitto opted for the practicality of a career in aeronautics rather than follow in the footsteps of his father, but he never walked away from the Hollywood Shorties. And in 1976, founder Billy Barty handed over the managerial reigns for the Shorties to George, who immediately named basketball the Shorties’ primary focus.

Playing the Laker Girls was actually George’s idea. In 1982 it was still possible to call the Forum, be connected to the Director of Promotions, and with simple charm and wit land a halftime gig on the biggest stage in the NBA. As George puts it, the experience was, “A high that you couldn’t even think about.”

Today, Tony Cox is remembered more for his turn as a thief in the 2003 dark comedy Bad Santa than for the three pointer that sent the Forum into a frenzy. He shrugs off questions about working with Michael Jackson in Captain E.O., but when asked about hitting that three he can’t contain his smile: “I’ll never forget that moment—that crowd, that noise.”

While The Garbage Pail Kids Movie paid some of the Shorties scale, Under the Rainbow provided weeks of overtime, and Jedi placed Shorties (aka Ewoks) squarely in the annals of cinematic history, each of these can be easily classified under the heading “Right place, right time.” And though it paid them each just pennies, only of that halftime game at the Fabulous Forum might it rightly be said that, “Hard work always has a payday.”

The Shorties would go on to play many games against the Laker Girls throughout the 1980s. Other NBA teams would also provide them a stage, including the Los Angeles Clippers, Sacramento Kings, Golden State Warriors, and Seattle Super Sonics.

The post The True Story of One of the NBA’s Most Outrageous Halftime Moments appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.