Today we think of the Laker games as being sellouts, with Hollywood celebrities grabbing the courtside seats. But West reminds readers that it wasn’t always so. When the team moved from Minneapolis in 1961, making it the West Coast’s first NBA team, empty seats were plentiful at the old Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.
A gimmicky Crowd-O-Meter recorded the low attendance in a city where the Dodgers and Rams were the toast of the town and where coverage of the Lakers appeared at the back of newspaper sports sections. When the team first began in L.A., many fans of the Celtics and Knicks would turn out when those teams visited. Eventually the Crowd-O-Meter registered larger and larger crowds, with Pat Boone and Doris Day being among the early celebrities to come on board.
