It's Boston over LA, according to Gabby

Game One of the NBA Finals between the defending champion LA Lakers and the resurgent Boston Celtics will be played this morning (Thursday night at Staples Center) and The FREEMAN sports reporter Gabby Malagar is not worried sick.

For some inexplicable reason, Gabby is now a diehard Celtics fan. For nearly two decades he rooted for the Seattle Supersonics and used to swagger into the office in Sonics T-shirts that a cousin of his in Seattle regularly sent him.

Now Gabby occasionally swaggers into the office in a Celtics t-shirt but I never got around to asking him whether his cousin has moved to Boston. Anyway, it never occurred to me that he has switched allegiances until he started badgering me with text messages about the Celtics.

Gabby is a very straightforward person and he texted me right off that he longed to see the day when I would include him in my column. Having started together in journalism a good 29 years ago, I did not have the heart to ask him why in heavens would I do such a thing as that.

Yet I agonized over his request for many days until I decided, what they heck. Having written a column for nearly three decades, what is throwing away one issue for somebody who will probably clip this article to show his grandchildren and their children after that.

Gabby, by the way, is a gambler, in the sense that he loves placing bets on sporting events. As to the Lakers-Celtics finals series, he has long placed a bet on the Celtics even while the Celtics were still deep in the playoffs against LeBron James and the Cavaliers.

Okay, I have not been entirely truthful about this article, so let me make my mea culpa right now. It is not entirely because of Gabby that I am writing this. A small part of the reason why I am writing this is because I, too, am for the Celtics.

But I am not the diehard fanatic that Gabby is. I am for the Celtics only because I do not like dominant one-man armies such as James, Dwight Howard, and Kobe Bryant. I always go for underdogs, or for any team playing against any of these three titans, Bryant especially.

But that is already talking about me. Let us go back to Gabby. He did not really ask me to write about him but to write about his analysis of the finals. He asserts that if others can write and be wrong about their analysis, why can't he about his, especially if he is right.

I was tempted to tell Gabby that the reason he cannot write about his analysis, right or wrong, is because he has no column to write it in. Oh, he has a column all right, in this paper's sister publication Banat, but then that is another story.

Anyway, Gabby believes that Boston will prevail over Los Angeles because it has a deeper and more consistent bench. He asserts that even if Bryant goes berserk with his scoring, if the vaunted Celtics defense can shackle the rest of the Lakers, it is enough to make Boston win.

I have my own view of why the Celtics will win. But this is about Gabby's analysis, not mine. I do know, however, of at least one Lakers fan who not only will flatly reject the analysis of Gabby but will also regard it with friendly disdain.

He is lawyer Francisco Malilong Jr. who now writes a column for SunStar. But that is not why Frank would hold Gabby in friendly disdain. Frank used to write a sports column for The FREEMAN. Somewhere in there lurks the reason why Frank is not buying Gabby's yarn.

I expect Frank to have his own pro-Lakers analysis too. Between the two, Frank may be the brillant lawyer while Gabby needs my column to speak his mind. Still, Frank plays basketball only slightly better than Gabby. So that should pretty much even things up.

In deference to the wife of Gabby, I will not disclose how much he bet on the Celtics, or against who in the office he bet against. I myself have an unspecified bet against my daughter Jam, who likes Bryant and Pau Gasol for reasons that make my genes twitch and tickle.