Jack Nicholson, Spike Lee and Billy Crystal are inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as super fans

Back when the Lakers put on shows as good as anything Hollywood had to offer, the coolest guy in the building might have been courtside.

Even across the country, everyone noticed Jack Nicholson.

“When I was growing up, the guy I looked at was Jack Nicholson,” Spike Lee said. “As I sat in the blue seats at the Garden, I said, ‘Hopefully one day I can sit courtside like my husband Jack Nicholson.'”

Lee eventually made it to the front row to watch his beloved Knicks. And this weekend, he and Nicholson will make it into the Basketball Hall of Fame together.

They, along with fellow actor and entertainer Billy Crystal and businessman Alan Horwitz, will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s James F. Goldstein SuperFan Gallery on Sunday, hours before this year’s class takes place in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Named after Goldstein, one of the NBA’s most recognizable non-player faces who attends approximately 100 games each year, the gallery recognizes fans for their knowledge and passion for basketball, as well as their reputation in the basketball community and their appreciation for the history of the sport. In addition to Goldstein, the gallery, founded in 2018, also includes Penny Marshall and Raptors fan Nav Bhatia.

Celebrities are just fans with better seats

They’re more famous than most, but basically they’re just like the customers sitting way up in the cheap seats.

“I just represent all the loyal fans of the game we love,” said Crystal, a longtime Clippers ticket holder whose love for the team dates back to when they played in San Diego.

Plus, for the die-hard fans, it never matters where they sit. It’s all about being in the building when their team needs them most.

For Lee, that was May 8, 1970. When he was 13, he missed his father’s concert appearance after receiving an offer to attend Game 7 of the NBA Finals. He wasn’t sitting nearby but still had a great view to watch Willis Reed take the court with the leg injury that had forced him to miss Game 6 against the Lakers and his availability for the playoff game in doubt .

“I’ve been to the World Series, World Cup, Super Bowls and Olympics,” Lee said. “That’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Billy Crystal had a “hard time” as a Clippers fan in LA.

The Knicks won that title and added another in 1973, but have come closer only a few times since Lee became a ticket holder in 1985 after they drafted Patrick Ewing with the No. 1 pick. Horwitz’s Philadelphia 76ers are also still in a long losing streak , although they still don’t quite compare to the Clippers, they’re still waiting for their first chance to deliver for Crystal.

“He suffered too,” Lee said. “What makes it worse is that he’s in LA and he was with the Clippers all those years when the Lakers had Magic and Shaq and Kobe. Oh man, that was really hard.”

Nicholson was on the right side of the Los Angeles rivalry after becoming a Lakers ticket holder in the 1970s. The three-time Oscar-winning actor adjusted his filming schedules and personal meetings so that he could sit next to the visiting bench in sunglasses at big Lakers games.

From there, he watched the Lakers blow a 24-point lead against Boston in Game 4 of the 2008 NBA Finals – a loss Nicholson expected when the Celtics were on the rise.

“It was late in the game and I kept hearing, ‘Hey Doc, we’re dead men,'” said Doc Rivers, the Celtics coach at the time. “And he kept saying it. I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about and when we came back I figured it out late and won the game.”

The two became friends when Rivers later coached the Clippers, and the Lakers’ most famous fan even watched the other side when they faced the Houston Rockets in the 2015 playoffs.

“Jack came to this game,” Rivers said. “I showed up at a Clipper game and then we blew a (huge) lead and he left and I don’t think he’ll ever come back to another Clipper game.”

Nicholson, now 87, no longer attends the Lakers and is the only one of the four new superfans who is not expected to attend Sunday’s ceremony.

Spike Lee on being honored in the Hall of Fame: “Who would have thought?”

Still a regular at Madison Square Garden, Lee now wears a Jalen Brunson jersey that was once a John Starks jersey. The Hall of Fame honor is meaningful to him, he said, because he has become close to many NBA players over the course of his film career, from Air Jordan commercials with Michael Jordan to films like “He Got Game.”

“I know these guys and especially the visiting teams, a lot of these guys come on the court and say hello to me,” Lee said, chuckling at the number of times Jordan profanely told him to sit down. “They give me five, hug me – and those are the opposing teams.”

Sometimes these interactions backfire and Lee takes the blame for a Knicks loss. He was upset for upsetting Reggie Miller in the playoffs, as Indiana came back to win in Game 5. When Kobe Bryant scored an opponent-record 61 points on February 2, 2009, he was motivated not to let Lee talk about whether the Knicks would win when they met later that evening about a project they were working on.

Lee has a stat sheet from the game signed by Bryant, on which he wrote, “Spike, that (expletive) was your fault!!!!”

Now he will be inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Jordan, Bryant and many other greats.

“I resort to some Brooklyn language,” Lee said, “who would have thought?”

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AP Sports Writer Steve Megargee in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

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