Hal David was right to write that Los Angeles is a great big freeway. From the airport to downtown, nothing but steel, glass, and concrete. San Francisco and Los Angeles pose as competitors in so many ways. When the Big One finally comes, I think Los Angeles will handily win when comparing values of property loss. I didn’t believe Google when it said some hotels were spitting distance from crypto dot com arena, but from my window less than half a mile from Crypto, I can see two hotels in between. Years from now — or tomorrow — I’ll ask …

Sitting in airports gives me more pause for thought, literally and figuratively, than anything else during my basketball travels. I’m always traveling alone. Occasionally, one of the teams I’m covering is also at the airport, but never the same gate. Once I took a cab to the airport, and arrived at the same time as the bus carrying the UC Davis Aggies. I ran into a referee in Burbank (or was it Denver?). She said: “Are you following me?”. “Yes”, I said. Coincidentally, I was at the last two games she’d worked in northern California. I used to think airports …