Hruby Tuesday: After All These Years, Redemption For Clipper Darrell. Maybe.
Say this for Darrell Bailey: He isn't about to die for the Los Angeles Clippers. This is not for a lack of trying. On a Saturday afternoon last year, the 43-year-old was driving though his Lynwood, California, neighborhood when he began to feel an ache in his chest. The ache became a throbbing pain. Scared, he called his mother. You might be having a heart attack. Get yourself to a doctor. Bailey did. He spent the night in a nearby hospital, resting and undergoing medical tests, and as the next afternoon dragged on, he realized something was seriously amiss.
In a few hours, the Clippers would be playing the New York Knicks.
At Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles.
A home game.
Uh-oh. This wouldn't do. Bailey hadn't missed a Clippers home game in nine years. Clipper Darrell hadn’t missed a home game in nine years. Three hundred and eighty-six consecutive games of leading cheers and dancing in the aisles and heckling opposing free throw shooters; of lost games and Donald Sterling and Blake Griffin missing his entire rookie season with a broken kneecap; of popping lozenges and dressing like a "Batman" villain and being a superfan -- note: not an official diagnosis in the DSM-IV -- of the single worst franchise in the history of American professional sports. This was a streak, like Cal Ripken or Brett Favre or the guy who spent almost 64 consecutive hours sitting inside an ice block in Times Square, and Clipper Darrell was not about to let it slip quietly into a good night of bland food and backless gowns. High cholesterol and higher blood pressure be damned.