Savvy readers of yesterday’s post on my NBA two-fer may have noticed a glaring omission in my description of the contrasting environments of a Lakers and a Clippers home game. There was nary a word about the Laker Girls – or their lesser-known counterparts, the Clipper Spirit. Well let me fix that right now.

The Laker Girls are a sports institution, as are their football alter egos the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Watching them perform during time-outs is like having an extra show-within-a-show. That’s part of the overall experience that makes a Lakers game so unique. They are talented, they are gorgeous, and they are as classy as you could possibly be while wearing outfits the size of cocktail napkins. Even my better half, The Bird, could find nothing to dispute about that statement.

So it was with a deepening sense of dismay as the game progressed that I began sensing the possibility that enterprising souls in the Corporate Sponsorships department of the Lakers had come up with a way to…gasp…monetize the iconic Laker Girls themselves.

The first time the Laker Girls did an actual routine, as opposed to the general dancing and jumping around done during other play stoppages, the song they were choreographed to had a distinctive Latin flair. I wasn’t quite sure, but I thought the lyrics included the word “tequila”. Sure enough, at the end of the routine a woman who appeared to be one of the Laker Girls was featured on the video board hawking 1800 Tequila – under the standard guise of a “Please Drink Responsibly” PSA. Clever use of coincidental program positioning, I thought.

All subtlety was blown out of the water in the next quarter however, when the Laker Girls romped onto the court for their next routine, clad in white shirts that said “FIOS” and “This Is Big”. I’m not saying that any innuendo was specifically intended…let’s just say that had the two lines of text been reversed in positioning, members of the religious right would have stormed the court in mid-dance. The next routine brought the dance team out in mini-jumpsuits featuring a well-placed Carl’s Jr. medallion, and it became starkly plain – the Lakers are selling sponsorships to individual Laker Girl routines, making them in essence live commercials. It was like slapping a sandwich board on the Mona Lisa.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been selling sports sponsorships for some time, and part of me is irrefutably jealous that I didn’t come up with the idea. I truly do admire the ingenuity of my marketing brethren. The Lakers are in the rare and enviable position of not having enough space to feature signage for all of the sponsorships and advertisements that they are able to sell. And they were able to come up with a brilliant solution. After all, what infinitesimally small percentage of the crowd – particularly the male portion of the crowd – could STOP themselves from watching the Laker Girls perform? But somewhere in the recesses of my brain however, I couldn’t help feeling that I had just been sold a corporate lap dance.

Then I started thinking. What if the Laker Girls decided that the $75 per game fee that they are purported to receive was out of proportion to the value that they added the team? What if they went on strike? What if they took the sponsors with them? They are by all measures their own franchise. With a little organization and a little chutzpah, they could go private and then go for a good old fashioned Gordon Gekko “greed is good” leveraged buy-out of the Lakers. Hey this is Hollywood, is it not? Picture Norma Rae meets Working Girl.

I’ll have my people call their people…as soon as I get people, that is.