"I am the manager," the man said.
The Fatburger boss then made clear to Carr that the snub was indeed about color: the green and white Carr wore for the Celtics.
In a bygone time before Bluetooths, Google, and skimpily clad dancers gyrating on America's most renowned parquet, there raged a visceral rivalry, a basketball blood feud waged by legends in mini-shorts who embodied the spirits of their wildly different cities and helped the NBA launch a golden era of prosperity with their star power.
Tonight at TD Banknorth Garden, men who were riveted by the drama as children, Boston's Paul Pierce and LA's Kobe Bryant among them, will become protagonists in a new chapter of the historic rivalry when the Celtics and Lakers open their 11th championship series amid the ghosts of playoffs past.
Their struggle for basketball supremacy, born at the dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s, evolved in the 1980s into a culture clash, with Larry Bird's Celtics epitomizing the lunchpail ethos of Boston's longshoremen and Magic Johnson's Lakers channeling Hollywood's celluloid heroes as they created a flashy, fast-paced, often-breathtaking rendition of the game famously known as Showtime.
"It was an all-out war," said Carr, whose anti-Laker antics - he called them "the LA Fakers" - prompted Angelenos to pelt him with beer and hot dogs.
Ten times between 1959 and '87, the Celtics and Lakers played each other for NBA titles, the Celtics winning the first eight, the Lakers the final two, the acrimony growing with each encounter.
"If it's overstating it to say it's the greatest rivalry in professional sports history, then it's the greatest rivalry in the history of professional basketball," said Bob Cousy, who helped launch the tradition by leading the Celtics past the Lakers for NBA titles in '59, '62, and '63.
