If you haven’t guessed yet, I am the loser.

Not only did my wife paint my face in the hated purple & gold colors of death, it seems my face is having a nasty little reaction after washing it off. Meanwhile my camerawoman/wife was questioning her choice of spouses as she wondered how the hell a sexy, successful woman like herself wound up painting her fat husband and watching him embarrass himself on camera for all to see. Truthfully, I wonder what the hell she’s doing with me too.

So here I am in all my awfulness. JR, Jack, I know you’ll have fun with this. That’s OK. I’ve steeled myself for the mockery. Enjoy yourselves fellas, you won:

I not only hate the Los Angeles Lakers, I hate everything they represent.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know my beloved Boston Celtics are meeting the wretched L.A. Lakers in the 2010 NBA Finals starting tomorrow. But what you probably don’t know is my friends JR, whose site can be found here, and Jack here, are rotten Lakers fans. And the two of us have come up with a wager for this series: the loser has to paint their body in the colors of the opposing team and perform a cheer on video, which will be broadcast throughout the blogosphere and ridiculed for all of eternity.

But friendly wagers aside, this series is really phenomenal. Why, you ask? Allow me to explain.

Boston versus Los Angeles. East coast versus West coast. Blue collar gumption vs. Hollywood glitz. Or as I like to refer to it: Flash (LA) versus Substance (Boston). These two teams currently account for 32 of the league’s 63 championships (Celtics have 17, Lakers 15). But in head to head matchups, the Celtics OWN the Lakers with a 9-2 record over the years.

But there’s no doubt the Lakers have the best player in the world in Kobe Bryant, but the thing is Kobe knows he’s the best player and has historically acted accordingly. He’s selfish, boorish and generally unliked outside of greater Los Angeles. He also raped a girl in 2003 and then got away with it, but that’s a whole other story. Meanwhile, the Celtics put the emphasis on team play. Every player is just as important as the other, and their unselfish play is what makes them great. Just ask the Lakers, who as recently as 2008 got their asses handed to them by the Celtics in the Finals despite being heavy favorites. And it only took six games.

But make no mistake, this rivalry extends WAY outside the confines of the Staple Center and the Garden.

Boston fans see the Lakers and their fans as soft. Pansies. Which, of course, they are. Just look at the star treatment Kobe gets from the refs, not to mention Gasol’s soft European style of play. You breathe on the guy and he reacts like someone hit him with a sledgehammer. The one guy who’s not soft, Ron Artest, just happens to be crazy. As in certifiably friggin insane. He’s the guy who jumped into the stands and started fighting fans when he played on Indiana. So what that means is he’s soft mentally and will surely be goaded by Boston’s cagey veterans.

Boston fans will chant “NO MEANS NO!” at Kobe and the familiar refrains of “BEAT L.A.!” will shake the Garden rafters like it’s 1984 all over again. Because the 80′s were when this thing really kicked off. Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Danny Ainge, Cedric Maxwell, Dennis Johnson and company had some historic battles with Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, James Worthy and of course the hated Kurt Rambis.

Speaking of Rambis, check out this clip to see exactly how heated this thing got back in the day:

The most telling thing about that video is that Kevin McHale blatantly tries to rip Rambis’ head off. And how do Rambis’ teammates respond? James Worthy PUSHES RAMBIS when Rambis jumps up and tries to defend himself. Worthy pushes his own guy to the ground after he was just decked. It’s gutless, it’s soft…it’s classic Lakers basketball.

The Lakers can have all their stupid celebrity fans at the game. They can be content with lame poseurs who show up in the second quarter and then leave early to beat the traffic. Over there it’s not a game as much as a scene, and a place to be seen. I’ll take drunken Boston fans out for blood. Harassing Lamar Odom and his brainless “celebrity” wife. Calling Kobe out for the criminal that he is. I hope they attack the Lakers bus after they go home losers, just like they did in 2008.

Because I don’t just want the Lakers and their fans to lose, I want them crushed. Destroyed. I want them to go back to La-La Land not knowing what just hit them. And I want their obnoxious fans to shut the fuck up already, while choking on their already inflated sense of entitlement.

This is not just basketball, it’s war. And the Celtics are taking this thing, which means JR and several of my other Laker fans friends, will be clad in green and white while singing the praises of my team on video. And I will remind them each and every day for the next year that they root for an inferior team. I will rub their faces in it as much as possible. I will never relent, kind of like Kobe in a Colorado hotel room.

Celtics in six.

BEAT LA!!!!!!!