"Hell, no," hoops fanatic Shelton Jackson Lee said last week, from courtside at the Lakers' Staples Center, when asked if he was rooting for Boston. Lee, known to others as Spike, has quite the history with the green, having directed a couple of movies in the '80s that set clear lines of demarcation for black folk.

In She's Gotta Have It, you either identified with Lee's character, Mars Blackmon, a poor Knicks fan and Celtics hater, or you were with Greer Childs, also black, but rich and a Celtics fan. Hardly a surprise that Greer didn't get to keep the beautiful Tracy Camilla Johns; at the end of his stay in the movie, he's heard to mutter, more to himself, "I'm gonna get me a white woman," so that settled that. (Okay, Mars didn't win her either, but he got all the good laugh lines in the flick.)

In Do The Right Thing, Lee's masterpiece, the white guy whose bike tire accidently messes up Buggin' Out's new white Nikes is confronted by Buggin's friends. He tries to point out he has just as much right to be in Bed-Stuy as anyone else: "I was born in Brooklyn!" he shouts. But he is in front of a brownstone, his brownstone, that none of Buggin's friends could afford in a month of Sundays.

And, he's wearing a Celtics jersey.

So, Spike could dap up Pierce before the second half of Game 3, but still root fiercely against him when the clock started.

"It's still that Celtics green," he said.

But then, Spike allowed, times may be changing. We may have a black president in November, and while Obama plays ball on primary days with his body man, former Duke player Reggie Love, he's broken that rapper-baller black man hegemony into a thousand pieces.

Rock the green, black people. It's cool. Mostly.

David Aldridge is a reporter for TNT Sports. He has previously worked at The Washington Post, ESPN and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Martin Johnson and the fall of the Celtics kingdom, Michael Dawson's checkmate, and Faith Maginley's 30-day trial of love.

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