SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) – Billy Crystal was honored for his dedication to a basketball team that has no Hall of Fame history and couldn’t help but feel the irony.

“How strange to get a ring before any of the Clippers,” he said.

The actor joins James F. Goldstein of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame SuperFan Gallery and took part in a ceremony Sunday along with fellow entertainer and filmmaker Spike Lee and Philadelphia businessman Alan Horwitz. Longtime Lakers fan Jack Nicholson will also be added, but the three-time Academy Award winner was unable to attend.

Crystal wore a suit jacket and slacks, while Lee and Horwitz dressed as if they were sitting courtside. Lee, wearing an orange vest over a New York sweatshirt and topped by a black Knicks bucket hat, sparred with the opposition as if he were sitting in his seat at Madison Square Garden.

“I saw some Boston Celtic green. Uh-uh,” he said, before showing fans that he brought coach Red Holzman’s 1973 NBA championship ring, the last won by the Knicks.

“It’s been a long time, but I think it will be orange and blue skies this year,” Lee said.

Horwitz, known as the Sixth Man of the 76ers, wore a 76ers sweatshirt, a blue Sixers hat and blue and white colored sneakers. He choked as he thought of how proud his mother would have been if she had known of his honor.

Their time as basketball fans goes back more than five decades. Horwitz was watching the Philadelphia Warriors when Wilt Chamberlain was a rookie in 1959. Crystal was in high school a few years earlier when he was attracted to another high schooler, Larry Brown, who would later be enshrined after winning championships as coach in college and the NBA.

Lee was at the arena when the Knicks won their first championship in 1970, and Crystal was often at MSG himself after starting out as a Knicks fan. He went to Lakers games when he traveled around the country before someone recommended he watch a Clippers game.

“And I said, ‘Why?'” Crystal said.

But he enjoyed it and has stayed with them ever since, even though the team never rewarded him with a championship. Lee has held Knicks season tickets since 1985, when they signed Patrick Ewing, although it took a while for him to reach the prime real estate he now occupies.

“Every movie I moved,” he said.

While Lee talks about the title this season, Crystal doesn’t have such high hopes for the Clippers. But he noted that the dedicated fans will stick with their team no matter what.

Not that it’s always easy. A baby started crying as he spoke.

“That’s how we’ve felt for the last 30 years,” Crystal said.

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