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The Rise of Showtime

By MARK HEISLER, Times Staff Writer
After a humble beginning, the Lakers earned a place in L.A. up there with the royal Rams and adored Dodgers

    The Rams arrived from Cleveland in 1945, bringing major league professional team sports to Los Angeles and glamour too, with their quarterback controversies and their players dating movie stars or becoming movie stars.
    The Dodgers arrived from Brooklyn in 1958, answering a civic prayer after a campaign that included turning over a huge chunk of local real estate, displacing an indigenous population and winning public approval in a hotly contested referendum.

	Magic Johnson brought Showtime to L.A.--and ushered in a new era in the NBA.

     The Lakers? The team that opened the territory west of the Mississippi for the NBA and created a colossus that is now the hottest ticket in town arrived in 1960 as a bunch of gangling refugees from a bush league made up of eight teams, down from the 11 that had started the '50s. Attracting the Dodgers required years of high-level negotiations between owner Walter O'Malley and delegations of local politicians, and some hard bargaining, by O'Malley, at least.
     The Lakers simply showed up on the Sports Arena doorstep, dropped off by owner Bob Short, a Minneapolis trucker who kept his home in Minnesota and monitored developments by phone. The Coliseum Commission was delighted to have them, but it was business that walked up, like a tractor pull or a rodeo.
     The Rams were Hollywood royalty. The Dodgers were adored and lionized. The Lakers couldn't find a radio station to carry their games their first season.
     "There was really no attention at all," muses Jerry West, the last charter Laker. "I'll never forget one night the Laker players went to a Dodger game at the Coliseum. Wally Moon was hitting his home runs over that little short fence in left field. We were there en masse and they introduced us and it was like, no one even knows who in the heck we are. . . .
     "It seemed so strange, going from a rabid college situation to come here with little or no fanfare at all. The Laker organization tried to do everything within the community--appearances, anything that would get some attention in the news media. But we weren't very big news in the media, and I understand."
     These days, West is an icon. As executive vice president of the team, he commands a $3.5-million salary, more than 10 times what he ever made in his storied playing career. The team has young marquee stars Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, even if the news the Lakers have made recently has been so often embarrassing, like the blowups in the last four postseasons.
     This fall's move into a new downtown arena, Staples Center, has launched a new era. The Lakers are expected to gross $130 million this season, which would break their club record, set in the 1997-98 season, by almost 50%.

     Estimates run all the way to $150 million. The worth of the franchise Short bought for $150,000, which has no assets but its players' contracts, may now be worth more than the $311 million that Fox paid for the Dodgers, Dodger Stadium and Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla. In other words, it has been a fast last 40 years of the 1900s for the NBA in Southern California. (Oh yes, another team, the Clippers, moved here in 1984, although they haven't had the same level of success, or any. With the Clippers, it's as if everyone is still in the trying-to-ignore-them phase.)

THE '50s: FORMER DYNASTS SEEK HOME

     The Dodger move was a bombshell that broke hearts throughout the nation's largest city. The Laker move broke a heart or two in Minnesota's largest city.
     The Lakers had a glorious past in Minneapolis, winning five titles in six years from 1949-54, but George Mikan retired and there went the first NBA dynasty. By 1960, they were on their way back, led by the brilliant Elgin Baylor, who took them to the '59 finals as a rookie, but their local following wasn't following.
     Short, given to sharing his distress after losses--"He came in the dressing room more than once and said, 'Look, fellows, I like basketball as well as the next guy, but not when it's costing me $50,000 a night,' " says former Laker Vern Mikkelsen--told the other owners he wanted to move.
     The other owners liked Short where he was. It was costing them enough to take the train to Minneapolis; they didn't even want to think about plane fare to California.
     The vote was 7-1, against. The same day, Harlem Globetrotter owner Abe Saperstein announced he was forming a rival league with a team in Los Angeles. The owners voted again, this time 8-0 in favor of this bold pioneering thrust (after Short promised to pay the difference in their travel expenses.)
     Mikkelsen turned down Short's offer to become coach, even when Short offered to throw in a share of ownership.
     "I didn't think he'd get the thing to Sioux Falls, much less to L.A.," says Mikkelsen, whose family often asks what his share would be worth now, "but he did."

THE '60s: LIGHT THE LIGHTS

     Had the natives been a little more interested, Short, who remained in Minneapolis, might have given more thought to renaming the team.
     As it was, he kept the old name because, he said, it was on all their old trophies.
     Their first game in Los Angeles drew 4,008 (announced). There's an old story of Short calling general manager Lou Mohs after each game and asking what the attendance was and it was generally around 4,000.
     "Can't you double it for the press?" Short is supposed to have asked.
     "Again?" Mohs is supposed to have answered.
     By midseason, West, a rookie, was starting. By the next season, they made the NBA finals and took mighty Boston, which had won three titles in four years, to seven games before succumbing, after Frank Selvy, who had set a college record by scoring 100 points in a game, missed an open 15-foot jumper that would have won the Lakers a title.
     That was your Laker decade in a nutshell.
     In all, they played the Celtics six times in the finals in the '60s and went 0-6, finally dropping a Game 7 in the Forum as favorites with Wilt Chamberlain at center against an old Celtic team that had finished fourth in the East, under balloons owner Jack Kent Cooke had penned up for the postgame celebration.
     "We weren't as good," says West, who remains the only finals most valuable player chosen from a losing team. "That's the frustrating point. We were close, but we weren't quite as good.
     "Luck plays such an element in sports, and people don't want to say that. And I'm not saying the Celtics were lucky to beat us because that's not the case, they were better and they should have won. But we had a couple of opportunities when a good bounce or a basket at the right time, maybe we could have changed the course of history a little bit.
     "It's something that probably even today has left some of the scars that I think all of us have. I think today they measure players by the number of championships they won. I'm not real fond of the fact that we only won one when we played."
     Nevertheless, they were happening.
     During the '61 playoffs, Short hired Chick Hearn. Los Angeles loved personalities (the first Dodger to make $1 million was not Sandy Koufax or Steve Garvey but Vin Scully), and Hearn was soon as important as West and Baylor.
     In 1962-63, the Lakers became the first NBA team to make $1 million at the gate. Short made a $500,000 profit the next season, then sold to Cooke for $5.1 million in cash. Cooke, bombastic, imperious and a showman in his own right, soon found himself limited in a way he would not tolerate with the Coliseum Commission politicos, and off he went.
     "A guy name Ab England was the head of the commission," says Mel Durslag, then a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner columnist. "He was a Pontiac dealer from Hollywood. He was a nice guy, but it was just a political plum. They had no idea what they were doing.
     "Jack was pestering them for this and that. They had a meeting and I covered it. Ab says, very knowingly, 'Where's he going?'
     "That's all you had to do with Jack."
     Cooke was one of the first to divine a key fact: Owning the right team means never having to say you're sorry, not to mention an unending credit line. Borrowing from sponsors as an advance against future advertising revenue, he built an arena with fake Doric columns under an LAX glide pattern in Inglewood, which had never seen such splendor.
     Hearn says he was the one who first called it the "Fabulous Forum." Cooke liked it so much, he made it part of the name, promising Chick a little extra in his pay envelope. Hearn says that turned out to be a picture of Cooke.
     But anyway, it was L.A., and they were a hit.

WINNING IN '70s, RULING IN '80s

     Improbably, the Lakers broke through to win a title under Bill Sharman in 1973, winning 35 games in a row (still a record) in a streak that started, ironically, the night Baylor retired and young Jim McMillian took his place.
     Chamberlain retired a year later. West left in two, and lamented later that he hadn't waltzed after winning the title.
     The Lakers were suddenly nowhere, but not for long. Something new was happening, the ascendance of Los Angeles as an NBA destination. As Chamberlain had done, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then in Milwaukee, demanded a trade to Los Angeles, which the Bucks were obliged to grant him.
     The revival was finished four years later, when the Lakers drafted a 6-foot-9 point guard named Magic Johnson with the No. 1 pick in the 1979 draft, a throwaway from the New Orleans Jazz, who had sent it to the Lakers three years before for signing then-33-year-old Gail Goodrich.
     "You go to training camp, day one, and you say to yourself, 'My God, this guy is really unique,' " West says of Johnson. "He is a guard. He's not some guy who thinks he's a guard.
     "But in watching him, the thing that was really unique early, he didn't really try to be a leader. He was just a leader. He didn't have to try. I mean, that was his niche. He was a leader."
     Next thing you knew, it was Showtime.
     Through the '80s, the Lakers raced up and down NBA floors, outmatching opponents, even the Celtics, whom they beat, five titles to three in the decade, winning two of three faceoffs.

     In 1988, the Lakers became the first NBA team since 1969 to repeat, fulfilling coach Pat Riley's guarantee. But by decade's end, Riley, who had grown from the players' buddy to their harsh taskmaster, had extracted the last drop from them and they had tired of being squeezed.
     Abdul-Jabbar retired in 1989 at 42 with a record 38,367 points that may never be approached (the closest active player, Karl Malone, is almost 10,000 behind). The Lakers posted the league's best record the next season but swooned in the playoffs, falling to the Phoenix Suns in the second round after a last staged tirade by Riley failed to rouse them. With feelings strained all around, Riley took the hint and left.
     Johnson departed in 1991, after his shocking announcement that he was HIV-positive. He has remained in robust health since, and even made a comeback in 1996, but it only served to undermine the chemistry of a young, volatile Laker team.
     There was no reviving it. By '96, Showtime had been over for a long time.

THE '90s: THINGS ARE LOOKING UP (AND DOWN)

     Going into the 2000s, the NBA has never been healthier in Los Angeles. Happier, yes. More prosperous, never.
     The Lakers have been rebuilt around two of the game's brightest, if not yet most compatible, stars, O'Neal and Bryant, who, after three seasons together (and three disastrous postseasons and some signs of rivalry), are 27 and 21. Phil Jackson, fresh from winning six titles in Chicago, has been given a $6-million-a-year contract to work out the kinks, basketball and inter-personal. Ticket prices have been doubled. So, inevitably, will expectations.
     The Clippers remain a representation of their tight-fisted owner, Donald T. Sterling, who bought the team--basically by assuming the deferred salaries owed to players--when it was in San Diego and brought it to Los Angeles in 1984, suing the NBA, which opposed the move, and prevailing in court.
     It proved to be Sterling's biggest victory in sports. The franchise was in town eight seasons before making the playoffs in 1992 under coach Larry Brown. The Clippers made it again the next season--but then Brown departed, becoming Sterling's sixth coach to have come and gone within two seasons in 11 years. Nor have Sterling's players been any happier. The franchise has re-signed only two players to long-term contracts, Loy Vaught (since departed too) and Eric Piatkowski. In Clipperdom, everyone but the Donald is just passing through.
     In 1988, they won the lottery for the top pick, Danny Manning, but his cantankerous agent, Ron Grinker, engaging in a stormy round of negotiations over Manning's first contract, vowed his client would leave as soon as he became a free agent--after the 1994 season. For years, while Manning grew up, blew out a knee and returned, Sterling wondered if Manning was worth the money they were paying him. Then, when Danny began to emerge as a star, Sterling insisted he'd never leave them. In the fall of 1993, Sterling vetoed General Manager Elgin Baylor's Manning-for-Glen Rice deal.
     Finally at midseason, Sterling let Baylor put Manning back on the market. They wound up trading him to Atlanta for Dominique Wilkins--another free agent. Then, after the season, they decided they didn't like Wilkins' price, either, and let him go too.
     Nor was that an isolated phenomenon. In 1995, seeking to rebuild in a hurry, they traded Antonio McDyess, the second pick in the draft, to Denver for Brian Williams, Brent Barry and Rodney Rogers--all of whom fled as soon as they could. The Clippers now have a promising young team, headed by a hot rookie, Lamar Odom. However, two young starters, Mo Taylor and Derek Anderson, who actually wanted to re-sign, weren't offered new contracts and Taylor has vowed to leave. As usual, the question among the Clippers isn't how good will these young players become, but where will they be when it happens? Until this season, the Clippers toiled in dank anonymity in the musty Sports Arena, but now they're sharing the same sparkling arena the Lakers use. Since the Kings built the place, it didn't cost Sterling anything, either. It's something he might be able to build on, if he ever feels like giving it a try.

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