A Man to Get the Clippers on the Uptick

All we need now around here is a third pro basketball team--one for Wilt Chamberlain to run.

The L.A. Conquistadors, we can call them.

Elgin Baylor is back in the basket business. The new director of basketball operations for the Clippers is about to go up against Jerry West, general manager of the Lakers, one on one.

“I always could beat him,” Baylor joked Tuesday.

He will have a chance to do so in his new position with the Clippers, the team that emphasized the Los in Los Angeles.

If only Baylor could play for the Clippers--”I’m only about 10 pounds over my playing weight,” he said--the Lakers might have reason to worry. But despite losing twice to the Clippers this season, the Lakers still represent, in a lot of minds, the only game in town.

Baylor, a Laker lifer as a player, the lord of mid-air, is 51 now and not about to haul out his jocks and socks. He is strictly management now and hopes to put a team in the Sports Arena that will make the team at the Forum take notice.

West welcomes the challenge. “I’ve got the utmost respect for Elgin,” he said Tuesday. “He’s going to do a great job.”

But look at what Baylor has to work with:

He is taking charge of a team that did not make the playoffs and does not have a draft choice in the first or second rounds.

He has a big scorer, Derek Smith, who already is threatening to do whatever it takes to get out of town.

He has a contract that gives the final say on business decisions to somebody else.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, we are likely to see Elgin Baylor hanging in mid-air.

The last time he had some control of an NBA team, as coach of the New Orleans Jazz in the 1970s, Baylor’s hands were similarly tied.

“The biggest problem I had with the Jazz organization was that we had no draft picks,” he said. “And we had a problem with money. We didn’t have the money to buy players. It got to the point where we had to sell Truck Robinson to meet the payroll. And Truck the year before had had his best year, a sensational year.

“I thought we were just in the process of building a ballclub. Pete (Maravich) was playing the way I wanted him to play. Pete was having an excellent year. Pete got hurt. Pete went out with a knee injury. And that knocked us out of the playoffs. We missed the playoffs by a couple of games.

“So, I was looking forward to the next year. Looking forward to getting a couple of good players. And Truck is sold.”

And pretty soon, Baylor is fired.

Which explains why the very first thing Baylor did as an executive with the Clippers was to rehire Coach Don Chaney, a man whose team was 5-0 at one point before Derek Smith’s season-ruining injury took 25 points a night out of the box score.

“That’s what I mean,” Baylor said. “I can sympathize with what he went through. All things being normal and equal, Chaney ought to get a chance to show what he can do.”

Three of his first four years in New Orleans, if Baylor’s memory served, the team did not have a first-round draft choice. Another time, when the Jazz signed 33-year-old Gail Goodrich as a free agent, it had to send the Lakers its first-round picks for 1977 and 1979--the ’79 choice turned out to be Magic Johnson--and a second-rounder for 1980. The Lakers were nice enough to send back a 1977 second-round pick.

Since the Clippers’ record this season was poor enough to put them among the non-magnificent seven, Baylor and Chaney should be huddling right now to decide whom they like in the lottery.

But Clipper management, in its infinite wisdom, decided seven years ago that it needed Jellybean Joe Bryant a lot worse than it needed a lousy 1986 draft pick.

So, it is safe to assume that next season’s Clippers will not make anyone in Los Angeles forget the lineup that had Baylor, West and Chamberlain.

On the other hand, Marques Johnson, Norm Nixon and the new, improved Benoit Benjamin do know what to do with a basketball, and Smith will definitely return, Baylor said. “You can quote me on that.”

Although he has been busy in business, Baylor has missed basketball. He is one of those guys who watches 100 games a year or more on cable TV, just for fun.

But he denies that it was murder to be on the outside looking in, that he was longing to get back in the NBA any way he could. “It wasn’t killing me inside or anything like that,” Baylor said.

The chance to return was given him by Donald T. Sterling, the Clipper owner, who was not at Tuesday’s press conference at the Sports Arena unless he came disguised as a bowl of Cheetos.

Sterling and Baylor have sat together at games this season, and when a decision was made to replace General Manager Carl Scheer, it came as no surprise that Baylor was the man.

Chaney, for one, seemed very pleased. As a player, he idolized Baylor to the point that he emulated Elgin’s nervous tics on the court. “I used to pretend I had a stiff neck, too,” Chaney joked.

Oscar Robertson once took note of the fact that the Professional Basketball Writers Assn. of America had voted Bill Russell the best player in NBA history. “Russell was a great pivot man, but to say he was the best the NBA has ever seen is going a bit too far,” Robertson was quoted as saying in 1980.

“As a shooter, as a dribbler, Elgin Baylor had no match. The greatest game I ever saw was a Los Angeles playoff game in Boston when the Celtics double-teamed Elgin and Jerry West, and Baylor still scored about 60 points.”

Hot Rod Hundley has gotten a lot of mileage, of course, about the time “Elgin and I combined for 73 points in a game. Elgin had 72.”

He was a superman from Seattle University who was the NBA’s No. 1 draft pick in 1958 and signed for $15,000. He spent his entire playing career with the Lakers, two seasons in Minneapolis before the team was moved to Los Angeles, and then expected to stick around for a while as a coach.

Baylor thought some guys had the temperament for coaching, and some did not. When Chamberlain was hired to coach the ABA San Diego Conquistadors, Baylor was skeptical. “I don’t think he can coach,” he said at the time. “What could he possibly help a player with? He never had any discipline.”

That was 13 years ago. A lot of time has passed. A lot of 24-second clocks have run out. Maybe Wilt is willing to give it another try, if Los Angeles ever gets another team.

In the meantime, Elgin Baylor is back in the game, back in the sport and city he loves.

We can only hope that he and Jerry West do not combine for 73 victories next season, West getting 72.