A Tower of Power He’s Not, but He’d Save Day for L.A.

The trouble with Ralph Sampson is, he isn’t Wilt Chamberlain.

Now, a lot of basketball players have that problem, but, you see, Ralph has no excuses. He’s three inches taller than Chamberlain, he’s two steps faster and he’s a (slightly) better foul-shooter.

Ralph Sampson wasn’t even Patrick Ewing, they complained. It turned out that Patrick Ewing wasn’t even Patrick Ewing once he got to the big leagues, but that’s beside the point.

Ralph Sampson was supposed to be The Franchise when he showed up on the Houston Rockets two years ago. He was so good as a college player that the Celtics’ Red Auerbach got annoyed with the whole state of Virginia when Sampson elected to stay in college there rather than going hardship and letting the NBA fight over him like lions over a prize zebra. Sampson was in no hurry to get to the NBA and then in no hurry to take it over when he got there.

He played with the deadpan look of a patient poker player on a long cruise. He was good but he wasn’t flashy. He threw in points from all over the court. But he didn’t dunk them. He didn’t do any of the fancy turnaround, behind-the-back stuffs. He didn’t play an overpowering in-your-face game. He didn’t knock people off the ball. He didn’t scare anybody. He didn’t scowl enough.

He looked like a guy working on a lathe. He threw in 1,720 points, 21 a night, he blocked 197 (count ‘em) shots, he picked off 913 rebounds, and his team won 29 games, 15 more than it had the season before. But that was still good for only last place.

Ralph, for his part, thought that if they wanted him to play Dracula they should have given him a cape and a coffin to sleep in. If they wanted him to frighten little children they should have rented him a gorilla suit. But if it was basketball they wanted, Ralph Sampson felt he was giving them an impeccable 40 minutes a night. He was Rookie of the Year, and he brought respectability to a franchise that had been focus-less since Moses Malone left it two years before.

Houston was not satisfied. It wanted Instant Jabbar. Russell. Muscle. It wanted caveman basketball. It wanted its Sampson to kill the lions. It wanted him to throw his weight around.

The trouble was, he didn’t have any. At 7 foot 4 inches, Ralph weighed a bare 220 or so. By NBA standards, this is practically anorexic. Sampson was either too tall for his weight or too light for his height. He had to get either heavier or shorter.

Sampson disagreed. A studious man, he had come to the conclusion that his silhouette was the way nature intended. And a canvass of the heavy men in the pivot, from Willis Reed to Bob Lanier to Moses Malone, indicated to him that heft on the hoof was hard on the knees and ankles. Lugging 280 pounds a night up and down hardwood floors every 24 seconds on legs that may have been constructed to carry 50 fewer seemed to Ralph to be not only unwise but, in the long run, unproductive.

Then, a curious thing happened: The Houston team drafted a gifted Nigerian out of the University of Houston, Akeem Olajuwon.

This seemed to cram an awful lot of height into one space. “It’s going to get awfully crowded in that pivot,” one newsman warned. “How are they gonna play it--piggyback?”

It was assumed that Olajuwon, who is five inches shorter than Sampson, would shift to forward.

Ah, but Olajuwon is 25 pounds heavier. So Sampson was the one management told to move over. The game waited for an argument. Sampson shrugged. And moved over.

The league thrushes coined a new phrase, “The Twin Towers Of Power,” and got ready for a new dynasty. The team moved all the way from last to second in its division but got flipped out of the playoffs in the first round by Utah, which had finished next-to-last.

This season, the numbers are better. Houston went clear to the top in its division. But the league hasn’t run to the cellar yet. The Twin Towers dominate the skyline but not necessarily the backboard. The Celtics do not tremble.

The rub is that Sampson seems to be a point guard in a center’s body. He has touch, quickness, a feel for the court, an instinct for the flow of the game. He is miscast as a power forward. He plays a finesse game, not an intimidating one.

In a large sense, so does Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And therein lies the grand plot, the scenario of the future. It goes like this:

The league needs a viable franchise in Los Angeles. The gate demands it, television demands it, and so does the public. When Abdul-Jabbar goes, the Lakers go from Showtime USA to a lounge act, from uptown to Delancey Street. They are shopping for that next Big Man in the Pivot.

Sampson would fit right in. He wouldn’t need a club or a fright wig to play with this chorus line. He could be himself. His skills are not too dissimilar from Abdul-Jabbar’s.

Sampson playing forward is like Bogart playing a priest. He can do it, but why? The man-who-isn’t-Chamberlain could become at last the man-who-is-Ralph Sampson. Who could ask for anything more?