<i> WINNIN’ TIMES:</i> At First, Nixon Couldn’t Believe It Was West

As Norm Nixon came out of his Baldwin Hills home one day in the summer of 1983, several kids from the block raced up behind him. They were breathing heavily, obviously bursting with news.

“Hey, Norm, somebody is going to get robbed,” one of the neighborhood kids said.

“What do you mean?” Nixon asked.

“There’s been cars parked at both ends of our street with telescopes, guys looking into houses,” another of the kids said excitedly. “People are setting somebody up.”

Sure enough, Nixon started to notice the cars. “Maybe they are watching somebody,” he thought. “It’s got to be a drug dealer.”

It wasn’t long before Nixon discovered who they were watching. He had pulled up in front of his house at 2:30 one morning several days later and was heading for his front door when a figure stepped out of the shadows.

“Hey, man, I have to talk to you,” said the figure, whom Nixon won’t identify to this day.

The man said he’d be right back. Nixon went into his house and woke his brother, Ron, who was staying with him. Minutes later, there was a knock at the door. With his brother at his side, Norm cautiously opened it.

The man from the street walked in, looked around quickly, shut the door, and said, “Norm, I just want to tell you that we’ve been following you for the last two weeks. We were hired by . . . Jerry West.”

At first, Nixon didn’t believe it. But he became convinced when the man told Nixon every place he had been for the previous two weeks.

“If you still don’t believe me, I’ll tell you where we are parking,” the man said. “We are at either end of the block. I’ve got a job to do, but I like you and I felt an obligation to tell you. Now I’ve got to go back to work.”

Any lingering doubts Norm had were removed the next day. As he drove away from his house, he looked in his rear-view mirror. One of the mysterious cars pulled out from the curb and followed behind him at a safe distance.

Finally, Nixon had had enough. He walked outside with his Doberman pinscher a few days later, marched down the street and right up to one of the stakeout cars. He didn’t recognize either of the men in it.

“What are you guys doing?” asked Nixon in an angry tone.

“Oh, we’re watching somebody’s house for them,” one of the men said. “They’ve been having trouble.”

Before Nixon could answer, his dog darted into the street, directly into the path of an oncoming car. The vehicle barely brushed the dog, but it was enough to send the animal scurrying in fear back to its own backyard. Nixon looked at the car, then the dog.

“Damn,” he muttered.

He had been planning to come right back with his brother and some friends to shake the surveillance guys up so they would leave him alone. But his dog came first. By the time Nixon assured himself that the animal was OK, the car was gone.

Nixon confronted West.

“You’ve been hanging out with some drug dealers,” West said. “And we know that you do drugs.”

Interviewed recently, Nixon said: “If I did a lot of drugs, people that would know better than anybody else would be the coach and the trainer. I don’t miss practices. I don’t miss buses. I don’t miss planes. I’m very rarely hurt, very rarely miss games, averaging more minutes than anybody on the team. So I should be the last one that should have to deal with something like that.”

As the Lakers prepared for another run at the top in the summer of 1983, Nixon’s name kept surfacing in trade rumors. And in other rumors. In NBA front offices around the country, they whispered: “Nixon’s on drugs. Nixon’s got a bad case of tendinitis in the knees. Nixon’s lost a step. Nixon’s a troublemaker.”

Norm heard them all. And he knew what the bottom line was going to be.

“When I came to training camp and West threw his arms around me and told me not to worry about all the trade talk, I knew I was gone,” Nixon said.

His teammates tried to assure him it wasn’t so. They felt he’d be awfully difficult to replace.

But he was replaced on the mid-October day before the Lakers broke training camp in Palm Springs.

Eating dinner with Magic Johnson and Michael Cooper, Nixon got the word that he and Eddie Jordan had been traded to the San Diego Clippers for center Swen Nater and the rights to San Diego’s still unsigned No. 1 draft pick, Byron Scott.

Does he think West’s suspicions or his own learning about the detectives may be the reasons he was traded?

“I’m not sure those are the reasons,” Nixon says. “I just think you peep somebody’s hole card like that, it might not make for a great relationship. It’s just like if somebody is doing something, and I found out they’re doin’ it, they might not feel that comfortable having me around anymore.

“Or hey, maybe they were just trying to make a business move. Who knows why I was traded?”

Final part of a four-part series excerpted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc., from WINNIN’ TIMES by Scott Ostler and Steve Springer. Copyright (c) 1986 by Scott Ostler and Steve Springer.