What Are These Whozits Doing Here, Anyway?

I’m sure the Seattle SuperSonics, the basketball players, are nice guys. I’m sure they’re good to their mothers. I bet they give to the Red Cross, help old ladies across streets. They probably say, “Please” and “Thank you,” and call older people, “Sir” or “Ma’am,” and I’ll bet they’re kind to dumb animals and they like kids.

I don’t quarrel with that. What I can’t figure out is what they’re doing in the Western Conference basketball finals, what they mean by trying to louse up one of the great matchups in pro basketball history, and why they don’t know their place.

What a nerve! I mean, who are these guys anyway? In a league with Air Jordan, the Twin Towers, the Bird, Dr. J, Dominique, the Round Mound and Moses, they’re trying to sell us on a whole bunch of guys named Johnson, a backcourt that’s as anonymous as a police lineup. This is not a team, it’s a hideout.

You see anything that looks like a Twin Tower in that lineup? You see anything that looks like a headline player? You even know any of these guys?

I’ll pick a name at random. Young. Any of you have any idea what his first name is? For 500 silver dollars, what position does he play? What’s his game-point average? Could you pick him out of a crowd of tourists?

I’m not picking on young Mr. Young. The whole team is that way. Would you like to try to tell me which one is Russ Schoene in the warmups before he takes his jacket off? He’s not even in the league register. Dale Ellis is a good player. But nobody’s ever going to call him Dr. D or The Big E or Mr. Clutch.

They’re all like that--the biggest collection of Who’s He’s? this side of a motel registry. These guys not only need their names, numbers and team on their jerseys, they need blood type, phone number and next of kin and a brief bio. Five John Does and a coach nobody ever heard of, either.

And the way they play the game is enough to make you want to bring a book. Two guys do all the shooting, the rest just try to cobweb the court.

What are they doing here, anyway? Is this a punishment for our past sins, we have to watch these whozits in one of basketball’s climactic ’87 matches? Whatever happened to the Dallas Mavericks, the team of the future with Mark Aguirre, James Donaldson, Rolando Blackman and all those ballhandlers?

What are we doing with a bunch that won only 39 games in the season and beat out only two teams, the Phoenix Suns and the Clippers, if you consider them a team?

The trouble with that is, we may be heading to a final final that will feature the Detroit Pistons or the Milwaukee Bucks against these guys. Can’t you see CBS throwing its hat in the air over that one?

It’s the era of the nobodies. We’re getting used to leader boards in golf that look like a page from the Salt Lake City phone directory. We can take beardless youths winning Cy Young awards in baseball, tennis being given over to Iron Curtain robots. You can even handle the Denver Broncos getting into a Super Bowl.

But what’s going on in basketball? Don’t we deserve Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson any more? Have we been so bad we have to get Milwaukee or Detroit and Seattle? How can this be happening? Can’t somebody take these guys out of here and bring us some stars! How can Michael Jordan be sitting at home, and we’re looking at Tom Chambers? This is not a playoff, it’s a sentence. What have we done to deserve this? These guys should play in masks, and they should put the series on public television like one of those intermina ble dramas on life in pre-World War I Cornwall.

Who wants to beat these guys anyway? It’s like Joe Louis beating his chauffeur, winning at gin against your grandmother. Can’t we have the Houston Rockets, at least? What is this, an Italian movie? How can the Lakers get up for this cast of non-characters? This bunch who couldn’t get their pictures in the paper if they robbed a bank. There are more famous players on a Harlem playground. Maybe better ones, too. More exciting ones, certainly.

But we’re stuck with it. The good news is, they may not be around long.

In a shoving match that took the game right back to its peach-basket origins, the Lakers outlasted the Seattles Saturday. In a game about as athletic as a swarm of housewives pushing their way to a bargain counter, the Lakers prevailed. And that’s the most you can say for them. For much of the game, they didn’t need the basket. In fact, they didn’t need the basketball. It was Woody Hayes basketball. Everything but the cloud of dust. Each team scored only 15 points in the last quarter and most of those were free throws, to give you an idea.

The Lakers bragged about their defense after the game, but that’s like Dempsey boasting about his clinching. The whole fourth quarter was like a Joey Maxim fight--one long clinch.

Around a race track, when a horse wins without trying very hard, they say he won “on class.” That’s the way the Lakers beat the Whozits Saturday. On class. And 40 free throws. Like winning a fight on a foul.

Of course, it took the Lakers a long time to get interested. Seattle has that effect on you. The way the Sonics play the game, it takes awhile to realize they showed up, that they’re in town.

In fact, they won’t be. The next game is Tuesday, but the Seattle coach is flying them home because “L.A. isn’t a safe place to be.”

He promises to bring them back in time. The problem with these guys is, how will we know it? Compared to them, CIA agents are neighborhood celebrities, cafe society.