TO JAMES, THE GAME’S A SNAP : And Lakers’ Playoff Opponents Have Certainly Gotten the Picture

When Pat Riley first met him, he didn’t know what to call him.

“The first time, I think I called him Jim,” the Laker coach said. “Then I asked him what he wanted to be called.

“ ‘Call me James , ‘ “ he said. He said it very definitively, with a lot of pride and dignity. ‘James.’ ”

To most everyone who knows him, he remains James Worthy. In the Laker dressing room, however, his teammates have another name for him.

Clever .

Of course. The name fits the 6-9 forward as well as the goggles that frame Worthy’s mournful eyes.

What else do you call a man who has more insider moves than Ivan Boesky, more finger rolls than a Beverly Hills luncheon, more spins than a Chuck Berry 45?

Worthy, however, didn’t pick up his nickname on a basketball court. Would you believe a barber shop?

“Mike McGee and I would go to the same barber,” Worthy said while sitting in an office in the Forum recently.

“And one time when we went in there, the barber said to me, ‘I’m going to have you looking real clever. The team picked up on it.”

That barber doesn’t cut McGee’s hair anymore. McGee was traded to the Atlanta Hawks last June.

And for a while last summer, it seemed the barber might lose Worthy’s business, too.

The Lakers had lost to the Houston Rockets in the playoffs last spring, and the wise guys were saying that unless the Lakers planned to spend the next decade or so in the shadow of Houston’s Twin Towers--7-footers Ralph Sampson and Akeem Olajuwon--they’d best invest in their own high-rises.

And Dallas, apparently, had a big man they were willing to part with--Roy Tarpley, the rookie from Michigan. To make the deal even more tempting, the Mavericks were offering Mark Aguirre, whose explosive scoring was matched only by his explosive run-ins with Dick Motta, then the Dallas coach.

The cost to the Lakers? Worthy.

This time, however, it was Laker General Manager Jerry West who was clever. West successfully resisted the pressure to make the deal, which reportedly came from owner Jerry Buss, among others.

When Worthy first heard the rumors, he professed shock.

“I talked to him one time in my office last summer,” Riley said. “James was very logical, once all this stuff had died down.

“He realized it was part of the business, and he wasn’t going to let it hang over his head. He doesn’t operate that way.”

There was one other meeting Worthy had, which came in training camp last fall. That was with Magic Johnson, who may or may not have lobbied for his friend Aguirre.

“There have never been any personal problems between us,” Worthy said. “Whatever happened, it’s been settled.

“It’s not like we had to clear the air. It was a matter of talking things out, what the situation was.

“Magic never wrote anything in the papers.”

Worthy, meanwhile, went on to write perhaps the most successful chapter of his five-season career with the Lakers, culminating with his sonic boom in L.A.’s four-game sweep of Seattle in the NBA’s Western Conference finals.

In each game against the SuperSonics, Worthy led the Lakers in scoring, averaging 30.5 points a game and topping out at 39 in Game 3, the most points he’s scored in any game since high school in Gastonia, N.C.

Through the first dozen games of the playoffs, spanning series against Denver, Golden State and Seattle, Worthy is the Lakers’ leading scorer with a 25.1 average, almost six full points better than his regular-season average.

He’s also shooting a phenomenal 63% from the floor after coming into the playoffs as the league’s all-time playoff leader in field-goal accuracy at 59.5%.

And there’s no reason to believe he’ll cool off against Boston. Worthy averaged 25.5 points a game while shooting 60% in the Lakers’ two regular-season wins over the Celtics, and set a record for a seven-game championship series in 1984 when he shot 63.8% against the Celtics.

Detroit assistant coach Dick Versace scouted Worthy in the Seattle series.

“He had a great series, one, because he’s a great player, and two, I thought Seattle had match-up problems with him,” Versace said.

“They tried to guard him with (Tom) Chambers and (Xavier) McDaniel, and then they finally put Dale Ellis (a guard) on him.”

One-on-one, Riley said, there isn’t a player in the league who can stop Worthy.

“They can’t handle him unless they abuse him, or take privileges defensively and run at him,” Riley said.

And the Lakers have so many offensive weapons, as well as exceptional ball movement, that teams pay a high price for double-teaming Worthy.

“His gifts are these,” Riley said.

“Three things: To post up, you have to have a strong move to the baseline, which he does. You should see how he comes across the lane to post up, bumped and banged all the way, but has the guts to get on through there. It’s incredible to watch him on the tape, in slow motion.

“The second part is his catch. He catches the ball, on the move, either one-handed or two-handed. And once he’s made the catch, he’s got the quickest feet of any forward in this league.”

Maurice Lucas has said Worthy kills people with his first step. “His first step is awesome,” Lucas has said. “And his second step is in the hoop.”

And once he has the ball, Riley said, the rest is improvised.

“He’ll give a guy two or three fakes, step through, then throw up the turn-around,” Riley said. “It’s not planned. It’s all just happening.”

And it’s all so very clever.

“The Invisible Man.”

That’s how Los Angeles Magazine entitled a recent profile of Worthy.

“The top honors elude James,” former Laker Hot Rod Hundley, now a broadcaster, told Al Stump, the author of the magazine story.

“He’s like Chuck Connors in an old movie, blowing up a whole army and then everybody rushes over and kisses Victor Mature.”

His teammates say they know little of Worthy’s life away from the court. Riley has said there are times he has no idea what Worthy is thinking.

“He doesn’t ever complain about anything,” Riley said. “If I criticize him, he never makes an excuse, he just nods his head and takes it.

“If I compliment him, he just nods his head and takes it.”

Emotionally, Riley likens Worthy to Jamaal Wilkes, the small forward whose place Worthy took on the Lakers.

“Silk was a quiet man who just played--he was very competitive and coachable,” Riley said. “James is like that. The position changed, but not the personality.”

Worthy is the type of player, Riley said, who suppresses his own ego to better serve the team.

With the media, Worthy is generally agreeable, unfailingly polite, and rarely expansive. Some have interpreted Worthy’s silence as meaning he has nothing to say.

“I’m not totally introverted, but I can’t make people realize that,” he said. “So I really just don’t get into it.”

Worthy, whose father is now an ordained Baptist minister after holding a variety of jobs (laborer, clerk, cab driver) and whose grandfather was the son of a full-blooded American Indian, is not one for idle conversation.

He is, however, more than willing to discuss such subjects as whether he finds basketball intellectually stimulating (“I don’t think the game itself can do that, but it opens avenues--travel, meeting interesting people--where you can prosper intellectually.”) or the expansion of the NBA to Charlotte, in his home state of North Carolina (“That’s home for me. I’m comfortable there. And socio-economically, the place is growing and has become a great place to live. It’ll be like Atlanta in another 10 years.”)

And he also is coming to terms with Los Angeles, an alien place for someone who prefers the small-town pace of Gastonia and lives about that simply, eschewing most of the luxuries that are de rigueur in the NBA.

Worthy in a Mercedes? This is a guy who occasionally rides his bicycle to practice, who chooses to live in solid Westchester instead of splashy Bel-Air.

Yet, when asked what song he would choose to best accompany his game, Worthy chose “California,” a composition by jazz flutist Kent George.

“How’s that for someone who’s supposedly a country boy from Gastonia?” he said.

There are those who suggest this country boy from Gastonia is just the man to fill the vacuum left by the retirement of Julius Erving. To be sure, the Dr. J balletic swoops are part of Worthy’s repertoire.

For now, anyway, Worthy declines.

“I’ve always been the type of person who just wanted to play my own game,” Worthy said.

“I remember going to Carolina Cougars games as a kid to see Dr. J and the ABA teams. I always idolized him when he was with the Virginia Spurs.

“I never hung around to ask for his autograph or anything. But I pictured myself being there one day.

“Those are big shoes to fill. I think I’ll stay away from that. I’ve heard them say that about me, then Michael (Jordan), taking over. It’s nice to hear sometimes, but I can’t dwell on that.”

For now, Worthy is happy to be known by no other name than his own.

James .