This May Be Too Much for Even Baylor

Elgin Baylor was, quite simply, the best there ever was at inventing a shot to win a game.

When he played basketball for the Lakers, they needed a whole new language to describe his moves.

The phrase, “Yo-yo to the top of the key,” was coined by Chick Hearn to describe Elgin’s style of play.

When Baylor appeared with the ball, bouncing it effortlessly without so much as looking at it, it was like a cop appearing at the door of an illegal crap game. Players scattered in all directions.

When people made futile swipes at the ball, Elgin just swatted them scornfully away, like King Kong smashing biplanes.

It was like a shell game. Elgin just showed them the ball for an instant, then it seemed to disappear some place, only to reappear a moment later going into the basket.

He was a past master at the 23 1/2-second basket. If his team was ahead in the closing minutes, that was precisely how long he took to sink the throw ahead of the buzzer. He was also the world’s greatest at drawing fouls on his way to the basket.

Baylor also had what appeared to be this terrible twitch at the time, a nervous tic it hurt you to look at. You thought: “The poor fellow has this terrible head shake. Must be some form of St. Vitus dance. It must be terribly distracting.”

It was. It distracted a whole generation of guys assigned to guard him. Just when they thought they had figured out what he was going to do, his head would jerk. Their heads would follow. The next sound you heard was swish!

It’s a funny thing. The day Elgin hung up his jump shot, his twitch miraculously disappeared. His head today is as steady as Jack Nicklaus’ over a three-foot putt.

Baylor is probably the last 6-foot 5-inch power forward the game will see. He played on teams that never did have bona fide NBA centers, yet his Lakers made the final series six out of eight years in his heyday. He averaged 38.3 points one year, more than 30 two other seasons, and was over 20 all his career.

If any one man can be said to have made pro basketball a true national sport by popularizing it in L.A., it was either Elgin Baylor or Jerry West. Together, they put the team name Lakers on a par with Rams, Trojans and Dodgers in this town. Watching Elgin Baylor on a basketball court was like watching Gene Kelly in the rain.

I bring this up because the elegant Elgin has the ball again in a high stakes game. The clock is running, nobody else seems to be open and it’s going to take all his skill and cunning to get the shot off this time.

Maybe he’ll have to go back to the head twitch. Because Baylor is in charge of the--are you ready?--1987-88 Los Angeles Clippers! Ta-da!

Now, the Clippers are--or have been--to Los Angeles sports what the Whittier fault has been to downtown business. This is not a team, it’s a laugh track.

It won--hold onto your hats--12 games last year! You heard me. That’s 12, as in one dozen.

That kind of ineptitude is generally matched only by Mussolini’s navy and the occasional British heavyweight fighter.

The Clippers managed to lose 70 games. That’s seven-oh as in 87% of your schedule. The old St. Louis Browns did better than that. So did the team touring with the Globetrotters. The Clippers lost seven games by 30 or more points.

Some teams go weeks without winning. This one went months. Their season average was .146. They found ways to lose games that might have worked even if the other team hadn’t shown up. It was a team that really didn’t need the basketball.

How is Baylor going to put this ball in the hoop? Being general manager of this group is like being first mate on the Andrea Doria. You better count the lifeboats.

The Clippers can’t win on the court or in one. They lost another big game recently when they had to agree to pay $6 million to the NBA as reparation for moving from San Diego to Los Angeles without permission.

That loss was a little less decisive than most of theirs, though, in that the league is not going to force them back to San Diego--or even Buffalo, where they originated. The lower court had threw the case out, but the appeals court upheld the league’s right to stop franchise shifts without approval. The Clippers will pay the $6 million in return for being allowed to stay where they are.

Where they are is the sub-basement of the NBA. Is this one stacked defense even an Elgin Baylor cannot slicker?

A man who once threw in 22 field goals over Tom Heinsohn and Bill Russell in a championship game at the Boston Garden, Baylor doesn’t think there is a defense that can’t be cracked. Or a league that can’t be caught. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Akeem Olajuwon, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan don’t scare Elgin any more than Russell, Nate Thurmond, Willis Reed and Walt Bellamy did.

“Our first year in Los Angeles, the old Lakers won 36 and lost 43,” Baylor says. “The next year we won 54 and the championship.

“The game is such that no one man can dominate it anymore. You need a cast of characters. You know Magic (Johnson) is good and Kareem. But you need a James Worthy and a Michael Cooper. You need a team.

“And we have five first-round draft choices in these two years. And we have some young players who now realize the opportunity this game and this town offer to them.”

In other words, as soon as the general manager can convince his young team you can’t play the game overweight and undermotivated, they may start winning seven out of eight instead of losing them.

It sounds as if Elgin Baylor is at the top of the key and yo-yoing the ball as usual, looking for the opening. All I know is, if he gives the head fake, the rest of the league better get back under the basket fast.

I remember Richie Guerin in the old Madison Square Garden one night after Baylor had a 50- or 70-point night, complaining, “Elgin Baylor has either got three hands or two basketballs out there. It’s like guarding a flood!”