NICE WHILE IT LASTED : These Days Are Calm Before the NBA Norm for Danny Manning

This is what passes for the last days of Danny Manning’s innocence:

A summer of forceful instruction at the hands of Big John Thompson, succeeding Larry Brown, the coach who handled the screaming for the last four years; accommodations behind barbed wire in the security-conscious Olympic Village fortress; the pressure that comes with being the top player on a U.S. men’s basketball team that will be expected not only to win, but to dominate.

And this is what awaits when innocence is no more:

Graduation to the National Basketball Assn. and the Clippers; the anticipated signing of about a $2-million annual contract; the pressure of being the top player on a downtrodden team, on which six of the top seven players have one year of pro experience or less and the seventh is Benoit Benjamin.

Goodby, sweet bird of youth.

Hello, big time.

“Yeah, it has occurred to me,” Manning said, grinning while dressing after one of the U.S. team’s exhibition victories over the NBA stars.

What does he think about it?

“You get paid to play,” he said, shrugging. “You better go play.”

This isn’t going to be easy, interview-wise or adjustment-wise. Danny Manning is just so nice, he shrinks from publicity and would never think of anything as presumptuous as walking in and taking over someone’s program, a la you know who and who else.

Since Thompson, like Bob Knight before him, will probably spread the U.S. team’s offense around--Knight even managed to turn Michael Jordan into a reasonable facsimile of everyone else--Manning’s Olympic summer is his last chance to be what he has always wanted:

Just one of the guys.

At Kansas, he used to say he was “just a complementary player.” It took Larry Brown four years to boot him toward the top of his potential.

“That’s it,” Manning said of his old complementary-player description, happily. “That’s me.”

Said Brown: “Danny’s personality is, he wants everybody to be part of the team. It’s never been his personality to take over a team. He’s not Magic or Larry Bird, and that doesn’t mean he’s not a great player. You know, he’s Danny and he’s special.

“If you’re Magic or Larry, you have the ball-handling skills and the mentality to run a ballclub and to dominate. Danny’s 6-11. People say he’s a point guard. He’s a point guard against another 6-11 guy, but he’s not a point guard against Tyrone Bogues. It would be unfair to ask him to do those things.

“I think his personality and the way he plays, he’s more suited to be part of a team, rather than Magic or Bird or some of those other guys who carry a team.”

Actually, Olympic measurements show that Manning is 6-feet 9-inches, not 6-11. But his ballhandling skills, if not on a par with Magic Johnson’s, may be superior to Bird’s, although he--along with just about everyone else--doesn’t have Bird’s ability to see all of the floor.

However pleasant the two reigning superstars are, no one ever worried that they were too nice.

But Danny is nice, no doubt about it.

After Sept. 29 and the Olympic final, he’ll just have to grow out of it.

He has always been pleasant, unassuming, down to earth, most at home around his friends.

His father, Ed, the former NBA player and Kansas assistant who is about to join Brown with the San Antonio Spurs, is quiet and unassuming.

His mother, Darnelle, is soft-spoken.

“When Danny started playing basketball, like in junior high, and everybody started to talk about what a great player he was, Ed and I always made sure that he knew the world doesn’t revolve around him, that he was part of a revolving world,” Darnelle said from Lawrence, Kan.

“We played everything down. We never built anything up. It was never a big thing.”

Then Danny never had a chance to develop a big head?

“Not really. Not as long as I was his mom.”

But it’s a rough world for the truly talented, even the soft-spoken ones, and controversy always comes looking.

Danny became famous in 1983, when Brown, new coach at Kansas, hired his father, then a truck driver, thus moving the family--and Danny, then a junior at Page High in Greensboro, N.C., and the most-recruited player of his class--from the clutches of the mighty University of North Carolina.

Danny became so reviled in North Carolina that when he went to Raleigh as a Kansas freshman for a game against N.C. State, his high school coach refused to attend.

“He thought Coach Brown had broken some rules to get Danny by hiring Ed,” Darnelle said.

It was just as controversial in the Big Eight. Conference coaches blasted Brown, even though most of them have hired, or would hire assistants who are coaches or relatives of recruits. Missouri’s Norm Stewart, who yelled loudest, hired Steve Stipanovich’s coach and Jon Sundvold’s brother; Oklahoma hired Wayman Tisdale’s coach; Kansas State, Mitch Richmond’s coach.

At Kansas, Manning’s career was far from smooth. There was the standard abuse from opposing fans, such as Mizzou’s Antlers, who ran out banners, one of which read, “Start the Bus, Ed.” There was his awful game--four points, five fouls--against Duke in the bow-out of the ’86 Final Four. There was the four-year tug of war to get him to take over the team.

Brown likes to say he really only complained once--”I made a dumb remark once, saying I didn’t think Danny was assertive”--and writers have been going back to it ever since.

Actually, Brown was still issuing hints about Manning’s need to become more aggressive, and the pro scouts’ desire to see if he could assume the scoring burden with people hanging on him, etc., etc., in the middle of Manning’s senior season.

It was then, with Kansas 12-8, several starters lost for the season and hope fading of even making the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament, that Manning took over for good. What followed was the Jayhawks’ Cinderella story, making Danny undisputed player of the year, top pick in the NBA draft and a $2-million player.

Now he just has to live up to it.

“They got Charles Smith, Gary Grant,” Manning said of the Clippers. “They had a great draft.

“But we don’t have any miracle workers. All we can say is, we’re going to go in and try hard every night.”

Said Clipper Coach Gene Shue: “Basically, that’s the way I would like him to come in, unselfishly. That’s the whole point of having a Danny Manning. I would like him to come in and play and get comfortable, develop a real feeling for the pro game.

“You go at your own pace. At some point, as he develops confidence, he’ll assert himself more.”

Manning has played on one of these dream teams, but that could have gone better, too. Playing on U.S. soil, Denny Crum’s 1987 Pan-Am Games team, which looked like as good a unit as the United States had ever sent to one of those competitions--though the Americans were already leery, after squeaking by in the ’86 World Cup--was shocked in the finals by Brazil and Oscar Schmidt.

Stung, Manning gave his silver medal to a friend.

Since, players from that team have pointed to a lack of unity.

“One of the downfalls, we had too many guys pouting about not playing,” Willie Anderson said.

David Robinson has said the situation was “not cool.”

Said Manning: “It was just a lot of uneasiness. The thing I want to say is we didn’t have the necessary role players. We didn’t have someone to come in and play the tough defense. And I’m not just talking about defense.”

This summer, Thompson is picking a team, expressly examining each candidate to see if he looks like the type who will complain if he doesn’t play much. Thus, Stacey Augman may outlast Richmond or Jeff Grayer, but nobody will outlast Manning. Every team needs a first star, no matter how subtle a designation it is, and on this team, he’s it.

Another Magic?

The Clippers are running ads and printing brochures and making Manning the focus of their planned renaissance.

He can do the Carson show, if he’d like.

Or Letterman.

Lucky you, huh, Danny kid, sweetheart, baby?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to sign a contract to play basketball. That’s going to be my responsibility. That’s all I’m going to concentrate on.

“Celebrity? Well, you know. . . . If I go out on the court and play, that should do all the talking for me.

“I’m not shy. I’ve never been shy. The thing is, when you get around the media and you’re quiet, they assume you’re shy. But I’m not shy at all.”

He used to be pretty reticent, though. As a sophomore in the NCAA regionals, he once vaulted a concrete barrier behind the press tent to get back to the sanctuary of the locker room--where he was then beset by more writers. After that, Kansas publicists clued him in, telling him he was going to be doing this and a lot more the rest of his career, so he’d better learn to enjoy it.

“If Danny could just play ball without the publicity or anything, he’d be just fine,” Darnelle said.

He can. He just can’t turn pro and do it.

So this is a special time, as Manning and teammate/teammate-to-be Charles Smith, the Yankee Clippers, get set to take on the Soviets. In this world, you have to vanquish the evil empire and then the battle begins.