NBA: A Season Begins : A Rookie Not Too Short on Experience

The first time Laker rookie David Rivers met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, they were sitting next to each other in the first-class cabin of the jumbo jet taking them to Hawaii for training camp. From Los Angeles to Honolulu, a trip of more than 5 1/2 hours, they didn’t exchange a word.

“I was feeling him out--I didn’t know how to react to him,” Rivers said. “I thought he could care less about who he was sitting next to, so I didn’t even think to say anything to him.”

So while Abdul-Jabbar read, Rivers flipped through a magazine, watched the in-flight movie, kept to himself. Finally, a breakthrough: While trying to cut up his salad on the meal tray, Rivers splattered some of the dressing on his napkin. The first sound he heard from Abdul-Jabbar was laughter.

“That was it,” Rivers said, chuckling. “We still didn’t say anything to each other, but he laughed.”

A funny way to begin a relationship, but when Magic Johnson introduced all the newcomers at a team meeting and asked the veterans whether they wanted to own a rookie, they all said no--except Abdul-Jabbar.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll take David. He can get my newspaper in the morning.”

So, before Rivers could even begin to worry about making a proper impression on the basketball court, he had to start each day by going to the hotel gift shop, buying the New York Times, and delivering it to Abdul- Jabbar’s door. He was doing fine until the day the gift shop ran out of the Times and Rivers brought the San Francisco Examiner instead.

A big mistake. That morning, on the team bus to practice, Abdul-Jabbar loudly informed everyone of the rookie’s shortcomings as a newspaper carrier. Rivers didn’t make the same error again.

“But after that experience when I’d get him the paper, I would slam it down real hard outside his door,” Rivers said, laughing again.

Given their early connection, then, maybe it wasn’t surprising that the 41- year-old captain was the first of the Lakers to ask the rookie about the 15- inch gash that crosses Rivers’ abdomen from hip to hip, a permanent reminder of his brush with death in a car accident two years ago.

“I would get dressed and I’d see guys glancing at it but Kareem was the first guy to respond,” Rivers said.

“He said, ‘Man, you were lucky,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’

“That opened it up for just about everybody else. They asked me questions about what happened, was I in any pain, all that stuff. They shake their heads, because the scar goes from side to side, like I was cut in half and put back together again.”

David Rivers is 23 years old, but his brown eyes are those of an older man, perhaps because they have looked directly at death and imagined what was on the other side. He already has buried two brothers--one who was stabbed to death, another who was struck and killed by a truck--and when he went through the windshield of a van driven by a former Notre Dame teammate and was ripped nearly in two, he thought of what it might be like to be dead, too.

“I did, because I had accepted the fact that I was going to die,” he said. “I thought about seeing my two brothers. I thought about having the ability to see the whole world, see everybody all at once. I thought about things like that.”

It happened after a late-summer pickup game back at Notre Dame, when Rivers was riding in a van driven by Ken Barlow, his recently graduated teammate. They were headed down a dark two-lane highway toward Elkhart, Ind., where both had summer jobs working for a caterer. It was about 1 a.m. when a car came at them and never left their path. Barlow veered off the road more than 100 feet, got back on the pavement, then lost control of the van. It rammed an embankment, and sent Rivers through the windshield, headfirst.

Somehow, after three hours of surgery and hundreds of stitches later, Rivers survived. Somehow, he also played basketball again--first for Notre Dame, now as a No. 1 draft choice for the Lakers.

Somehow, just as he always had dreamed back in Jersey City, he was in the National Basketball Assn., following in the footsteps of the only idol he ever had, Julius Erving.

“Julius Erving was everything,” Rivers said. “Watching him on TV on a Sunday afternoon and seeing all the glitter and having the idea of someone being on TV and being the star and being comfortable in life--I mean, I would literally run through the house after watching him play, singing his old commercial. Hey, Dr. J, where’d you get those moves?

“I would say, ‘I’m going to make it to the NBA. I’m going to be just like him.’ You’d hear people say he was one of the most respected players in the league. I wanted people to say that about me.

“That’s what influenced me most, to be the type of person I am, both on the court and in how I conduct myself.”

There are those who suggest Rivers won’t last in the NBA because at 6 feet tall, he’s better suited to delivering papers than delivering a basketball. They point to his failure to make the U.S. Olympic team--he was among the first players cut.

Yet somehow, you believe that David Rivers, the son of Willie Joseph Rivers, a chandelier hanger and exterminator, and Mamie Rivers, a hotel maid, together the parents of 14 children, will cling to his dream as surely as he clung to life itself.

Somehow, you believe Rivers will find a way.

David Rivers is sitting in the coffee shop of the Los Angeles airport hotel that he now calls home.

“They gave me a room for a couple of season tickets,” he said.

The waitress, a small Asian-American, greets Rivers warmly and hands him the menu.

“He comes here every day, very much in a hurry,” she tells Rivers’ lunch companion. “He knows the menu by heart.”

Only then does the waitress notice the Laker sweatsuit Rivers is wearing.

“Do you play”--she holds a hand high above her head, her way of describing basketball--”you’re not tall. How come?”

“I just do the little extra things that got me here,” Rivers said.

“I’m so used to seeing 8 foot tall people,” the waitress says. “So, you really don’t have to be that tall?”

No, Rivers said, you don’t.

“I’ve just got to stay a step ahead of everybody,” he told her.

Short people can run for President (Michael Dukakis is 5 feet 8 inches), but with few exceptions in the NBA, they’re apt to be ballboys--or mistaken for one.

“I don’t think my height has ever hampered me at all,” Rivers said, “because I feel that if I do what I do best, people won’t question my height. My game is being creative and outrunning people on the court.

“I’m sure there are questions lingering in minds of people even today, but once I get the chance to go out there, my height won’t be a factor.”

Those questions weren’t answered in the Lakers’ first game last Friday night in Dallas. Rivers watched the entire game from the bench. But Coach Pat Riley has a vision of what he’d like Rivers to give to the Lakers.

“We’re going to make a film of 50 Spud Webb drives and mad dashes,” Riley said, referring to the Atlanta Hawks’ 5-7 dervish. “That’s what I want from David.

“He can do it. He has that kind of explosiveness. If he can create that for us, he will give us a dimension we don’t have. And our guys want to run the ball so much that if doesn’t push it, I think they’ll kill him.”

At Notre Dame, Rivers led the team in scoring and was named the team’s most valuable player all four seasons, leading the Irish to the NCAA tournament each season. A spot on the Olympic team seemed a natural progression, but it didn’t happen that way. As coincidence would have it, his roommate at the tryout camp was Barlow, who, in another coincidence, was the Lakers’ last No. 1 draft choice, though they traded him on draft day to Atlanta for Billy Thompson.

It was said that U.S. Coach John Thompson thought Rivers shot too much for a point guard.

“They came and told us we were cut at 5 in the morning,” Rivers said. “I looked at Kenny Barlow and I chuckled. ‘Man, I can’t believe this,’ I said.

“And then to hear the guys they were calling back. I was pretty shocked at the moment. Then I thought about all the possible things that go into it--people being opinionated, politics, looking for a certain chemistry that people thought was going to work.

“Even though it had been a long-awaited dream, I didn’t worry myself. I said, ‘I just hope they win the gold.’ I wasn’t positive they would, but I said I hoped they did.”

They didn’t, of course. Maybe Rivers would have made a difference, maybe not. But it didn’t help his reputation coming into Laker camp, though General Manager Jerry West remained effusive in his praise of the point guard, calling him a “genius” with the basketball.

Rivers still had to prove himself to those he knew would be his toughest critics--the Laker veterans, especially the keepers of the backcourt, Magic Johnson and Michael Cooper and Byron Scott.

“From Day One when I stepped on the floor, there was a lot of talk about, ‘We want to see what you’re made of,’ ” Rivers said. “They challenge you. They try to push you to the limit.

“They hit you, they bump you, they’re always in your face.

“But they challenge each other. Cooper and Earvin, they’ve been together for years, but when they’re out on the floor, they challenge each other constantly.

“What I noticed about this team, and what I think is very rare, is that they have this attitude, this philosophy, that they don’t care who does the job as long as the job gets done well and the team wins. That’s all that counts.”

The jury, of course, is still out on Rivers. Privately, some players have suggested that he has taken too much for granted, that his work habits aren’t what they should be.

“That’s something, when you’re the Man in college, that can happen,” a sympathetic Magic Johnson said. “Maybe the work habits he had there are carrying over. That has to change.

“We feel he can be better. He has to be quicker here to beat the defenses. He has to read guys quicker and better.”

In the Utah exhibition game, when Johnson and Rivers played together, Magic said the rookie finally showed some of the things they were expecting from him. Rivers said he expects his trial will continue all season.

“I don’t think that will ever end until my rookie year is over because from now until the final game, I’ll always have that title on my head--Rookie,” Rivers said. “People will always be looking at me as a rookie. If I make a mistake, it’s ‘He’s a rookie.’ I’ll be proving myself to people all season.”

But while they play the same position, point guard, it would be a mistake to measure Rivers’ game against Johnson’s.

“Earvin and I are both creators,” he said, “but I think we create in different ways. He’s 6-foot-9. He doesn’t have to be one step ahead of the game, so to speak.

“He can penetrate, go down the lane 50 miles an hour. He can go down, sort of coast and make ball fakes and he doesn’t have to make them very quickly and still give a guy an easy layup.

“I have to be quick, sometimes going 80, 90 miles an hour, making the quick decision, because I’m smaller, and as far as passing, my arms are shorter. I have to be a little extra quick.”

You can be as quick as they come, David Rivers has sadly learned, and still never be sure death is gaining on you. When the Lakers went to New York to play an exhibition against the Knicks, the first thing Rivers did was to drive home to see his 16-year-old brother, Jermaine.

“He’s the baby in the family,” Rivers said.

He also has a brain tumor. A few days after Rivers’ visit, Jermaine needed to be hospitalized again.

“It’s in the back of his head and they can’t get to the tumor surgically,” Rivers said. “He’s going through a lot right now. It’s pretty rough, especially for my parents. They spend every night with him in the hospital.

“Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. Like everybody else, I believe he’s going to be fine, but it’s a serious situation.”

As many thrills as Rivers has had as a player, his losses--and near-losses have left scars, and not just the one that slices across his midsection.

“It makes me think about how we sometimes take so many things for granted,” he said. “We’re always so sure nothing will happen. When you see people get hit by a car, you say it won’t happen to me.

“But people haven’t experienced being close to death. I understand how simple it is for a life to be taken. I was right there.”