He’s Not Out to Be Front and Center

I would not want to be Mychal Thompson. Just as I would not want to have been George Selkirk, Hunk Anderson, Babe Dahlgren, Gene Bartow or even Gene Tunney.

Mychal Thompson probably doesn’t know who most of these guys are--but he will.

They are sports figures I think of as guys who weren’t. As in, the guy who wasn’t Babe Ruth, the guy who wasn’t Jack Dempsey.

George Selkirk is the guy who wasn’t Babe Ruth. Hunk Anderson is the guy who wasn’t Knute Rockne. Babe Dahlgren is the guy who wasn’t Lou Gehrig. Gene Bartow is the guy who wasn’t John Wooden. I think you know who Tunney wasn’t.

Mychal Thompson is going to join this ghostly company next year. He’s about to become the guy who wasn’t Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

It’s going to be like following George M. Cohan on a vaudeville bill, taking over Patton’s army or being the guest host on Johnny Carson’s show.

He gets the spot on the bill of the guy who came to foreclose the mortgage. Count Dracula would be a sentimental favorite by comparison.

Replacing a legend is the quickest and surest way to unpopularity, if not obscurity. Selkirk, it so happens, was a pretty good ballplayer. He hit .312 the year he replaced Babe Ruth. But he was no Bambino. He hit only 11 home runs.

His nickname was Twinkletoes. What kind of name is that for the substitute for the Sultan of Swat? Selkirk couldn’t win. If he had hit 61 home runs, they would have hated him for that.

Babe Dahlgren was a pretty good ballplayer, too. But he was no Lou Gehrig. He drove in 89 runs the year he took over for Lou. Not bad--but Gehrig had driven in 184 one year.

Heartley (Hunk) Anderson never got a chance to show whether he was a good coach or not. When he replaced Rockne, the Rock’s teams had just gone two seasons undefeated. Anderson went 6-2-1 and 7-2 but got the gate the next year.

All Gene Bartow ever heard when he was coach at UCLA was how Wooden would have done it.

Mychal Thompson knows what he’s in for. And he doesn’t care for the sensation. First of all, he’s being asked to replace a guy who is the leading scorer in basketball history with 38,387 regular-season points. That’s 26,571 more than Mychal Thompson has scored. He’s going in for a guy who has 18,440 rebounds. That’s not the most in history, but it’s 12,174 more than Mychal has.

Kareem also has a half a foot in height and a 35-pound pull in the weight. Replacing him might be easier than playing him.

But Mychal doesn’t see why he has to do either.

“I hope they get someone,” he said candidly the other day.

In other forms of show business, understudies are players who secretly can’t wait for the star to fall down stairs or get hit by a truck so that they can go out there and show the public how much better they are.

It’s Mychal Thompson’s worst nightmare. Thompson is quite content with his off-the-bench role, with his role calling for him to jump in the game and give the regular center (or forward) a “blow” (respite from the action), drop in his 9.2 points, suck up a few fouls, not win the game, but keep the team from losing it.

He does this as well as or better than almost anyone else in the league. He played in 80 of the Lakers’ 82 games this season, although he started in only eight of them and none last season.

Mychal is not exactly in the famous “Bench me or trade me” frame of mind popularized by the late Chico Ruiz, but he would like it if the Lakers would go out and get somebody else to be Kareem Jabbar--or rather not to be Kareem Jabbar. Mychal likes being the butler.

“I would hope they’d take that million and a half and get someone,” he admits frankly.

Pro basketball is the only major sport that has a salary cap for its employees. The union traded this off in return for getting 55% of the revenues. Its aim generally is not so much to save money as to equalize the competition, prevent some reckless billionaire from buying up all the available talent.

Under its complicated formula, the departure of Kareem will leave the club with $1.5 million to get a pivot man.

Mychal Thompson might be distressed to know that his coach wishes that the club, instead, would distribute some of that money to Thompson and stay out of the free-agent market.

“What are you going to get for that money?” Pat Riley demands. “You’re not going to get Patrick Ewing or Akeem Olajuwon or Robert Parish or Mark Eaton. For just an established center, they’re going to begin the general negotiations by asking for a James Worthy or Byron Scott. We’re not going to give them up.

“I don’t want to tell management what to do, but I’d like to see them spread that money to Mychal and let’s post him up. Mychal’s 33 but he’s a young 33.”

The prospect does not noticeably thrill Thompson. His attitude rather reminds you of the character in Lincoln’s life who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail and, asked how he felt about it, replied: “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

Mychal would rather sit. A cheerful fellow who never played basketball till he was 17 years old, Mychal’s ambition is not to be the next Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, it’s to be the next prime minister of the Bahamas, where he was brought up.

But Thompson has had some hard-to-figure career turns before--picking Minnesota as his college, for example. Mychal was bucking a huge trend going from the sapphire seas of the Grand Bahamas to the ice fishing holes of the Minnetonka.

He’ll get to be a trivia answer someday. But those ghostly images in the background shaking their heads and saying, “Don’t do it, Mike” are guys named Selkirk, Anderson, Dahlgren, and maybe even the guy who shot Jesse James.

They don’t have to tell Mychal Thompson. He doesn’t want to fill anybody else’s shoes. Least of all, theirs.