For One Game, New Style Just Doesn’t Suit Lakers

Pat Riley went back to work Saturday and so did the Lakers. Only Riley was not in some gymnasium, coaching basketball. He was in some television studio, talking basketball. Yes, Pat Riley has gone from NBA to NBC, the TV network now proud to have two peacocks.

Nobody, not even his hairdresser, knows for sure if Riley would have made the least bit of difference in the Laker season opener, when the San Antonio Spurs clicked off 20 unanswered points and made the Riley-less Lakers look . . . uh, not pretty.

“What can you tell your team at such times?” Bob Costas asked.

“You can tell them: ‘Hang tough,’ ” Riley replied.

I can’t honestly tell you if telling the Lakers to hang tough was what won them all those championships.

But I can tell you this much:

Pat Riley has made a bad career move. He is cheating his public.

His female public.

I call them the Laker Women, not to be confused with Laker Girls. There are a lot of Laker Women out there--come on, you know who you are. And admit it, you aren’t looking forward to life without Riley.

Quit coaching? Hey, everybody understands that. No problem. Everybody moves on. A person’s gotta do what a person’s gotta do. And Pat, we all know that you are more than just a pretty face, more than just a fine head of hair. You’re a man, not a mousse.

But Coach, the last thing the Laker Women wanted you to do was co-host some dumb TV-studio basketball show. They wanted you to, oh, you know, do a Danielle Steel mini-series with a vital-to-the-plot hot-tub scene . . . or adopt the name Apollo and wear one of those really interesting costumes on “American Gladiators” . . . or maybe appear on a popular daytime soap opera and marry Susan Lucci and get your face slapped a lot.

One of the most dedicated Laker Women out there is Dinah Shore, and I don’t think she will mind my sharing her favorite Pat Riley story with her sister LWs. At a party one night, Dinah was in mid-conversation with another gentleman when, as she put it, “he” walked in.

Dinah said:

“I excused myself and strolled over as casually as I could manage and said: ‘Hi, Pat.’ ”

And Pat said:

“Hi, Doris.”

So, OK, he wasn’t great at names. But he was great at games.

Women who follow basketball, well, they’d grown accustomed to his face. It almost made their day begin. And the Laker Women are going to need a week or more to warm up to this Mike Dunleavy person, even though he does have nice threads.

Riley will be missed. The Lakers should retire his suit.

How will they do without him?

Heck, I don’t know. But I do have a sinking feeling--am I the only one?--that this could be a long and difficult season in Inglewood. Not that the Lakers are going to turn into the Sacramento Kings overnight. And this is no reflection on the skills of either Riley or Dunleavy as coaches. I just think the Lakers might be heading downhill.

Hope I’m wrong. Be glad to be wrong. I know how many games the Lakers won last season. I know Saturday was just one game. I’m not dying to write their obituary. I’m just not sure this team is special anymore.

And their conference is soooo tough. Winning on the road is no longer going to be automatic. The Lakers will tell you that it never was, yet Magic Johnson will also tell you that when the Lakers looked at the first 20 games on their schedule, they expected to go 17-3.

The worst break the Lakers ever got was David Robinson being faithful to San Antonio while he was out to sea. You’d think any guy in the Navy would want to play for a team named after a body of water. But no, Robby the Swabbie stayed true to the Spurs. He and Magic Johnson would have been unbeatable together, and the Lakers would have led the league in players who speak like Mister Rogers.

Los Angeles could become a city divided. If the Clippers could put five healthy regulars on the floor for a solid month, I might pick them to have a better record than the Lakers this season, which would certify me in many minds as the sportswriter who ought to be confined to a rubber room with a propeller beanie upon his head.

The Clippers made a sound investment in Bo Kimble, who has been a very good player and a very true friend to the late, great Hank Gathers.

Will the Clippers make the Western Conference playoffs? Yes, sports fans! Stop the presses! After 14 playoff-layoff seasons, their time has come. The Clipper record will be superior to that of several teams, among them the Denver Nuggets, who have been transformed by Paul Westhead into the Keystone Kagers.

And the Lakers?

Third-place in their division, tops.

Laker Women--and men, too--you will never know how much it hurt to write that line.

Now back to Pat Riley in our studio. Pat?