COLUMN ONE : Basketball Has Spain Jumping : ‘Basquetmania’ has made stars of expatriate American players while capturing the hearts of the country’s sports fans.

When Audie Norris, a former Portland Trail Blazer, left the Italian league to play in Spain in 1987, everyone told him he had made a foolish mistake. Spanish basketball was bush. Coaches, players, sportswriters warned him, “You are just going to fade away in Spain.”

But the 30-year-old, 6-foot-9 American from Mississippi has hardly faded away. His team, Barcelona, the Spanish champions, now ranks with the tops in Europe. Although not a prolific scorer, he is looked on as the mainstay of the team.

“Everyone agrees,” said sportswriter Luis Gomez, “that, in spite of the statistics, Norris is beyond discussion the best American player in Spain.”

Norris is a grand celebrity, especially in Barcelona, where fans cheer him and rush for his autograph. Sports magazines display his photo often. Journalists guess that he now earns close to $1 million a year.

Norris has not faded away mainly because Spain, which once cared little about basketball, has suddenly gone slightly mad about it.

The new mood is reflected everywhere. Two television channels call their basketball shows “ basquetmania. “ One monthly magazine and three weeklies are now devoted to basketball. Spanish teen-agers have taken to it with the kind of gusto they once showed only for soccer. Although attendance figures for Spanish sports are poorly kept and suspect, it is obvious that basketball attendance is mounting.

“There used to be a time,” said Jacqueline Norris, the basketball star’s wife, “when I could sit in the stadium at a game and talk, and he could hear me.”

“Now,” Audie Norris said, “I can’t even see where she is sitting.”

But Spanish fans are not just obsessed with their own teams. They are just as obsessed, perhaps even more so, with the National Basketball Assn. in the United States. NBA fever has taken hold everywhere in Spain. This is sometimes hard to fathom, since no Spaniard plays in the NBA and since fans, at most, see only one NBA game a week on Spanish television.

But the fever is indisputable. A fast-selling item on the ground floor of Spain’s major department stores this Christmas season was “NBA” cologne for men.

The leading Spanish newspapers list the NBA scores every day. El Pais, Spain’s most influential and trend-setting newspaper, noted mainly for its insightful and lengthy discussions of politics and world events, devotes a good deal of space to the machinations of the NBA.

El Pais’ analyses in November and December scrutinized all the important NBA trends:

“The Lakers have lost their angel; the new coach has disoriented his players.”

“The fountain of eternal youth, the Celtics, with an average age of 32, lead the Atlantic Division.”

“The Pistons don’t frighten anyone anymore; the champions suffer an unfortunate streak of defeats.”

“The Lakers have started to revive.”

One of the weekly sports magazines, Super Basket, is devoted entirely to coverage of the NBA save for a little space left over for other sports in what it calls “Yankeelandia.” In addition to a host of feature articles, such as a cover story on the arrest of Laker James Worthy for allegedly soliciting an act of prostitution, Super Basket chronicles every game in the NBA.

There is little doubt that two of the major sports events in Barcelona this year were the arrival of Laker Magic Johnson for a basketball clinic in October and the participation of the New York Knicks in a tournament with three European teams a few weeks later.

This NBA obsession troubles those concerned with more traditional Spanish life.

“Ask any kid of 13 here to name 10 top Spanish bullfighters, and he’ll barely come up with two,” said William Lyon, the bullfight critic of the Madrid newspaper El Sol. “But ask him to name the top players of the NBA, and he’ll name them all.”

Why the sudden basquetmania ? Jose Luis Ortega, the 36-year-old editor of Super Basket, traces it all to Spain’s disappointing showing in the World Cup soccer championships of 1982. Spain, the host and favorite, did not even make the final four. But an unexpected basketball laurel dissipated some of this disappointment two years later: Spain reached the finals in basketball at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“We were trounced by the United States,” Ortega said in a recent interview at his offices in Madrid, “but it did not matter. To have reached the finals in basketball was a tremendous feat.”

“Spanish youths were looking for mythical heroes,” the editor went on. “They couldn’t find them in soccer, but they found them in Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, players they had never seen.”

The interest in basketball expanded at a furious pace. Gigantes de Basket, which specializes in Spanish basketball and now sells 45,000 to 50,000 copies a week to become the best-selling sports magazine in Spain, first appeared on newsstands in 1985. Its sister publication, Super Basket, which now sells 28,000 copies a week, first came out as a weekly devoted to the NBA in September, 1989.

Julius Corrella, the assistant general manager of the Barcelona basketball club, agrees that the 1984 Olympics helped generate new interest in basketball. He also believes that an increase in the number of games televised and the reorganization of Spanish basketball into a strong league in 1983 helped to excite fans about the sport.

But, most important, Corrella said, “Everyone is just bored with soccer.”

This is surely an exaggeration in a country where a soccer match can attract a crowd of 90,000 while most basketball games draw much fewer than 10,000 spectators. But there is little doubt that there is a trend against soccer. Younger Spaniards often seem more interested in basketball. The enormous growth of cities in Spain and the shortage of urban space may contribute to this.

“It takes too much space to play soccer,” Corrella said in an interview in his office. “Basketball is much easier to play. There are basketball courts in every schoolyard.”

At work as well may be the same, strange fascination for all things American that has caught many youths in Europe these days. The youthful appetite for American multimillion-dollar, blockbuster movies has crippled the market for the quiet, realistic films made in Europe. American rock still rules the airwaves in Europe. The influence of American music is so pervasive that French singers are trying their hand at rap. This fascination is sometimes shared by elders. All Spain sat mesmerized before their television sets in recent weeks to watch the Spanish-dubbed version of “Twin Peaks.”

An American coming upon Spanish basketball for the first time might find a slightly old-fashioned air about it. The players play in relatively small arenas pulsating with the chants of teen-agers. There are no printed programs for sale. The games often revolve around a small playmaker who takes the ball down court and passes it off to taller shooters in set plays. Zone defenses slow the pace. The teams struggle for every point.

Each of the 24 teams in the major Spanish league is allowed two foreign players. Most are Americans, but some teams have hired Yugoslav, Venezuelan, Soviet and Lithuanian players. Barcelona actually has three Americans, since Los Angeles-born Steve Trumbo is now a naturalized Spanish citizen. The other Americans are Norris and Puerto Rican Piculin Ortiz.

Americans usually rank among the highest scorers. Walter Berry of Atletico Madrid, for example, a St. John’s University star who played with the Portland Trail Blazers, the San Antonio Spurs, the New Jersey Nets and the Houston Rockets before going to Europe, leads all scorers in the league, with an average of more than 36 points a game. But his teammates spend so much time feeding him the ball that they often squander chances of their own. Atletico Madrid has lost almost as many games as it has won this year.

Norris, a graceful center with an uncanny vision of all the movement around him and the knack of delivering swift, sure, spectacular passes, fits into a well-balanced Barcelona team with several dangerous scorers. Although he was sidelined part of his first two seasons with knee problems, he believes he has enhanced Spanish basketball by helping to break the pattern of dependence on a high-scoring American.

“If I scored 30 points a game,” Norris said over lunch in Barcelona recently, “this team wouldn’t be any good.”

“Most Americans in the league think that’s all they are here for--to score points,” he went on. “But you have to bring more to the game than just offense or just defense. You have to have leadership.”

Norris said he believes he has also influenced Spanish basketball by discouraging teammates from regrouping into set play patterns all the time. Instead, he has tried to instill them with the NBA style of taking quick advantage of where the ball and every player happen to be at any moment. “But it’s hard,” he said. “They’ve been trained for so long to do it the other way.”

Spanish teams are also organized differently. Unlike American teams, most Spanish sports clubs are not private corporations or partnerships out to earn profits. The usual club is a kind of cooperative with thousands of members who join the club to show their support and obtain free entry or, at least, preference in buying tickets for the games. The club’s income is supplemented by sponsoring corporations that pay a fee to have their names or products emblazoned on the team’s uniforms.

These sports clubs organize mainly for soccer or, as it is known outside the United States, football. But they support other teams as well. The Barcelona basketball team is run by the Barcelona Football Club, which has 100,000 members, the largest number in Spain.

The Europe Cup is the main prize for European basketball clubs. Nothing could demonstrate the emergence of Spain as a basketball power better than a victory for Barcelona in cup play this year.

Barcelona came close to taking it last season, losing to Jugoplastika of Yugoslavia in the finals, 72-67. The all-around strength of the Barcelona team was reflected in the scoring. Norris averaged 16.1 points a game in the 14 Europe Cup matches, veteran Spanish star Juan Antonio San Epifano (better known as Epi, and a member of the Spanish team that won the silver medal at the Olympics in Los Angeles) averaged 15.6 points, and three other players each averaged more than 10.

To improve the team’s chances this year, Barcelona officials snatched the coach away from Jugoplastika. Bozidar Maljkovic, who guided Jugoplastika to two championships, is now hoping to win his third cup in a row, this time with Barcelona.

Although Danny Ferry of the Cleveland Cavaliers honed his play at an extraordinarily high salary in Italy before moving to the NBA, most American players in Spain follow the pattern of Norris, who graduated from Jackson State University in 1982 and then grew upset and depressed by his three seasons with the Trail Blazers. He averaged only 13.5 minutes a game. “And they weren’t consecutive minutes,” he said.

“I wanted a change, and I needed a change,” he went on. “If you don’t have a guaranteed contract, the NBA is not a secure place. Each year you’re in a do-or-die situation.”

So Norris accepted an offer to play with the Benetton club of Treviso, near Venice, in the Italian league for the 1985-86 season under a contract that paid him, after taxes, $125,000 a year.

“I don’t regret coming here,” he said.

His wife, Jacqueline, interrupted. “But you were nervous.”

After a year, Norris recalled, he and his wife were taken aback when an Italian sportswriter asked him, “How does it feel to be a household word in Italy?” It was the first time they realized his impact upon Europe.

Barcelona signed Norris away from Italy for the 1987-88 season, just as the Spanish excitement for basketball started to swell.

When Magic Johnson arrived in Barcelona in October for the special exhibition at the new Olympic St. Jordi Sports Palace, he and Norris discussed the turns in the Mississippian’s career. Norris said Johnson congratulated him on his fame in Europe and told him, “If you’re doing it here, don’t even think of coming back to the NBA.”

In Italy’s basketball league, former Laker Michael Cooper finds stardom and fans aplenty. C1