It’s Every Man for Himself When Ship Is Foundering

The thing to do when you find yourself on a sinking ship is get off. Hit the water running. Let the captain go down with the ship.

When last seen Tuesday, Coach Mike Dunleavy was swimming furiously away from the Good Ship Lakers, which was about to go down with all hands. Dunleavy was streaking for dry land--in this case, Milwaukee.

Dunleavy said he got an offer he couldn’t refuse from the Milwaukee Bucks, but the facts of the matter are, he got an offer from the Lakers he could refuse--two more years on his contract--because the Lakers came with it.

Dunleavy knows the Lakers hit an iceberg and had gaping holes in their hull and would soon be lying 50 fathoms deep in the NBA.

But Dunleavy didn’t want to leave the impression he was abandoning ship. He had nothing but praise for the stricken vessel.

Of course, people said nice things about the Titanic, too, but the league’s best advice would be not to book passage on the Lakers anymore. This franchise was once the flagship of the NBA, but now it’s down at the stern and taking on water. The best thing to do would be to head for the lifeboats.

Dunleavy did. In fact, he didn’t even wait for them.

He said all the obligatory things. He was leaving with a heavy heart. Leaving the Lakers was, by far, the most difficult decision he ever had to make in his life. The guys had been great to him, the owner had been a brick about the whole thing.

Still, he was leaving. He’s the second coach in a row to leave the Lakers under his own power, Pat Riley being the other. Maybe the Lakers should make a mental note not to hire any more guys whose names end in “Y.”

For all the honeyed words, you had the feeling Mike Dunleavy had been looking for this escape hatch.

It wasn’t as if he were locked in a room, throwing notes over the transom reading, “Help!” But the Lakers’ decks are clearly awash, the vessel foundering. And Mike doesn’t even want to get his feet wet, never mind the rest of him.

The Lakers have had an extraordinary run of good luck. In a league and a sport where one big player can make all the difference, the Lakers kept coming up with the big player--Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson. It was almost as if the club had an assembly line. If you’re looking for those names, try the Hall of Fame.

When the Lakers had those guys, coaches were lining up to get aboard, not jump ship. It was like coaching the 1927 Yankees.

Dunleavy announced that he was leaving because he is getting a unique--Jerry West called it “unprecedented”--deal out of Milwaukee. It calls for an eight-year contract to coach.

Now, there is no such thing as an eight-year contract. If you win every year for eight years, you last eight years. If you don’t, you don’t. You might get paid for eight years, but the rolls of sport are barnacled with the names of guys who got guaranteed contracts and collected the last several years in absentia.

Pro basketball is a unique sport. You draft a guy with a 20-point average from North Carolina, and he turns out to be Air Jordan. You pick up a guy who dropped out of Bobby Knight’s program at Indiana because he couldn’t take the pressure, and he turns out to be Larry Bird.

So a franchise can always be just a Ping-Pong ball draft pick from going from cellar to title. But when you find its coaches heading east on I-10 with their families and possessions, you have to wonder about a team. That is the best barometer you can get that there is ice ahead.

The Lakers are a collection of journeymen without Magic Johnson. They were all-world with Magic and Kareem. They were all-conference with only Magic. They are all done without him.

It’s possible Dunleavy began considering his options the night Magic made his tragic retirement announcement. He says the thought of moving never occurred to him until 48 hours before, when the Bucks asked the Lakers to let him out of his contract so they could sign him. If so, he said yes faster than a spinster at a church dance.

He is properly grateful to the Lakers’ Jerry Buss for not holding him to his contract. But, for the Lakers’ part, he is not John Wooden. Or Red Auerbach. And to keep a man in a job he wants out of is self-defeating.

So the Lakers are now without a coach, without their great player and, it would seem, without direction. As Bob Steiner, publicity director for California Sports, Inc., the Lakers’ business arm, had it, “We are now the longest-running tragedy since ‘Camille.’ ”

Rejection is hard to take. Rejection by a coach is like rejection by a girl with buck teeth and glasses at the school hop. Makes you want to run to the mirror and see what’s wrong.

Is it the town? Is it the civil unrest? “Absolutely not,” Dunleavy says. “I’m just sorry I can’t stay here and help in the cleanup.”

It’s the team. The coach had the choice of staying aboard and singing “Nearer My God to Thee”--or heading for Milwaukee. That splash you heard was Dunleavy making his decision.