NBA PLAYOFFS : Former Officer Is Still a Gentleman

They call him “the Admiral.” His realm is not the bounding main, it’s the rebounding main. He doesn’t ply the waters of the Coral Sea, he plies the hardwood of NBA arenas. His fleet doesn’t consist of aircraft carriers with destroyer escorts, it consists of point guards and power forwards. His flagship is not the battleship Missouri in the South Pacific, it’s the Alamodome in San Antonio.

Of course. It’s Lt. David Robinson, the world’s tallest naval officer, probably the only guy in basketball who could dock a frigate or know the cosine of an angle is not two signatures on a loan.

But David doesn’t want to make the world forget John Paul Jones or Oliver Hazard Perry or Farragut or even Bull Halsey. He’d settle for a statue alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Bill Russell or even, perhaps, Shaquille O’Neal or Patrick Ewing at the moment. I mean, could John Paul Jones set a pick? Make a commercial with Dennis Rodman?

There’s a little bit of a vacuum at the top of pro basketball at the moment. That’s the Big-Man-in-the-Pivot role, the dominant center who expropriates the game for himself and his team. We haven’t had one of those since Kareem or, earlier, Wilt Chamberlain.

It’s not enough anymore to be between 7 and 8 feet tall or to have arms longer than a bell rope; you have to have moves of a 5-footer.

David Robinson is the most famous athlete--or most famous person--to come out of the Naval Academy since Roger Staubach. Seven-foot basketball players (or 6-foot quarterbacks) don’t ordinarily gravitate toward service academies with their scientific curricula and logarithmic demands. Theories of the Modern Dance is not on the list of Annapolis electives.

The San Antonio Spurs waited patiently while Robinson served his obligatory two-year service tour. When it was anchors aweigh, they immediately put him in the pivot and told the team to get him the ball.

He didn’t dye his hair purple or get “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” or “I have not yet begun to fight” tattooed on his chest. I don’t think he even got an earring. But he quietly began throwing in 23-25 points a night.

Last year, he averaged 29.8 to lead the league in scoring, and in total points, 2,383.

There is a law of physics that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and, in basketball, this has been a good thing. Chamberlain would have taken the game home with him were it not for Russell. And O’Neal may have it for dinner were it not for Robinson.

No one knows whether these two are headed for the ultimate showdown in the ongoing NBA championship series. Shaquille has Michael Jordan to get past. But meanwhile, the Admiral is trying to cut through the enemy fleet, the Lakers, who have put to sea against him.

So far, the Lakers have been in no mood to salute and say, “Aye, aye, sir!” Or “Permission to come aboard, sir?” Or “Strike their colors.”

The Lakers are fighting the war at long range like the Battle of Jutland. Playing aircraft carrier basketball, you might say. They had seven three-point baskets (and attempted 16, no less) in their 92-85 victory over the Admiral’s flotilla at the Forum on Friday night. That was almost one-quarter of all the baskets they put in. And many of the other 27 were barely inside the three-point arc.

The Admiral was unruffled. After all, Bull Halsey took his fleet through a typhoon, didn’t he? Did Perry panic? And John Paul Jones captured the British ship even after his own had been sunk.

Old sea dogs do not let a little cavitation demoralize them.

Robinson, in traditions going back to Sir Francis Drake, remains calm on the bridge. His game is marked by coolness under fire. No Capt. Queeg here. His crew is not mutinous, it is idolatrous. In the best traditions of the sea, he will go down with his ship, but the probability is, he has not yet begun to fight.

The Admiral plays a game I can only describe as noiseless. He plays basketball the way he lives life--unobtrusively. He’s like a Joe DiMaggio. When the ball comes down, he’s under it.

He plays in an indefatigable good humor. He has been known to pat an opponent on the head for a good move. But he makes a lot of them himself. He is fluid, graceful. Even at 7-1, he does not affect the dominating play of other skyscrapers. He is master of more than the 18-inch basket, and he does not bring a troglodytic presence to the key some 7-footers do.

Also in the best traditions, he is an officer and a gentleman. He didn’t even set out to be a basketball player. “I was only 6-7 entering college,” he said the other night as he stood in the visitors’ locker room at the Forum. “Basketball was not really an option.”

His specialty was not dunk shots, it was mathematics. His interest was blueprints, not game plans. Where a lot of athletes might have trouble getting in the Navy with a mop and a pail, he creamed the college entrance exam with 1,320 points out of a possible 1,600.

The Navy lost a commanding presence--but basketball gained one--when he grew six inches in his academic career and proved as adept at setting a pick as balancing an equation.

He should play in braid. He brings a mass of class to the game. He is not the massivity of menace of Ewing or O’Neal, but he is as consistent and dependable as a sunrise. He has scored 30 or more points 146 times in his career and, after scoring 2,383 points last season, scored 2,338 this season. He doesn’t run aground.

He doesn’t mind being a role model. He doesn’t gloat in victory. After all, wasn’t it Adm. Dewey who said at the battle of Santiago, “Don’t laugh, boys; the poor fellows are dying”? He doesn’t gloom in defeat. A good naval officer just regroups.

If he wins, he may just repeat Commodore Perry’s laconic report “We have met the enemy (Lakers) and they are ours.” So, just pipe him aboard. And run up the flag. Like Gridley, he’ll fire when ready.