NBA PLAYOFFS : Now He’ll Try to Steal NBA Show

Until the bottoms-up exchange the other night between Laker basketball player Vlade Divac, comedian Dennis Miller and actress Teri Hatcher, I suppose my favorite story of Vlade in Hollywood would have to be the one about the taco.

A popular line of Mexican fast-food outlets had contacted Vlade about filming a TV commercial for their delicious new taco. Vlade’s reaction was that he would be absolutely delighted to personally endorse their delicious new taco. Matter of fact, Vlade had only one teensy-weensy question.

“What is taco?” he asked.

Well, that was then and this is now. As the calendar pages fall and young Mr. Divac charmingly transforms from immigrant speaker of fractured English to talk-show raconteur and Laker team spokesman, we take you to a furnished sound stage in Burbank where our hero, Vlade Hollywood, is waiting in the wings of a popular NBC late-night program.

Jay Leno has just brought out Hatcher, who on a television series does all of us in the news biz proud with her portrayal of Lois Lane, the intrepid reporter from the Daily Planet who turns up everywhere but the Laker locker room.

Watching on a TV backstage, Divac is amused. Having just said hello to Miller on camera, Hatcher catches everyone off guard by telling a story that could have made Superman blush. She tells Leno’s viewers that when she and Miller first met, 10 years before, Miller told the actress that she had the nicest, well, bottom he had ever seen.

Divac makes a mental note. You know these basketball players, always studying film.

Soon it is Vlade who parts the curtain and waves to the “Tonight Show” studio audience. The applause is heartwarming to Vlade. After all, it was he who had just cost Hollywood’s favorite team Game 2 of its playoff series with the San Antonio Spurs, and perhaps the series, by clanking two free throws in the final seconds.

He had come home down in the dumps. Everybody back in Los Angeles would be laying the blame on him, Vlade feared. But here was this audience, clapping. Maybe the applause sign was illuminated, but still it felt good.

Vlade lowered his 7-foot self into Leno’s right-hand seat. Know everybody here? the host asked.

“Yes. I know Dennis,” Divac ad-libbed, looking at Miller. “Ten years ago, Dennis told me that I had the nicest (bottom) he’d ever seen.”

Nobody put him up to it, Vlade verified with a laugh Saturday, after a workout before today’s Game 4 with the Spurs. It was his own idea.

He was literally the butt of his own joke.

“Teri’s first, mine second, Dennis third,” he said at practice, announcing the latest ratings.

Long accustomed to being a center of attention, Vlade Divac once again finds himself in the floodlights. Unless he can stand his ground against the mighty David Robinson and the flighty Dennis Rodman, this season’s entertaining Laker series will be put on hiatus for the summer.

Last time the Lakers got as far as the finals, in 1991, Divac was still a newcomer in a strange land who deferred to older players.

“I would like to see Chicago make the finals again,” he says, “and play us in them. When we played them before, we won Game 1 in Chicago and I couldn’t sleep all night after the game. I kept laying awake picturing them putting a championship ring on my finger.”

To proceed in the playoffs, however, first the Lakers must somehow solve Robinson, Rodman and home-court disadvantage.

Asked if he thought Robinson was the most valuable player of the 1994-95 NBA season, Divac didn’t hesitate, saying, “Absolutely. Without a doubt, of the regular season, Robinson was the MVP. But I think it is not an award that makes sense. To me, the most valuable player of the basketball season is the man whose team wins the championship. Hakeem Olajuwon was the MVP last year when the season was over, not before.”

Robinson, also, has his Hollywood moments. He spent part of Saturday preparing to attend a screening of Billy Crystal’s new film “Forget Paris,” in which Robinson is briefly seen, playing himself to Crystal’s NBA referee. “No, he doesn’t throw me out of the game,” Robinson says. “It’s pretty true to my real character.”

Having jogged up and down the floor beside Divac for a number of seasons now, Robinson says he considers him a worthy rival.

“I think a lot of people around the league have gone to sleep where Vlade Divac is concerned, regarding how good he is,” Robinson said before Saturday’s practice. “He and Elden Campbell both, for that matter.”

Divac has become the senior presence of this Laker team, on and off the court. He is making $3.33 million this season to rub elbows with Robinson, Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal and other supermen who never made Lois Lane’s acquaintance. He says of his young teammates, “I really believe we have a championship team here. This year, next year, two years from now, I don’t know. But we will have a championship team.”

And, of course, he also has those outside interests.

Asked later how that taco advertisement went, Vlade’s answer was that it went very well indeed. “I use tacos now,” he even said.