Laker Big Man Excels in a Big Way

He was the Lakers’ Invisible Man. He could have come to work swathed in bandages a la Claude Rains. Not even if he dyed his hair purple, tattooed himself vermilion and slept on the floor would anyone have looked up from his reading when he entered a room. If he jumped the club, no one would have noticed for the first week or so. No one cared what he thought of Bosnia, the price of oil or even the three-second violation. He didn’t get interviewed on anything. Which was all right with him.

He was awfully big to be so inconspicuous, nearly 7 feet. But he was Elden What’s-His-Name to the fans. Even on a team of non-stars, he was almost a non-person. He was sent in, usually, to suck up fouls, deflect them, so to speak, from the starters.

He was suffering, probably, from the Benoit Benjamin Syndrome. Benoit Benjamin, you will remember, was the mammoth L.A. pro whom the game kept expecting to become the next Wilt Chamberlain. When he never lived up to the expectations, to put it mildly, he created a bear market in investing on 7-foot centers.

People thought Elden Campbell would be a case in point.

At first, he fit the mold. Campbell looked a bit confused out there. He blundered into foul trouble. He clogged the middle, all right. His own team’s.

He barely shot the ball. In 52 games, he got off 123 field-goal attempts--about two a game.

He was a little over 6-11 but he came into the league weighing only 220. He was asked to contain the likes of Hakeem Olajuwon, who weighed 260, and Shaquille O’Neal, who topped 300.

Then, the league noticed a funny thing: Campbell could do it. In his first year, he played 380 minutes but had 38 blocked shots. He was as quick-striking as a puff adder. He probably could move laterally quicker than any big man in the league. This was no Benoit Benjamin, this was a star.

The league didn’t double-team him but neither did he need help neutralizing, say, a Charles Barkley. Campbell held his own. His blocked shots moved up to 159 the second year before the league wised up and stopped trying those shots with Campbell in the vicinity.

He filled two roles with the Lakers. When Vlade Divac was in the pivot, he played power forward. When Divac was out, he played center.

He found 220 was too light to keep the league locomotives from knocking him around. So he did something about it. He went religiously to the weight room and beefed up 35 pounds. Campbell was conscientious; he was not going to let laziness make him an underachiever.

“He used to get banged on by the big physical types. Now, he can bang with the best of them,” his assistant coach, Bill Bertka, boasts. “He transformed his upper body. He always had that quickness. Even Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] remarked on it when he worked with him. Kareem told us he had ‘unreal’ quickness for a big man. He’s so much quicker than most post men.”

The Lakers couldn’t believe their good luck, and this Campbell kept coming. From Executive Vice President Jerry West, who resisted front-office attempts to trade Campbell for a “name” player, to Coach Del Harris, the saga of Elden Campbell is like buying a painting you find out is a lost Rembrandt.

“Let me show you what he has meant,” Coach Harris says excitedly, pulling a sheaf of papers from his office drawer. “Look here,” he adds, pointing with a pencil.

“In the last 42 games, he is No. 1 on the team in minutes played (1,433). He is No. 2 in shooting percentage (.508). . . . He is second in rebounds. He has the best assists-to-turnovers ratio (113 assists to 78 turnovers).

“This is who he is today. The most improved player in the league.”

In the corridor outside the locker room, corroboration is coming from an unusual source--Coach Rick Adelman, whose Golden State Warriors have just lost to the Lakers. “Your two big men [Divac and Campbell] beat us tonight,” he tells his rival coach Harris. “Campbell is a big factor in this league now. He can beat you so many ways.”

Nods Harris: “Elden exudes confidence now. He feels comfortable on the floor. He knows where to be and how to make his presence felt.”

Adds Bertka: “He gives us an all-dimensional game. He’s more than just a post-up guy. He used to take that fall-away jumper; he never took anything to the basket. Now, he does. He can beat you from the perimeter or the paint.”

Although he was born and raised in L.A., Campbell went to Clemson to college. USC tried to keep him here, but Campbell says he was captivated watching the Atlantic Coast Conference style of play on TV. His dad says that Clemson won the lottery because the Clemson coach promised to come to Elden’s high school, Morningside, to give a speech for a fund-raiser. Adds Elden’s father: “I told him, ‘Wherever you go, you stay for four years.’ ”

Elden did. He wound up the school’s all-time leading scorer and Clemson won its first ACC title.

The Lakers drafted him on the last pick (27th) of the first round in 1990. Few bells sounded at the time. It was not a major acquisition in the view of the basketball press. Elden even got his name misspelled (“Eldon”) half the time.

Everyone in the NBA knows how to spell his name now. He stood in a locker room the other night just after he upped his season total to 204 blocked shots (fourth in the league) and explained his role whimsically. “I take up space. And I block shots.”

He does more than that. And he will take up space in the All-Star game for many years now. He has gone from “Who in the world is that guy trying to guard Olajuwon?” to “How in the world can that Olajuwon be expected to guard that guy Campbell?”