Generation Van-Xers Just Don’t Get It

Let’s face it, it’s not the smartest thing to knock over a referee whose report to the league office starts:

“Dear Dad.”

That was what Nick Van Exel did to Ron Garretson, son of the NBA supervisor of officials, in the latest embarrassment for a prosperous league and one of its most storied teams. The Lakers have seen their co-captains go off their rockers within two weeks; Executive Vice President Jerry West may choke the next delinquent with his bare hands.

West, a tortured genius as a player and no less driven as an executive, knows as much about feeling, facing and mastering pressure as any man alive and finds it weighing heavily on today’s players.

“When you lose in this game,” he said last week, “we’re all held up to a higher authority, and that’s the news media. And no one wants to fail in those peoples’ eyes.”

As much as I’d like to be a higher authority, the press is what it has always been, a conduit between the audience and the players. It’s just that the game is so much bigger, the audience so vast . . . and the players so young.

West, the second pick in the 1960 draft, remembers he had to come off the bench for most of his rookie season. Van Exel, a No. 37 pick, started from Day 1.

In the 14th and final season of one of the game’s greatest careers, West earned $250,000. Van Exel, who played his first season for the minimum salary, is up to $1.9 million and has already made more than West did in his entire career.

Endorsements? Forget that number. Van Exel has several fat ones; in West’s day, there were no such perks.

When West arrived, basketball was a cult sport, beloved in a few hot spots, largely ignored nationally or sneered at as a “YMCA sport.” Wilt Chamberlain caught grief for a magazine piece titled “My Life in a Bush League,” but it was. Of the eight teams when Chamberlain arrived in 1959, three had moved in the previous four years and three more would move in the next four.

Now the NBA is a major hauler for NBC, with ratings that have improved through the ‘80s and ‘90s as baseball has moved down, even topping the World Series once.

NBA players, paid sports’ highest salaries, are spoiled and dizzy with power. Alonzo Mourning, perhaps the fourth-best center, will get $15 million a season. Shaquille O’Neal can get $20 million if he stays in Orlando. If the Chicago Bulls don’t offer Michael Jordan more than anybody else--he’ll wait until last to see--he says he may leave.

Shaq is 24. In 1992 when he was 20, he signed endorsement contracts worth $10 million annually. As recently as 1984 when Nike gave Jordan a then-unprecedented $500,000 a year, his agent, David Falk, tried to interest McDonald’s in a regional deal for $50,000 and was turned down.

Shaq is actually a hard-working player (what other young magnate attended Pete Newell’s big man’s camp before his rookie season?) but a dud as a celebrity. It wasn’t anything he earned; it was given to him because he was large, had a nice smile and came along at the right time. Now he finds it overwhelming; big surprise.

The kids think life was always this sweet. In fact, it was built brick by brick by the ones who came before and carries a price tag: attention, expectations, pressure.

Van Exel, 24, is an emblem of his generation but an endearing kind of dead-end kid. When he messes up, he messes up big. He apologizes, but his way, refusing to include Garretson. At least, we know he was sincere.

“I think sometimes authority uses its authority too much,” Van Exel said. “I think officials, they go overboard sometimes. Sometimes they don’t respect players, and I don’t think that’s right.”

To a greater degree than he imagines, Van Exel has already won his war for respect. Inside, he’s still the tyke from a small Wisconsin town who had to go to a Texas junior college to get a down-on-its-luck four-year college to sign him.

The kids are only growing more powerful. Teams quiver before them. Today’s rookies will be free agents in two years. Magic officials lie awake at the thought of losing Shaq. This is a big, pressure-packed kindergarten, and the inmates are in charge.

FAST TIMES AT ORLANDO HIGH

Whatever happened to the Magic, the greatest young team in history?

About what you’d expect.

Last week’s game against the Bulls turned into a soap opera, with O’Neal’s mother ordering him to terminate his period of mourning for his grandmother--after five days--and the big guy arriving late.

NBC, which had hyped the Shaq-Jordan matchup for all it was worth, jumped on the story, suggesting management told Coach Brian Hill to play him. Hill denied it, noting at his postgame news conference, “NBC is a big pain in the rear end.”

The Magic had gone to great lengths to accommodate O’Neal, putting a corporate jet at his disposal, sending two officials to the funeral and a third to the wake.

When his absence became an embarrassment, O’Neal did the manly thing and blamed it on the team.

“I just wish people would stick up for me more,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense. Where the hell did they think I was? They saw me at the funeral. Did they think I was out water-skiing with Cedric Ceballos?

“If they wanted to know what I was doing, all they had to do was call. They could have talked to my mother. I just don’t understand people. Where did they think I was? That’s my question.”

It’s a good question. The Orlando Sentinel subsequently reported he made two side trips to Atlanta while he was gone, signed a movie deal and was seen the night before the game in an Atlanta nightclub.

Then there’s Penny Hardaway, supposedly the Magic’s down-to-earth superstar. In fact, he’s arch-sensitive and used to being coddled. Criticized by a Sentinel columnist for being ejected in a home loss to the Celtics, he delivered a self-pitying bleat that ran longer than the Gettysburg Address:

“I’ve never seen anyone treated in their own town like I am here,” he said. “They write I’m not a leader, that the Penny-and-Shaq era still doesn’t have a leader. All during the season, everyone is saying Horace [Grant] is the leader. Now I get kicked out of a game and I’m the leader.

“All during the season, I’m making last-second shots but I’m not the leader? I know I’m the leader of this team. . . . Me, Horace and Shaq are captains, but I think I have to be the leader on this team. Guys are hurt all season. I’m injured but I don’t go to the media and say my foot hurts, my elbow hurts. I play through it because I know my team needs me. One time I get kicked out of a game, it’s ‘I blew it.’ . . .

“It’s personal. This is the stuff they say to get the people booing. I’ve never seen a hometown paper bash players like they do here. It’s happened since I’ve been here. No player of my stature gets treated like I do. The same thing happened my rookie year with ‘Who is Penny Hardaway? We need a power forward.’ ”

Seriously, who is Penny Hardaway? Another $4-million-a-year victim.

PIECE DE RESISTANCE: CHARLES THE OLYMPIAN

So much for the league office as guarantor of a standard of behavior.

In a development that shows what this league cares about--manners or commerce--Charles Barkley made the Olympic team.

This is a huge surprise, stemming from the NBA’s concern that without Jordan, and despite the presence of 11 great players, the Dream Team needed a personality.

Barkley has one of those, all right. I find him as entertaining as everyone else does, but if anyone ever played himself off all future Olympic squads, it was Barkley, who elbowed an Angolan in the opener at Barcelona, joked the man might have had a spear, then went on to show up opponents and embarrass teammates on an otherwise impeccably gracious team for two weeks.

“People look at him and think, ‘They’re all like that,’ ” Magic Johnson said at Barcelona. “Nothing you can do but hope he doesn’t go overboard.

“The thing is, Charles is a good person if you know him. Well, they don’t. We know him. They don’t.”

They’re about to get reacquainted.