HORRY’S PRIVATE PAIN

Sympathy belongs not with Robert Horry, the father whose anguish has increased because the job takes him away when he feels the need to be home. Nor does it belong with his wife, the mother who has the joy--but also the pain--of seeing their girl every day, then dealing with the additional drain of calling around the country to search for answers when none are forthcoming.

No one the mother reaches seems to offer much encouragement, after nearly four years. But the girl is getting better in some ways. At least she doesn’t cringe any more when someone approaches in a white jacket or light-blue shirt, like the people at the hospital who came with the needles and the pain.

In other ways, she is far from better. She still has one tube to help with breathing and another to pipe food directly to her stomach, bypassing the problem area in her throat. Her motor skills are not yet 100% because her first six months were spent in the hospital, usually on her back, instead of gaining the early senses of coordination like a healthy baby.

Things were so bad in mid-December that Horry, though determined to make what would become a very difficult transition from small forward to power forward with the Lakers, nearly left those responsibilities to return to Houston. He ultimately stayed when his wife called one day and told him there were improvements. So he stayed and got criticized and booed.

“Her toughness, with all the stuff she’s been through, it’s like you’ve got to be tough too,” Horry said the other day. “You can let people say what they want to say about you. It’s like, ‘You should just think about what your daughter’s going through now.’ ”

*

Robert Horry was born Aug. 25, 1970, in Andalusia, Ala., and grew up in that small town north of the Florida panhandle, grew all the way to 6 feet 10. He played small forward at the University of Alabama before injuries to other players prompted a move to center for his senior season, a switch that didn’t hurt his NBA marketability. The Houston Rockets took him 11th in 1992.

It was also at Alabama that Horry met his future wife, Keva, having been introduced by a mutual acquaintance who would eventually become one of Robert’s closest friends. Years later, on April 2, 1994, Ashlyn was born into a world of some privilege--and considerable pain.

Doctors soon discovered that part of her throat, the epiglottis, had not formed properly, causing two serious problems. Breathing was difficult and eating was a risk, for fear the food would go down the wrong pipe. So tubes were inserted, and Ashlyn lived at the hospital. Robert and Keva lived on the freeways, going from their home to practice to the hospital to home to eat to the hospital again at night.

“As soon as one thing would go wrong, boom, we’d go there,” Robert said. “Sometimes, ‘Oh, she’s got a slight cold.’ We’re there. A cough, we’re there. It really scared us.

“Some days, you want to just sit back and cry about it. But other days you’ll be like, ‘Well, God did this for a purpose,’ and you deal with it.

“The first few months, you’re just like, tears almost every day. A couple times, she almost died. It was really rough on us.”

The strange part was that it came at the professional pinnacle, as he was winning an NBA title with the Rockets for the first time. Another came the next season--after Coach Rudy Tomjanovich had gone through Pete Chilcutt and Chucky Brown in the playoffs alone and finally moved Horry to power forward, where he would average 18.8 points and 10 rebounds in the sweep of Shaquille O’Neal and the Orlando Magic.

Ashlyn’s difficulties became something Robert and Keva learned to deal with, even as he was traded twice, not counting the deal to Detroit two months before their daughter was born, a trade rescinded when Sean Elliott failed his physical with the Rockets. (Horry, insistent on remembering the NBA had then become a business, keeps a framed Piston jersey in the game room of his home in Houston). He went to Phoenix in the summer of 1996 in a package for Charles Barkley, stayed long enough to enter sports infamy by throwing a towel in the face of Coach Danny Ainge, and was traded to the Lakers 13 months ago for Cedric Ceballos.

The start to his Laker career was filled with lurches. He was slow in adapting to the offense, but drew constant praise because he brought the defense and role-player mentality that Ceballos couldn’t capture. He lost a month and a half just after the All-Star break to a sprained ligament in his left knee, but left a summer-long reminder about his shooting skills by making all seven of his three-pointers in Game 5 against the Utah Jazz, a league record for most without a miss.

And then has come the rest of his Laker career. Hoping to seize an opportunity when Rick Fox came gift wrapped by forsaking much bigger offers to sign a one-year deal in Los Angeles, Coach Del Harris moved Horry to power forward in hopes of developing a quicker lineup that could extend the defense, move the ball and run.

It worked. The Lakers broke from the gate, and Horry had 13 rebounds on opening night against Karl Malone, 10 two games later versus Charles Oakley and 12 a few games after that while matching up with Malone. It didn’t help that he got fours and sixes in the contests in between, or that Horry had just signed a six-year, $30-million contract with an option for another season at $5 million at the end.

“You just try to put pressure on yourself,” Horry said. “You put pressure on yourself to go out and do better. And when you try to do too much and you’re thinking about it too much, it can throw your game off. A lot of times, my best games are when I’m not even thinking.”

A quick laugh can’t help but escape his mouth.

“That sounds funny,” he continued. “But you just let the game come to you. You just play. When you’re out there thinking too much, that’s when you can throw the ball away a lot of times. Just play. When I don’t think, I have fun.

“I think I put too much pressure on myself because I wanted to do so much because I know we have a chance to do good things. I just let it get to me sometimes. I started thinking too much. That’s what it was. I used to catch the ball and just shoot it without thinking. It’s the whole process of thinking, and that’s not me. When I just play, I’m at my best.”

The real problems came in December. Tendinitis struck in both knees. His college teammate and friend, Latrell Sprewell, was suspended, and Horry got caught up in the hurricane when he was one of several players to stand behind Sprewell at a news conference, a show of support allowed only because the Lakers were in Oakland that day with time off. Ashlyn had another setback.

Horry never told the Lakers, but he was close to taking a leave from the team to return to Houston, where Keva and Ashlyn spend most of their time, to remain close to doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“You could tell,” Harris said. “He went through a time.

“Those are the things that any time a coach brings that up, it sounds like another excuse. But Robert’s a very sensitive person. I know when he came in here that everybody had the idea that he was some guy that threw towels in coaches’ faces. He’s soft. I mean, he’s really a nice, sensitive guy and things like that are going to affect him.”

Said Horry: “You hear stuff sometimes, but you . . . don’t even pay it any attention because half those people up there don’t even know how to play.”

*

Horry, after a solid-if-unspectacular 8.6 points and 8.2 rebounds in November, was down to 6.9 and 6.5 for December. Harris was quick to note how much his presence at power forward had meant to the Laker defense, even if no one wanted to listen as public criticism mounted. In January, Horry’s board production bumped up to 7.0, but his shooting dropped to 32.8%, and Harris would soon encourage him to lay off the three-pointers.

Strangely, the next setback became the spark for the comeback. Horry sat out three games because of what has since been determined to be a problematic vein near the groin, and the time off allowed him to study from the sidelines the way teams play the Lakers and also regain some perspective. Even more strangely, some of the most valuable of the insights came from seldom-used backup power forward Mario Bennett.

“Forget the haters,” Bennett said.

It was advice Horry had gotten from others, from some as close to him as his father. Maybe it’s just that he was in a better frame of mind to listen after the three-game absence, but Horry remembered to forget. In the first four games in which he played at least 20 minutes, discounting one outing slowed by injury, he averaged 9.8 rebounds in only 32.3 minutes.

He is a new man in some ways. He is definitely a changed man.

“I’m getting more and more comfortable at [power forward],” he said. “I think right now, I consider myself a power forward instead of a small forward because I have no idea what I’m doing at small forward now.”

Imagine that, from someone basically a lifer at small forward before. As if almost anything is possible.

“The first time [the Rockets] won a championship was when my daughter was born and she was really sick. She came out of it, and then we won a championship. I’m like, maybe all this is bad right now. But maybe it’s a good sign for the future.”

So says Ashlyn’s father.