There’s No Bandwagon for Moms

Eddie Jones was driving to the Forum before Game 2 of the Lakers’ first-round playoff series against Portland, his ears ringing with criticism and doubt, when something else joined the chorus.

It was his cell phone.

“Eddie, I’m tired of hearing J.R. Rider talk bad about you,” said a voice at the other end. “I’m tired of everybody saying you’re not aggressive. Will you please start taking the ball to the basket?”

“Mom!” he said.

*

Eddie Jones will call his mother back today. He may tell her that her phone call dramatically changed his game and the Lakers’ postseason hopes.

But then, he has probably already told her. They talk four or five times a week.

Mario Bennett will find his mother in the Forum stands today. He will face her, turn up his palms, pump his arms in his familiar “raise the roof” gesture.

The fans always think it’s for them. But every game Betty Bennett is there, at least one is for her.

Today being a special occasion, he hopes she responds.

“I hope she does it back,” he said.

Welcome to Mother’s Day on a team with many moms who not only raised the roof, but painted it and patched it and held it up.

With many of the Lakers coming from single-parent homes, the team seems to have more appreciation than most for the women to whom their souls still clearly belong.

“I remember when my mom would work day and night with no car, giving up everything for us kids,” Bennett said. “Everybody remembers that.”

As in some other NBA quarters, you don’t joke about moms in the Laker locker room.

“The subject is strictly taboo,” assistant coach Larry Drew said.

When you meet a teammate’s mother outside the Laker locker room, you don’t call her by her first or last name.

“You just call her ‘Mom,’ no matter whose mom it is,” Drew said. “We’re all bonded by that.”

Today at noon, in Game 4 of the Western Conference semifinals against the Seattle Supersonics, there is a game to be won.

But there are also women to be honored.

Shaquille O’Neal is sending flowers to “The Cake Woman.”

That would be his mother, Lucille Harrison, so named because of how she would respond when his military stepfather disciplined him.

“Dad would beat my butt, then leave, then Mom would come in with the cakes,” he said. “I’m sitting there crying, and here she comes, telling me I have to stop messing around in school or whatever . . . but bringing me cake.”

Derek Fisher will be taking his visiting mother to dinner, but it will be anticlimactic after what happened last week back home in Little Rock, Ark.

There, Annette Fisher was summoned home from work in her Honda Accord for what was supposed to be an emergency package.

That package was a new Lexus.

Fisher had bought and shipped it to her for an early Mother’s Day present.

He had never forgotten how she and a couple of other mothers once dropped everything to drive his AAU team 15 hours from Arkansas to Minnesota, where it won the national championship.

Or the time she and his father drove 10 hours to watch him play a road game for Arkansas Little Rock that night . . . and then drove back home after the game. That page he received after practice Thursday was her thank-you.

“I called her back and she had been crying and crying,” he said, looking around the Forum after Saturday’s practice. “In all of this, that’s the fun part.”

Quite often the Lakers are paged by their concerned mothers.

This is because while the rest of us who watch them play can only guess how they are feeling, mothers know.

When Nick Van Exel leaves an arena upset, he knows what is coming in a few hours.

“My mom, paging me, calling me, 6 a.m.,” he said. “Happens all the time.”

Joyce Van Exel will tell Nick his eyes looked bad on TV from Indianapolis, that he’s not getting enough sleep.

Nick will politely note that, of course, he’s not getting enough sleep. He has been awakened by phone calls at 6 a.m.

Joyce will talk on.

Nick, although wanting to go back to sleep, will listen.

They all listen.

“No matter how big some of these guys may seem, when they are talking to their moms, they are still that little boy,” Drew said.

Some Lakers remember seeing their mothers everywhere.

“It was amazing. We would have four boys playing in three games, and she would find time to make them all,” Jon Barry said.

Other Lakers would only see their mothers in the shadows. With Rick Fox’s mom, Diane, it was always intentional.

She was a Canadian Olympic high jumper who didn’t want to push him to follow in her steps.

“So I’d be playing in the backyard, and she’d never come out. She’d only be watching from the laundry room,” he said.

Later, through college and in his early pro years, when she would emerge to sit in the stands, he would always play nervously and poorly.

Then this spring, when she flew from her Bahamas home to Los Angeles to watch him for the first time as a Laker, suddenly it clicked.

He looked up in the stands, saw her smiling and realized that because he was happy--as a winning basketball player and budding actor--she was happy.

She watched three games, during which time he averaged 20 points and six rebounds.

“I looked up there and she gave me this little wave,” he said. “She always supported me in such a loving way. Still does.”

They all still do, it seems. With the money and hype and cheers all changing rapidly for today’s Lakers, their moms are sometimes the only thing that stays the same.

For all of us, really. You don’t need to be a star to have a star mom.

Some of them raise the roof.

Others stay up past midnight typing their eighth-grader’s scribble until it looks like a sports story, driving it across town to the local weekly newspaper, sticking it in the mail slot, making him believe.