Dr. Shaq Grows Impatient With the Kobe Experiment

You asked for it: The Lakers’ deepest, darkest story won’t go away, but it’s not because of us paparazzi hounding them.

Instead, a prominent player keeps suggesting that the press delve into it.

“You guys know the real problem,” Shaquille O’Neal recently told reporters, who were asking about something else entirely. “You’re just scared to write about it.”

If that was too subtle for us cowards, Shaq spelled it out last week to CBS Sportsline’s Mike Kahn:

“What is this, an experiment? Nobody waited for me when I came into the league. The pressure was there as soon as I started to play. That’s my job. Why wait? I’m not going to be here that long that I want to wait years for him to figure it out.”

“Him” is Kobe Bryant, whom O’Neal considers too wild, a view that was completely valid last season, especially after the All-Star game, when the over-hyped child star began struggling and throwing up shots even wilder than usual.

Then, O’Neal was cool about it, never saying a word or even making a face. His anger seemed to pop up this season, as if from a jack-in-the-box, even as Bryant’s game began to smooth out.

O’Neal slapped Bryant in a preseason skirmish, made oblique comments about “playing dumb”--code for taking a long jump shot instead of throwing it in to the center--and finally put it on the record.

Part of it is basketball and deserved. The rest is psychological and inevitable.

O’Neal, the designated savior, arrived here with Bryant, the high school kid with the game and smile that enchanted everyone, including Shaq, who named him “Hollywood” and tried to take him under his wing.

That didn’t last long. Bryant was his own person and didn’t fit under even a wing as large as O’Neal’s.

If O’Neal was the franchise, Bryant was the darling. Even management was transfixed, with Jerry Buss and Jerry West doting on the child, Kobe, as much as the man, Shaq.

Next thing you knew, Bryant was the nation’s darling too. He broke out commercially as teenagers, the target audience in basketball marketing, began choosing fellow teens as heroes. The league and the networks, desperate for a successor to you-know-who, went off their gourds, and Bryant, who never backs down, tried to live up to it.

After last season, you wondered if he would ever be able to play with other players, but now he does, even if he errs on the wild side.

Of course, there were other things going on . . . such as Dennis Rodman. O’Neal sponsored that one, rode it all the way down and mourns it still.

“Everybody knew the off-court stuff before he came in,” O’Neal told CBS Sportsline. “Why were they surprised? It wasn’t a distraction to me. . . . The L.A. media made more out of Dennis off the court than it really was to the team.”

Actually, the problems were on the court, where the Lakers swooned to No. 5 in the West and started no-showing in big games while their thug asked out.

O’Neal has been bashed for everything--missing free throws, doing movies, rapping--as if size and fame meant he should stroll to a title. Actually, he worked hard at his game, even the free throws. He developed a burning desire to win, a growing inclination to lead and a welcome habit of speaking his mind, but also a monumental impatience.

This season, he campaigned for “a thug and a shooter.” Buss caught the fever, West lost authority and to this day, nobody seems willing or able to reassert the command structure.

For all of Bryant’s exuberance on the floor, he’s actually shy, a loner among his teammates, and at 20, one basketball generation younger than the 26-year-old O’Neal.

Shaq’s upset at him? Kobe can’t imagine why.

“It can’t be a personality thing because I really don’t know the guy that much,” Bryant says. “I don’t really hang around him that much so. . . .

“It has to be on the court--and certain things, I just can’t help. You know what I mean? I go out there and I just play and I’m trying to learn and do the best job that I can, whether it’s passing the ball, moving the ball. I try to do that. I’m trying. That’s all I can say. What do you want me to do?”

Well, stop breaking off plays that are supposed to go to O’Neal in the low post to throw up a 20-foot shot.

Trying may not be doing, but as long as Bryant makes annual quantum leaps of a kind we’ve never seen before, it will have to suffice.

It would be nice if someone sat the local prodigies down, talked to them about who’s in charge of what and helped them talk to each other. They may be talented youngsters, but they aren’t capable of running their franchise. This is the NBA, not “Lord of the Flies.”

It isn’t a matter of who’s right. It’s a matter of understanding that each has things to learn--and that each is the other’s best bet. For the Lakers’ sake, it would be nice if Shaq and Kobe figured it out while they still wear the same uniform.

FACES AND FIGURES

Now, doesn’t everyone feel better? The New York Knicks, flirting with falling out of the playoffs, resolved their scapegoat problem by “reassigning” General Manager Ernie Grunfeld, sparing Coach Jeff Van Gundy (for the moment) and forcing Madison Square Garden boss Dave Checketts to take over the front office. Playing to the tabloids, Checketts started by fining Latrell Sprewell $25,000 for comments made by his attorney, Robert Gist, who told the New York Post that Van Gundy and Grunfeld should be fired, there was “no backbone in the Knicks’ leadership” and Sprewell will demand a trade if he has to come off the bench next season, as he has all of this one. Comment: Gist is some lousy lawyer if he can’t knock that one down.

Talk about your short corporate memories: Carl’s Jr. signed Rodman when he was with the Bulls, fired him when he kicked the cameraman, rehired him when the Lakers signed him--and just fired him again when the Lakers cut him. Sprewell, fired for some reason from his $2.5-million shoe deal with Converse, was just signed by another sneaker company, And 1, whose president, Seth Berger noted, “Our roots are at the playground level, where ballplayers talk stuff and have the game to back it up.” In other words, what’s a little violence when there’s money to be made?

Turns out, it’s mutual: Charles Barkley, who has been in better moods than the one that he has been in all season, recently told Sports Illustrated he “can’t stand” Allen Iverson. Noted Iverson, “I can’t stand his fat butt, either. What has he done? How many years has he been in the league? He hasn’t even won a championship yet. To me, he hasn’t done anything. Tell him to lose some weight and come back in the next lifetime and try to win a championship.”

Former Bull teammate Ron Harper on Rodman’s release: “I thought he would last. You know, you only hear about half the stuff he does. But he never refused to go into a game [in Chicago]. I thought he loved the game.” . . . Michael Jordan: “It didn’t surprise me very much. Very few people can deal with Dennis. We did a good job with that. I don’t know if there’s anyone else out there who can deal with him. He carries a lot of baggage.” Really?

Larry Bird, continuing to challenge his Indiana Pacers, who were booed by home fans after a recent loss: “They call that booing? That wasn’t booing. You should walk off the Boston Garden floor when they’re booing. They’d meet you out in the parking lot by your car. Wait until some of these fans wait out there in the parking lot and challenge them to a fistfight like they did in Boston.”

Referee Steve Javie, to the Detroit Pistons’ bench after 33% free-throw shooter Eric Montross launched one high off the board: “You better get the spare backboard ready.”