Charmed NBA Lifer

John Salley: man or mirth?

“I’m mature now,” the Lakers’ 36-year-old backup center said recently. “Before, it was all a big joke to me. I was going with the ride. I wanted to find a joke. When I finish this, I’m going to be a late-night host, and unlike some of the late-night hosts now, I don’t always look for the joke now. I look for the conversation and if the joke finds itself in there, I’m cool.

“Before I was just like carefree. I didn’t care. ‘Hey, I’m here.’ I would be serious on the court, but only for 36 minutes. Now, I’m serious a day before the game, during the game.

“When I come to work and I’m around these guys, sometimes Shaq goes, ‘You know what, man? You’re always on guys. You don’t give us time to relax.’ Sleep when you’re dead. They’d say, ‘Hey, Sal. We’re going to go over to this. We’re going to go right over here and just kick it.’ Go to your room. I didn’t understand what Adrian Dantley used to tell me: ‘Get used to the four walls in your hotel room.’ I didn’t get that. Now I get it.

“I feel I wasted time. I was blessed in receiving the things that I received. But I feel that if I would have been more serious. . . . You know, it’s the whole thing--youth is wasted on the young.”

*

He was a Bad Boy and a Jordanaire and now he’s a Laker, with a couple of forgettable stops in between, seemingly always landing someplace where he and his rampaging Piston buddies used to be Public Enemy No. 1. He has been with Isiah and the Worm in Detroit, MJ and Scottie and Phil in Chicago, and Shaq and Kobe and Phil (again) in Los Angeles, a power forward/center hopping from circus to circus as needed. He’s trying to win championships at all three stops--he would be the only person to ever do that--and four in all.

There are NBA lifes, and then there are NBA lifes.

“I hated Detroit,” Salley said. “It was gray, it was cold. Isiah [Thomas] hated me. . . . I was a rookie, he came to hang out with me as the first guy drafted. I said, ‘Hey, man, you got a Rolls-Royce dealership? I want a Rolls-Royce. I need you to find me an apartment with a jacuzzi.’ Joking. He didn’t understand my personality. So he went and told everybody, ‘Guess what this rookie told me. He wants a Rolls-Royce.’ But I’m joking. [Coach] Chuck Daly decided, ‘Salley has no fouls in practice. If you foul him, it’s not a foul.’ ”

It was the fall of 1986.

“I was a rookie and didn’t realize what it was. I bought a $60,000 car and it stayed in the garage until June. I paid more for my car than I did my apartment. I should have been sleeping in that. I got on the team and I was 220 pounds, going against Rick Mahorn and Sid Green and they were saying, ‘We know how to stop your quickness. We’ll beat the [stuffing] out of you until you no longer move fast.’ We flew commercial, so I had to carry the bags. When they said, ‘10-day road trip,’ I didn’t know how to pack. I packed literally for each day. I had to get my own bags and the vet’s bags.

“I hated my rookie year. We go all the way to the Eastern Conference finals and I’m going, ‘When is this thing going to be on,’ thinking that’s the championship. We’re playing against Boston. I don’t know any better. That was a rough year.

“The second year, we go to the championship and I don’t want to do anything but win it, and we lose on another bad call by the refs. Since we went so far as a team, they had a parade for us, because we came in second, which showed the value of that city. I was like, ‘We didn’t win, what are we having a parade for? [Sarcastic] We’re No. 2. We’re No. 2.’

“I was 25, I bought a mansion, I finally got my Rolls-Royce. I was big time, boy. Me and Dennis [Rodman] were the only single guys on the team. And James Edwards; he was old enough to be our father, though. We had the city. We were the big fish in the small pond. But on the road, we’d walk in with that attitude, ‘We’re going to take your gym.’ We felt like Vikings. We’re going to come in, pillage the village, take all your girls, take what we want, and then leave. Make it a colony. That was our attitude. It was a good attitude to have too, because guys were buying into it. We walk in a place, the stands would be packed to see us beat up on their team. People love gladiators.

“Rick Mahorn would say, ‘We’re going to take your house, smoke up all the smoke, drink up all the drink, freak all the freaks.’ I used to laaauuugh. I used to go, ‘What are you taking about?’ He’d say, ‘We’re literally taking everything. We’re taking it all. Whatever they got, we’re taking it.’

“It was really cool at home. On the road, I learned how to use boos as cheers. It was dangerous walking around certain places. Especially in Boston. They hated our guts and everybody knew who we were.”

Salley signed a free-agent deal with the Miami Heat in 1992, after six seasons and two championships with the Pistons. He spent three years in Miami.

He was then left unprotected in the expansion draft and Toronto claimed him. Salley had hoped that would only be a layover, the way the Raptors took B.J. Armstrong and traded him to Golden State, but it didn’t happen with Thomas now in charge in Toronto.

“I spent six months in prison in Canada,” Salley said.

After being waived during the season. Chicago called. Salley finished the 1995-96 season there as a reserve. He was reunited with Rodman, but this was more like jumping to the other side, the way the Pistons and Bulls used to go at it during playoff battles.

“It was the only organization I could say was completely first class,” Salley said. “Everybody else, to the outside. But they literally treated their athletes like thoroughbred horses. They almost bathed us. The weight room was an Olympic-size weight room. The way the trainers trained me, getting me in shape because I didn’t play in Toronto. The swimming pool situation, the locker room situation--MJ’s on the team, so my locker was stacked with Nikes. I was a Nike guy too. Stacked with Nikes, sweatsuits. No money, but that was cool.

“Dennis had two security guards, Michael [Jordan] had three, Scottie [Pippen] had one. We stayed at the best hotels. And fans like you wouldn’t believe. I was with the Beatles, Elvis and Muhammad Ali all at the same time, you know what I’m saying? And Michael Jackson. Dennis being Michael Jackson.

“It was the most enjoyable thing in the world. I literally was a fly on the wall. I was in it, but not in it, understand what I’m saying? I was a Bull, so we were revered, but I wasn’t like a major factor. I got to see it. I got to be there.”

Salley won another championship that season, his third and apparently retired. He did some studio work for NBC, but still played pickup games. He eventually called his Chicago coach, Phil Jackson, in the spring of 1999, expressing an interest in playing again.

“I called him in May,” Salley said. “Even when they were talking about the Knick job, I kept saying Phil wants to be near the ocean that doesn’t smell of rotten bodies. And then I called again, he called me back, and I had a conversation with him. Then I called Jerry.”

Jerry West, the Lakers’ executive vice president, said he would come to UCLA one day to watch him play. He was signed to a make-good contract Sept. 29 and edged Benoit Benjamin, who would have brought more of a shot-blocking presence in that backup role, for the roster spot because of leadership abilities and previous knowledge of Jackson’s system.

“I knew the triangle,” Salley said. “He wasn’t bringing Luc Longley, he wasn’t bringing anybody else. I knew I could help big. . . . I said, I don’t want to sit behind that desk and commentate and rag on people. I don’t get jollies off of that, because I know what it’s really about and those guys sitting behind the desk, some of them, don’t.

“Things are happening that I’ve seen before. It’s a trip. It’s almost a deja vu. I told my wife. I said, ‘You know what? We’re going to win the championship.’ This was in October.”

*

Sleeping with the enemy.

In Chicago, being a Bad Boy represented all that is evil. Rodman shoving Pippen into the basket standard on a drive. Many of the Pistons--but not Salley-- parading past the Bull bench in defeat while leaving the court before the end of the clinching game in their 1991 playoff series. Going mosh pit on Jordan any year.

And then he was supposed to become a Bull?

“Michael and Scottie had to say whether I was in,” Salley said. “But they knew I was a good guy, especially Scottie. Michael also. He knew I was a good guy.”

Says Jackson now: “I think he got plenty of grief . . . [But] he was not one of the group of chumps that walked off and dishonored their team’s championship years.”

It was different in Los Angeles. Different with the Lakers is more like it. Citizens remember the duels--also not with the passion of the Celtic battles, but heated for sure after meeting twice in three years in the finals--but it was pretty much ancient history for the players. Only one of his new teammates, A.C. Green, was in the league anywhere during the last showdown, 1989.

“He’s a person,” said Green, a Laker then and now. “And before that, he was a Piston.”

Yes, this would be much easier than Chicago.

“Because I’ve always been known as a Bad Boy but not a Bad Boy,” Salley said. “I’ve always been the nice, calm, laughing, giggling one. Never the one that seemed like he was going out to hurt anybody, and I’ve always been the one that seemed to have more going than just basketball.

“We didn’t hate the Lakers. We hated the Boston Celtics and we hated the Chicago Bulls. Chicago liked me because I did shake everyone’s hand, and I would hang out in Chicago in the summer. They knew that they could hate me when I was wearing the [Piston] uniform, but they loved to have me on their team.

“I always wanted to play with the Lakers anyway. I wanted to go to UCLA, like Kareem. They didn’t come and recruit me. UC Irvine did and Pepperdine. I wasn’t going there. I wasn’t going to USC. I wanted to go to UCLA like Kareem, but they didn’t come and get me [Salley went to Georgia Tech].

“I always wanted to be a Laker. That Showtime attitude, that running fastbreak. I’m a finesse player. I didn’t want to bang. Had to learn to do it. But I’m where I’m supposed to be. Every time I’m someplace, that’s where I’m supposed to be. And I’m successful.”