LOSING ISIAH

Let’s just say a lot has changed since the Lakers’ last time here.

Aside from the difference in the Lakers, Larry Bird has returned to Florida and the Indiana Pacers to mediocrity under Isiah Thomas.

Isiah arrived in his first coaching assignment, promising to get them over the top, but except for a heady 11-day run in November, he hasn’t even been able to get them over .500.

Nor are they warming up. Coming out of the All-Star break, they scored 66 points in a home loss to Charlotte and were booed by their slow-to-anger fans.

“That’s not Isiah’s fault,” Pacer President Donnie Walsh says. “At this point, it’s basically my decisions that have put us here. Not him.”

Indeed, Thomas signed a four-year, $20-million deal shortly after Mark Jackson left but just before Rik Smits decided to retire and Dale Davis signed an extension and then, complaining about his new raise, demanded to be traded. So Walsh packed Davis off to Portland for 22-year-old Jermaine O’Neal.

Then Jalen Rose got hurt in the preseason, obliging Thomas to make his NBA debut with one starter (Reggie Miller) from the NBA finals five months before.

And it has gone like that since, as Thomas looks for the right lineup.

So far, he has used 12, but he has No. 13 in mind (Sam Perkins replacing Zan Tabak at center).

Perkins is 39 and has announced his retirement annually for two seasons. However, he’s still 6 feet 9 and can make three-point shots, so the Pacers might not let him out of here.

As is often the case in Thomas’ busy life, there’s more stuff going on: His Continental Basketball Assn. just went out of business, so he’d better not show his face in Sioux Falls, Yakima, Rockford or Gary.

Said Ft. Wayne General Manager Rich Coffey: “The league has been around for 55 years and it took him 12 months to ruin it.”

Said Bill Bosshard, a banker and former owner of the La Crosse (Wis.) Bobcats: “He [Thomas] can hide behind the corporation, the blind trust or the Mother Mary for all I care.”

Bosshard says the NBA offered to buy the CBA, leaving Thomas with a $1-million profit, but he turned it down. The NBA decided to start from scratch and there went 55 years of minor league history.

Not that it’s ruining Thomas’ life.

He can’t comment on the CBA, on orders from NBA Commissioner David Stern, who made him put it into a blind trust. He is upbeat about the Pacers, starting sentences with, “When we make the playoffs . . . “

Pacer players love him. He’s never short or peevish with the media. A Pacer official says he’s the most even-keeled coach he has ever been around.

At 39, Thomas still looks like a choirboy, with a three-inch scar over his left eye where Karl Malone once laid him out with a fearsome elbow.

Everything else remains--the charm, the impish laugh, the crackling intelligence, the towering ambition, the sense of mission.

So why does all this stuff happen to him?

When You’re a Jet, You Stay a Jet

“Here’s a little man in a big man’s game. He had a tough life. He had to fight for everything he got because of gangs, the whole nine yards. . . .

“When you’re a tough guy and got an edge to you, then that sometimes rubs people the wrong way. He’s a good guy, but he wants to protect what’s his.”

--Magic Johnson

Not that Johnson didn’t put in the hours, but things always fell into place for him: the courtesy Dream Team selection after he retired, the ownership stake in the Lakers, the chance to sell that stake, the chance to buy it back again.

Of course, Magic was different. Although he and Thomas were both referred to as “urban” kids, Isiah’s childhood on Chicago’s West Side was a lot more urban than Johnson’s in East Lansing, Mich.

“It’s like night and day,” Johnson said. “I didn’t have gangs. I wasn’t chased home by anybody, the whole drug thing, all that.”

Johnson’s parents were both at home. His father worked in the auto industry.

Thomas was the youngest of nine children, who were raised by their mother, Mary. Isiah says she went to the door with a shotgun once to chase away gang members looking for one of her sons.

Mary was devoutly religious, but there were other influences in the home, such as the older boys who were leading the street life, which Isiah intended to follow.

Instead, he made it out on his basketball skill. He was lovable, in addition, with a cherubic appearance that made him seem as if he’d been untouched by the ghetto.

In real life, he was as tough as they came. He backed down from no one. He once broke a finger in a practice, punching 6-11 teammate Bill Laimbeer, a cantankerous rich kid from suburbia who was his best friend on the team.

They didn’t call the Detroit Pistons the Bad Boys for nothing. Thomas may have been the smallest of them, but when things got rough, he was right in the middle of it.

The bare-knuckle spirit of the day cost him one of his best friends in the world, Johnson. They went from blood brother to acquaintances when they started meeting in the finals in 1988, and didn’t make up until last spring.

That was just how it was, if one was a Laker and the other a Piston.

In 1988, after Thomas scored an amazing 25 points in the third quarter of Game 6 at the Forum, hopping around the floor after spraining his right ankle, the Lakers wouldn’t let him use their training room to try to make it back for Game 7, 48 hours away.

Instead, Thomas used the Raiders’ facility in El Segundo, invited by the team’s marketing director, Mike Ornstein. Nevertheless, Isiah limped through Game 7 and the Pistons succumbed.

“I remember,” Thomas says, “Orny brought Howie Long by, Marcus Allen by. Everybody was talking to me about shooting it up [taking a pain-killing injection]. ‘In football, man, we’d just shoot it up.’

“I remember Orny telling me the story because he was friendly with Pat and Chris [Riley]. But I think they stopped speaking to him after that.”

Riley was adamant about not fraternizing. Johnson and Thomas used to kiss before the tipoff, but their friendship was soon on the back burner, then in the refrigerator.

Before the ’88 opener, Johnson invited Thomas to dinner in Los Angeles. Before Game 3 in Detroit, Thomas called Magic to return the invitation but says Magic put him off.

In Game 4, Johnson threw Thomas to the floor. Isiah got up and pushed Magic.

“Next day, my first son was born,” Thomas said. “He didn’t come to the house to see Joshua. He sent balloons and everything.

“It was a very competitive time and a weird time.”

The Pistons got the Lakers back, 4-0, in the 1989 finals, after Johnson and Byron Scott pulled hamstrings.

The coolness between Johnson and Thomas still prevailed in the fall of 1991 when Magic announced he was HIV-positive and retired. However, when he was voted into the All-Star game, it was Isiah who led the welcoming committee.

Or formed it.

“At that time we hadn’t mended our relationship and I remember at the All-Star game, none of the players wanted him to play,” Thomas says. “I think at that time, Malone was very vocal about it and some other people were very vocal. . . .

“At that time I was president of the Players Assn. I basically said, ‘ . . . you all, he’s playing. This is how we’re going to treat him. At the start of the game, we’re all going to go up and shake his hand and give him a hug and let him know it’s all right, he’s one of us.’

“Some people took offense to it in the meeting, but at the end of the day, it’s what we did.”

So Many Causes, So Little Time

So little ever turned out the way Thomas planned it.

Of course, no one could plan the way he could.

He was famous for his charitable instincts. He was the last union president who ran the group for the benefit of the little guys, before the agents (read: David Falk) took over and turned it into a platform to promote the stars’ interests.

Once, Thomas put together Crime Day, an attempt to have one day in Detroit--which was still sometimes referred to as the nation’s Murder Capital--without any criminal activity.

“‘I felt like I had a big enough voice or influence in the community that, through the community, through the police, through the government, you can bring about forces and for one day let’s say, let’s have no crime,” he says.

“Yeah, I thought I could make a difference, but that’s how I was raised to believe, if you have influence, you can make a difference.”

Hard-nosed as he was, his dreams often didn’t fade, they crashed.

When the Chicago Bulls dethroned the twice-defending champion Pistons in the ’91 Eastern Conference finals, Thomas and Laimbeer led a march off the bench before the game was over.

When Thomas retired, he didn’t slide into a front office job, although he’d been close to Piston owner Bob Davidson. Isiah leaked the details of a package he thought or hoped he’d get to a reporter who published it and Davidson dropped him cold.

Thomas became the first general manager in Toronto but left when his ownership group sold the team.

He became an NBC commentator.

Now here he is. In November, when the Pacers returned to Los Angeles, Thomas said his goal was to come back in June for a finals rematch.

Today, they’re 22-28 and worrying more about the No. 8 slot in the East. But when you’re starting the 22-year-old O’Neal, the 21-year-old Al Harrington (lately) and trying to find time for 20-year-old Jonathan Bender, all of whom turned pro out of high school, you understand your best days are ahead of you, even if they don’t turn out to be that good.

“I never saw results right away in anything I did,” Thomas says. “It seemed that every time I won, it was because I earned it.

“I’ve never walked into a situation--I mean, the year we won at Indiana, we were the first team to win an NCAA championship that had nine losses. In Detroit, we had to overcome a lot of obstacles and to persevere.”

In that case, he’s right back home in Indiana.

He says one day he’d like to be an NBA owner. It would be nice if it works out for him, because he put in the hours too.