LAttitude

It didn’t matter that he had just finished dancing with Allen Iverson while flirting with the world.

His Mercedes needed gas, so Tyronn Lue did what he always does.

He pulled out of Staples Center Friday night, drove two blocks to an inner-city gas station, climbed out, began pumping . . .

And here they came.

The Luuuuuuuue-nies.

“It was unbelievable,” said Mark Scanlon, Lue’s Kansas City high school coach who was riding shotgun. “People stopping their cars and jumping out. People pulling up in the station and surrounding him. Everybody shouting, ‘Luuuue.’ ”

The gas took 10 minutes, but Lue stuck around for twice that long, signing autographs, shaking hands, this little fella in a baggy sweatsuit lifted up by a wide-eyed town and disappearing into its embrace.

It’s Tyronn, as in tih-RON.

Or, in the appropriate words of Times staffer Houston Mitchell, it’s Tyronn, as in Pokemon.

It’s not Tyrone. It has never been Tyrone.

His grandfather is Tyrone. His father is Ronnie.

“Just put the names together,” Lue said. “Well, sort of.”

This week, the 2,560th person to mispronounce it happened to be, well, his own coach.

“Phil Jackson was kidding,” Lue said, pausing. “I mean, c’mon. I’m sure the coach knows my name.”

Yeah, and Tyronn Lue is also 6 feet, just as it says in the program.

“I am, too,” he protested.

A broadcaster who claimed he also was 6 feet challenged Lue to a standoff Monday.

The guard stood. The broadcaster stood. The broadcaster won by a full corn row, even if bystanders were too polite to acknowledge it.

“Tyronn is 6 foot with big shoes,” Kansas City high school friend Terry Nooner said. “And on a good day.”

The only thing beyond debate is that Lue is the one thing every championship team needs.

He is fun.

In a playoff run with few surprises, he is full of them.

On a serious journey by a large, expensive car, he is that magical token dangling from the rearview mirror.

And man, how we love that last name.

Descended from Cooooop. A close relative of Ed-die.

“It’s nice,” Lue said. “Maybe people will start remembering me.”

Remembering him? After what we’ve seen in the first three games of the NBA Finals against the Philadelphia 76ers, how can we forget?

Playing twice as much as he played earlier this spring, he has helped hold Iverson to 40% shooting, leads the Lakers with six steals, has made five of eight shots.

And when Iverson ripped him midway through the second quarter Sunday night in the Lakers’ Game 3 victory? Lue ripped right back, part of a double technical foul that threw Iverson into such a tizzy he scored only two points the rest of the quarter.

While Lue scored five.

According to Lue, smiling again during Monday’s day off with the Lakers leading two games to one, their conversation went something like this:

Iverson: “You wouldn’t be holding me if you could play me.”

Lue: “You can’t play me, either.”

Iverson: “You can’t do anything.”

Lue: “Don’t let everybody fool you. I got game too.”

Iverson: “Just stop holding me.”

Lue: “You hit the weight room a little more, it wouldn’t matter.”

It would seem to be an unfair fight, this league most valuable player against a guy who was lucky to be on the postseason roster.

“But growing up it was always like that, everybody trying to go at me because I was smaller than everybody else, everybody trying to bully me,” Lue said. “People would post up on me, throw me down, and there would be a fight. I learned what it takes to win.”

During the regular season no active Laker reserve played in fewer games than Lue. No Laker made a smaller impact.

Lue thought he would be in street clothes this spring until he came into the locker room before the playoffs and saw his name posted on the wall with the others.

“Just like in high school, when you’re checking to see if you got cut,” he said.

Jackson wasn’t thinking about fun, though. He was thinking about Damon Stoudamire, and Jason Williams, and Avery Johnson, and you-know-who.

“What do you need most, a three-point shooter or defense?” Jackson said Monday, explaining why he kept Lue instead of Mike Penberthy or even Isaiah “J.R.” Rider. “I’m one that will probably [prefer] defense. Ty’s also a real good team player, a good locker room kid, and is a gym rat. So I offered to go with that.”

It is a decision now causing quite a stir among those wondering, who is this guy?

Sometimes Lue, after three mostly obscure years here, is worried that even his friends don’t know.

“Any time they’re on national TV, he’ll call me after the game and say, ‘Hey, did you see me? Did you see that move?’ ” Nooner said with a laugh. “I know I have to watch the games, or listen to an entire breakdown, move by move.”

Lue is from a small town called Mexico. That town is in Missouri, near Columbia, but that didn’t stop a Mexican reporter Monday from asking Lue what he thinks about their country?

“I remember eating at a great buffet there once,” Lue offered patiently.

Lue moved to Kansas City after his freshman year in high school, where he played among tough future Big 12 stars. One game became so intense, he looked into the stands and talked trash to an opponent’s father.

He then spent three college years starring for Nebraska, where he found it so cold, he once wore a ski mask during class.

Then, in 1998, he was a first-round pick of the Denver Nuggets and immediately shipped to the Lakers as part of a deal that rid them of Nick Van Exel.

For that alone, he should be cheered.

That he finally has emerged from knee surgeries and ankle injuries to become the quick backup guard that the Lakers crave also helps.

“It’s important to him that people finally see what kind of player he can be,” Scanlon said. “He’s always had big guys trying to intimidate him. It’s never worked. Everyone can see that now.”

Lue has been so jazzed by this postseason that he recently flew the former coach and his wife to town for Game 2 of the Finals.

Lue picked them up at the airport, where a policeman saw him double-parked and asked for his autograph. Lue housed them in a Beverly Hills hotel. He arranged for a driver to take them to the game in a Jaguar.

“That’s the kind of generous kid he is, flying people out there all the time, on the spur of the moment,” Scanlon said.

Nooner, who played collegiately at Kansas, said Lue flew him to his Los Angeles condo last summer with six other guys.

“We don’t really do the clubs,” Nooner said. “We all just sit around telling jokes on each other.”

Lue is a free agent after the season, but he wants to stay in town. He hopes these finals will convince the Lakers to re-sign him.

At the risk of overdoing a serendipitous literary device, he’s not aluuuuuuene.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com