Lakers Might Be a Team of . . . No, Don’t Say It!

Walked through a darkened tunnel outside the Laker locker room late Friday, stumbled into a guy wearing a Rudy LaRusso jersey and Kurt Rambis glasses and a baseball cap covered in shiny pins shaped like Mel Counts.

Accidentally stuck the guy with his Darrell Imhoff-engraved pen.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No problem,” he said, smiling. “I’m used to it.”

“Used to what?” I said.

“Used to getting touched,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“Because everybody wants to know if I’m real.”

“Who are you?”

“My friends call me Dez.”

“What do you do?”

He turned his bright eyes upon a confetti-filled Staples Center floor. Pointed toward a scoreboard still blinking a 39-point Laker victory over the San Antonio Spurs. Nodded at three screeching publicists trying to convince schmoozing Cameron Diaz to go home.

“‘I do this,” he said.

“Do what?” I said.

“Make greatness out of garble.”

“You transcribe Shaquille O’Neal’s postgame interviews?”

“No, fool, I turn loose change into championships. I provide plodding teams with the final push. When I’m not giving embarrassingly alliterative interviews, I’m creating those surprising moments that make sports so memorable.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“What do you think? The Lakers could underachieve all season and then become possibly the best playoff team in NBA history without any help? Isn’t everybody wondering how they are doing it?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Well, you found him.”

I examined this strange man as he ran his hands through his flowing Don Ford hairdo. Then it hit me.

“Wait a minute, Dez, is your last name Tinny? Like, Dez Tinny? Destiny?”

“It’s Dez Johnson. Haven’t you written enough cliches for one month?”

“OK, um, Mr. Johnson, how did you end up in Los Angeles?”

“I was with Tom Lasorda last fall at the Olympics. He gave me the names of a few restaurants out here where I could scrounge a free meal.”

“You were with Lasorda’s gold-medal baseball team?”

“How do you think they won, silly? I spent two weeks with them, then six minutes with Rulon Gardner.”

“Then you came to Los Angeles?”

“Well, no, I had to first spend January helping the Baltimore Ravens. Even had a tattoo of Ray Lewis snaking around my torso.”

“So you came here in the spring?”

“Yep. It wasn’t like the Duke basketball team needed me or anything. So I came here and initially hooked up with USC.”

“Oh, so that’s why they advanced to the Elite Eight?”

“Yep. They would have kept winning too, if Henry Bibby hadn’t refused to give me a piece of postgame pizza.”

I paused as he wiped some nacho cheese off a T-shirt with a tie-dyed impression of Mychal Thompson. This was getting interesting.

“So then you joined the Lakers,” I asked.

“Well, almost. I made a wrong turn at their training facility and ended up on the other side of the building, in the locker room of the Kings.”

“Well, then, that explains . . . “

“Yeah. I would have stayed longer, but the fans ruined my image by booing Rob Blake.”

“So why the Lakers?”

“First reason is Jerry Buss. He may be the best sports owner in your town’s history. Yet instead of talking about banners on the ceiling, people only talk about girls on his arm.”

“So?”

“So, he’s not getting any younger, even if his dates are. He deserves the one last bit of extraordinary greatness that will escort him to a spot on the medal stand above even the O’Malleys.”

“So Jerry Buss is your reason?”

“Him, and Chick Hearn. After all these years, the grand old guy deserves a gold refrigerator.”

The man had a point. But I was even more curious. The Lakers were a fragile mess for most of the season, and even one loss in the first round could have finished them.

“So how did you know where to start?” I asked.

“Where these things always start, with the common people.”

“In the stands?”

“I filled the Staples Center with howling fans for that first playoff game against Portland, created an atmosphere of both passion and desperation that has been unmatched in that building since then.”

“So?”

“So Kobe and Shaq stepped into a room that felt like Game 7 and remembered immediately that the playoffs were bigger than both of them.”

“So that’s why they kissed and made up.”

“Yep. I just showed them what they had been missing.”

“So how do you explain the emergence of Derek Fisher, a seemingly failed first-round draft pick who two years ago was being methodically run out of town?”

“When Phil Jackson arrived last year, he referred to small NBA guards as ‘fairies.’ I took care of Fisher to prove that Dez Johnson is bigger than Zen.”

“How about Rick Fox, a guy who was so popular in Boston, he was hit in the head with beer bottles not once, but twice?”

“Payback for playing a jailed former pro athlete on HBO’s ‘Oz.’ ”

“Why?”

“He enables us to imagine what some of his rotten peers would look like behind bars.”

“Horace Grant? Robert Horry? Brian Shaw?”

“Perfect role players. Didn’t need to do anything with them.”

So, I thought, it must be true. I had stumbled into a man who was the explanation for the unexplainable. I finally had a Laker scoop that didn’t require some forced fable or overwritten fantasy.

“So what is happening with the Lakers is truly destiny?” I asked.

“No, it’s Dez Johnson,” he said, a tad irritated.

“One more question Mr. Johnson?”

“Sure. As long as you don’t write one of your usual endings, like how I was weeping as I trudged aimlessly into the night.”

“So why did you give the Lakers so many series sweeps?”

“I have to leave soon. Tom Kelly is begging me to come to Minnesota.”

*

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