Still a Third Option, but Worthy of Hall

By J.A. Adande

April 8, 2003 12 AM PT

If there’s anyone who should be prepared to cede the spotlight -- even on the day he received his sport’s highest singular honor -- it’s James Worthy.

Surely you won’t mind, James, if we break from our applause for your election into the Basketball Hall of Fame to marvel at the historic selection of the late Chick Hearn and tip our cap to the pioneering efforts of Earl Lloyd.

Hearn became the first broadcaster to receive a full-fledged membership in the Hall of Fame when he was honored as a “contributor” to the game Monday. (He had already received the Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy media award in 1992.)

Lloyd, the first African American to play in the NBA, earned some long-overdue recognition for breaking the color line in his sport.

There might not be another player in the Springfield (Mass.) basketball shrine whose greatness has been upstaged more than Worthy’s. He capped his college career at North Carolina by scoring 28 points -- making 13 of 17 shots -- in the 1982 NCAA title game against Georgetown and was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four.

But that game is best known for Michael Jordan’s winning jump shot. If Worthy gets mentioned at all, it’s because of what happened next: He was standing out of position when Georgetown’s Fred Brown inexplicably threw him the ball.

Worthy spent his 12-year NBA career with the Lakers, winning three championships and a Finals MVP award. It was unfair that a 6-foot-9 player had such quick moves, unfair that the star-studded Lakers had someone so good as a third option. Worthy shot 52% for his career, and anyone who watched him would have a hard time believing that he actually missed 6,326 times.

Still, whenever the Showtime era comes up, the first two names are always Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It never seems to bother Worthy.

“I just appreciated people who appreciated my game,” he said. “When you play in the NBA, when you get the respect of not only your teammates and your opponents, that was awesome. I’ve always been content with that. Being part of the top 50 was the ultimate accomplishment. This solidifies all the work, every wind sprint, every practice, every accomplishment I’ve achieved as a basketball player.”

You get the sense Hearn, who died Aug. 5, would have been more excited for Worthy than himself. But as, uh, worthy as James might be, he probably isn’t as deserving as Hearn.

Stu Lantz, who worked alongside Hearn from 1987 through Hearn’s final broadcast last year, defines a Hall of Famer as “the absolute best of the best.”

“Chick is beyond the best of the best,” Lantz said. “He’s in a class by himself. When it came to broadcasting and play-by-play for basketball, he set the bar for everybody.”

If Hall of Fame players such as George Mikan and Elgin Baylor helped change the way the game is played, Hearn defined the way it sounds. He developed the cadence for calling games and the words that found their way to every playground in the country.

“There’s no terminology other than what he used,” Lantz said. “He’s coined damn near everything in play-by-play.

“You’re going to say something that he said. You may not intentionally do it, but it’s going to pop up.”

“Airball” and “dribble drive” are only two of the phrases Chick created. And when he bellowed “slam dunk!” during the 1980s, chances are he was talking about Worthy and his one-handed swoops to the hoop.

Worthy and Hearn made a perfect tandem.

Worthy’s mother gave Hearn the tagline to his signature call whenever another Laker victory was at hand: “This game’s in the refrigerator.” In a letter to Hearn, Gladys Worthy suggested he add, “The door is closed, the light is out, the eggs are cooling and the butter is getting hard.”

Chick first called Worthy “Big Game James,” a perfect nickname for a man whose playoff average of 21.1 points was 3.5 points better than his regular-season average.

If Worthy had made the cut last year, he would have been inducted with Magic, who assisted on so many of his pro baskets. It turns out he’ll be in the same class as Hearn, who called them all.

“When I heard that Chick was nominated, I was overwhelmed with the possibility of going in with Chick, because he’s meant so much to the Laker organization,” Worthy said.

Unfortunately, two finalists with Laker ties, former coach Bill Sharman and current assistant coach Tex Winter, didn’t make the cut.

The four others honored Monday were Boston Celtic center Robert Parish, Italian player Dino Meneghin, Louisiana Tech women’s Coach Leon Barmore and Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon.

It was good to see Lloyd, who became the first African American to play in an NBA game when he suited up for the Washington Capitols in 1950, get his due. Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 might have had a greater social impact, but Lloyd opened the door to unprecedented success for black athletes. Today the 10 highest-paid players in the NBA are making almost $340 million among them, more than twice what the 10 highest-paid NFL and major league baseball players made last year. And the NBA is the only league in which all of the 10 highest-paid players are African American.

“Am I bitter about all this money that kids make now?” said Lloyd, 75. “I’m not. I felt real good about being in something early on that allowed African American players to come to this league.”

Lloyd didn’t mind if his name wasn’t in the headlines or at the start of a history chapter. In that case, he paved the way for Worthy in more ways than one.

J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com.

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ENTERING HALL OF FAME

JAMES WORTHY, Laker forward

CHICK HEARN, Laker broadcaster