Merry, but Still Contrary

It’s quiet now in Lakerdom.

Too quiet, if you ask me.

In the home of the movie studios, we love the classics, however harrowing, and the Lakers outdid themselves when Shaquille O’Neal invited Kobe Bryant to opt his once-golden self out of here and Bryant, by way of reply, called O’Neal fat and callous.

Coaches and teammates projected the life of the feud in decades, or lifetimes. Because O’Neal can express disappointment at not yet having his own statue in front of the arena like Wayne Gretzky’s, you can understand the conviction among those who know O’Neal best that he would never get over this one.

Indeed, O’Neal smoldered for a week. Bryant was defiant, retracting nothing and apologizing to no one, insisting they would just put this behind them, perhaps on the assumption everyone else was as controlled as he is.

Coach Phil Jackson, who had already mused that his team might “implode,” seemed uninterested in picking up the pieces, no more inclined than ever to sit his stars down and give them a good talking to.

Get between those egos? Not in this lifetime or the next 1,000.

Today, those Laker setbacks once more seem temporary and all crises transient. O’Neal and Bryant could duel with swords and it would seem like another episode in a serial with a happy ending, no more real than tears in a soap opera.

Bryant says his first preference is to stay. He and O’Neal say they’re OK. Teammates gasp as O’Neal kids Bryant about his shooting and Bryant kids O’Neal about his weight.

With the arrival of Karl Malone and Gary Payton, who are Yoda and Gandalf in this context, taboos are tumbling. In Dallas, when the Mavericks superimpose O’Neal’s head on Fat Albert’s body on the scoreboard going “Hey, hey, hey!” O’Neal looks over to the bench laughing and everyone breaks up.

“We’re in a very merry place,” Rick Fox said. “Do I think it’s a team that can turn into Robin Hood and his Merry Men? I don’t know if that’s the best thing. I don’t know if we could create another incident like we did, but I think we should definitely feel challenged.”

Happily or not, they’re not out of challenges.

However merry things may be, a friend says Bryant is still “wide open” to leaving.

He isn’t deterred by the prospect of a pay cut, insisting to friends he doesn’t play for money, or expects to make a lot in any case. Some friends think he already knows what he wants to do but isn’t saying.

The Clipper scenario remains possible (requiring a $2-million-to-$4-million cut from the $14.6 million he’ll get if he stays a Laker), as does the San Antonio Spur scenario ($4-million to $6-million cut, but gets to play with Tim Duncan) and even the New York Knick scenario ($10-million cut, Gotham at his feet) some Lakers consider the way to bet if he leaves.

It’s just business, but it’s not business as usual. If it looks as if the Lakers will get their season in before Bryant’s trial and the sense of foreboding around him seems to have lightened, this isn’t merely basketball.

Bryant is under immense pressure as everything in his life comes to a head at once. It only seems as if he has already been tried in the press. His guilt or innocence is yet to be decided.

They aren’t really following a script, even as they’re reduced to cartoon characters. Bryant is now a plaything for the popular culture: coveted by TV personality Nicole Richie, who says on camera during Friday’s game: “I want him to have sex with me;” spoofed in a “Saturday Night Live” skit with wife Vanessa berating him when they’re alone; the inspiration for a Halloween costume worn by a Baltimore Raven player named Travis Taylor.

The Lakers are trying to keep a team together. Bryant is at the crossroads of his life.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

“Anybody who said they couldn’t play together is foolish. They’re hell on wheels right now.... They’re maybe the most talented team I’ve seen in my life.”

-- Spur Coach Gregg Popovich on the Lakers

And then came the wise men from the East.

No matter what happens, nothing would have been possible were it not for Malone and Payton. With stature, experience, no titles and not much time left, they were ideal, having additionally impressed their new teammates by giving up tens of millions of dollars to come here.

If the Lakers thought there was something special about their problems, Malone and Payton had seen it all before. In fact, they’d been in the middle of it.

If Utah was a nice fit for the country-loving Malone, he spent years going back and forth with Jazz owner Larry Miller about contract issues. Malone even did a one-week gig on XTRA in 1998 and suggested he was open to becoming a Laker, which was like a Hatfield vacationing with the McCoys.

Payton’s life was spats, not all verbal, including a celebrated fight with Vernon Maxwell in Seattle that spilled into the weight room, where the aptly named Mad Max picked up a weight and Payton got a chair. Teammate Horace Grant, who helped break them up, was hit on the shoulder by the weight and missed the next game.

“The next day,” said Grant, now a Laker, “they were hanging out together, like it never happened.”

Aghast at the preseason exchange between O’Neal and Bryant, the new Lakers weren’t shy about going to both with the same message -- we didn’t come here for this nonsense -- although they may have called it something else.

Lo and behold, it went away.

Teammates may have sworn they could see smoke coming out of his ears, but O’Neal holed up for only three days, instead of the customary three weeks, before telling the press he was OK with Bryant.

Body language suggested otherwise for a while. The Lakers opened the season beating the Dallas Mavericks. Bryant, who had decided his knee wasn’t strong enough to play, walked out to the bench in the third quarter, sat down next to O’Neal and slapped him on the leg. O’Neal didn’t so much as turn his head.

Nevertheless, on the floor the Big Four were delighted to find how easily they fit together. Everyone gave up something, notably Bryant, whose shots dropped by eight a game. When they tightened their defense in December, they began pounding quality opponents, one after another.

What could go wrong now?

Oh, that.

“Kobe’s different than what I thought,” said Malone, the team’s new spiritual leader. “He’s more laid back than I thought he’d be. And he’s making an effort to really open up to his teammates, which is refreshing.

“Because everybody said that he didn’t, [that] on the plane he put earphones on. I haven’t seen any of that.... Everybody changes a little bit. I think it’s a welcome change.”

Malone is different than they thought too. Laker officials appreciated his offer to take $1.5 million and give Payton the $4.5-million slot -- actually, they refused to believe it until they heard it from his mouth -- but no one thought he had this much game left on top of it.

Watching Malone jostle and warn opposing players nightly, it’s easy to see why all the Jazz rivalries were bitter and he was hated by Laker fans. Now, he’s loved by Laker fans, which takes some getting used to for him.

“You know what?” Malone said. “I don’t know if it’ll ever get totally right. “Oh, God, the first game, Shaq looked at me and said, ‘You all right?’ I said, ‘No, man, I got to get used to these people yelling for me.’

“I see a fan over there, had a couple beers -- and that’s the same one that was booing me [in the past]. And then all of a sudden, he’s saying, ‘We love you now.’

“I’m like, he has had a couple beers.”

Malone used to wonder if anyone outside Utah even knew what he was doing, so he was surprised to his core to see that his new teammates didn’t just respect him, they were like kids who wanted him to read them a bedtime story.

The brash, motor-mouthed Payton kept everyone loose, but the blunt, down-home Malone became the missing elder statesman, a confidant of both O’Neal and Bryant. Or as one insider notes, “Karl is Switzerland.”

Bryant and Malone live near each other in Newport Beach and Bryant has often been drawn to older teammates such as Byron Scott and Derek Harper.

O’Neal and Malone share the experience of being very large men and can talk about guy things like hunting, or wrestling bears.

“They [teammates] realize I don’t have a hidden agenda,” Malone says. “I don’t make more than you. I haven’t won any rings. I don’t have no ax to grind with you....

“I want nothing from you, other than to be your teammate. But three, four, five years from now, whenever, 10 years from now, I want you to be able to say, ‘You know what? That was a real guy right there. He was real.’

“That’s all I want. Not that he was a good player or a good passer, just he was a good guy.”

Of course, by the time this is over, Malone may be a tired guy too.

Apocalypse When?

In the Bible, the apocalypse is the end of the world. Among the crisis-prone Lakers, it also serves as a worst-case scenario, such as the game when heavy rains hit and everyone was late, prompting Jackson to joke:

“I didn’t think the floods had hit. I know the apocalypse is around the corner but maybe not tonight.”

Before, no one could ever get too comfortable around the Lakers, who tended to be dominating, bored or upset at each other, or any combination thereof.

So, which is it now?

Six weeks ago, Jackson, who was never shy about acknowledging the distance between Bryant and teammates, told ESPN the magazine he “wouldn’t be surprised at all” if Bryant left.

Now, Jackson thinks things have taken a decided turn for the better, noting that while he still wouldn’t be surprised if Kobe leaves, “I think he’s going to stay.”

In a low point during the exhibition season, Bryant said, “Every day is a bad day.” Now, lots of days are OK, such as the one when he learned he was the leading vote-getter among the West All-Stars, producing a rare show of emotion from Bryant, who had come back expecting to be booed from coast to coast.

For the first time last week, Bryant said, “My first preference is to stay.” Teammates say he is more one of them than ever before. He and O’Neal are OK on the floor, exchanging nods, pats and high fives, and cordial off it.

“We’re fine,” Bryant said after a recent practice. “We were just sitting in the training room today, just talking about basketball, joking around.

“It’s a mutual respect that we have for one another, in the sense that we can both say what we have to say about one another and then just put it behind us and move on. We know that about one another, so we’re back to doing what we do on the basketball court and having a good time doing it.

“In the locker room, when it’s us two, no cameras, nobody else is around, we sit around, talk, joke around about a lot of stuff, talk about the game....

“He kids me around about shooting. I kid him around about his weight. It’s just locker room stuff that we talk about, but it’s fun. It keeps the whole team light.”

Nevertheless, peace among the Lakers has always been fragile and remains so.

Bryant’s intention to opt out was known for years -- he left maximum extension offers on the table -- but no one thought he had any intention of actually leaving. He and O’Neal were fine -- teammates note ruefully that both got upset at them, at Jackson and at the media last season, but not at each other -- and their team was a dynasty.

The events of summer and fall changed everything. Now everyone concedes Bryant could leave.

Nurtured as well as sheltered growing up, Bryant emerged with a grandiose self-confidence, certain he’d be forgiven for any mistakes and would prevail in the end.

It was true too, at least in basketball.

It takes a long time to learn no one sees things the way you do, assuming you ever learn it. The compartmentalized Bryant thinks he can reserve his option to leave without inquiry, comment or cost.

However, if thousands of words are lavished on sprained ankles, rhythm that’s mysteriously missing and execution that’s inexplicably bad, some must be devoted to a looming issue that will affect the franchise for years.

If it begins to look as though Bryant will leave, there will be a disinvestment process, in which Laker players and fans start to dwell on his shortcomings. This will upset him and the process will spiral downward.

Actually, it started months ago. Last summer, Bryant told Laker officials he wasn’t going to take anything off O’Neal, who then proceeded to announce, “The full team is here,” before Bryant reported.

Then word spread behind the scenes that Bryant was threatening to leave because of O’Neal. Not long after that, O’Neal announced, “If it’s going to be my team, I’ll voice my opinion. If he don’t like it, he can opt out.”

Bryant didn’t like it at all and retaliated memorably the next day.

If there’s still a chance to keep this together, it’s an accomplishment or a miracle, but it remains to be seen. Predicting what Bryant does is hard because no one thinks the way he does. Assuming he wouldn’t dare, he always dares.

Before the season, the thought was that he’d be a perfect teammate because he didn’t need more problems and was physically frail after a summer of surgery and his first taste of fear and depression.

Instead, as soon as he was able to play in the preseason, he went into launch mode.

Even in his lucid incarnation, Bryant tries to take over close games the way he breathes air. This is “The Issue That Won’t Go Away” among the Lakers, leading to much eye-rolling, as after Bryant saved the day in a win against the Bulls and a teammate -- not O’Neal -- asked, “What are we, robots?”

After Bryant’s dramatic game winner Friday, when he sat in a courtroom in Colorado all day, flew back, threw on his uniform and began hoisting away, O’Neal, Payton and, for his first time as a Laker, Malone left without talking.

Bryant’s loyalty is already being questioned by local columnists, because the Lakers have been so helpful, chartering and paying for jets to Colorado.

Of course, this is a business, if an ego-warped one. The NBA is all about the whims of its superstars and the Lakers were built on the defections of other teams’ stars, getting Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when they demanded trades from Philadelphia and Milwaukee and signing O’Neal away from Orlando.

It’s only basketball. Bryant might not enjoy himself as much on another team and rue the day he left, but it won’t do any real damage.

He has a life to put back together. He’ll never be our unaffected little Kobe again, for whom everything was simple. He’s a grown-up now and nothing is.