Best in Showtime

On the eve of their last season together, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant began ripping each other publicly, no novelty for them but a shock for new teammate Karl Malone.

Malone finally scolded both, assuring the media, “It’s not going to continue. Trust me.”

Within hours, ESPN’s Jim Gray was on the air, relaying Bryant’s statement calling O’Neal “fat,” accusing him of malingering and sneering at his notion of leadership (“You also don’t threaten not to play defense and not to rebound if you don’t get the ball every time down the floor.”)

What did Malone know? He had spent his career in Utah.

These were the Lakers.

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When exactly did an organization, which was already storied, star-studded and glamorous, cross the line into the monster the Lakers became?

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see at all.

On July 18, 1996, their proud tradition veered into uncharted waters when O’Neal signed with them, noting he had already “won at every level except college and the pros.”

If the Lakers didn’t already know it, life was a carnival around Shaq, whether he meant there to be one or not.

If no one had ever seen such whimsy in so huge a package, no one had seen a human lightning rod like Bryant, his 17-year-old teammate, with whom O’Neal would form the game’s greatest tandem, wage the game’s greatest feud and start the epic soap opera that continues, 11 years later.

For years they were linked, or chained together -- “Shaq and Kobe” -- but it wasn’t just them.

This was the exact intersection of sports and show business, an entire organization of stars -- on the court, in the front office, in the stands -- brimming with ego, living in the fast lane, teetering on the edge.

Shaq and Kobe just provided the finishing touch, literally -- reality programming -- after which this wasn’t just basketball but a true-life Survivor: Los Angeles.

Try finding another team with an owner’s beautiful daughter who posed for Playboy, dates the coach, runs the business operation and just went on radio to chide her brother, who’s second in command to their father, for zinging her boyfriend.

The Sopranos ... The Tudors ... the Lakers!

After the Lakers, everywhere else was Mayberry. In Shaq and Kobe’s heyday, NBA Commissioner David Stern joked his dream matchup was “the Lakers versus the Lakers.”

Amazingly, suggesting the shivers going up and down fans’ spines watching Bryant’s high-wire act, it’s still true with O’Neal gone and the glory days over. Even in the Lakers’ present shrunken incarnation, their TV ratings during their brief playoff stay topped everyone else’s this spring.

If they’re preeminent in the NBA, their hold on this community is absolute.

Readership for Lakers stories is often near the top of everything in The Times, as measured by hits on the paper’s website. Wednesday, as Bryant obliged by changing his position on demanding a trade hourly, Lakers stories were Nos. 1, 2 and 5.

Lakers stories were also Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on Sunday, when all Bryant said was, “I’m still frustrated. I’m waiting for them to make some changes.”

This was once a Dodgers town, but the team that still draws 3 million annually runs a distant second. A Lakers notebook on Kwame Brown’s ankle surgery got almost twice as many Web readers as the game story on the Dodgers’ 9-8 victory over the Cubs 10 days ago.

It goes downhill from there. When the Ducks won Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals, that day’s lead Lakers story got 20 times as many hits.

Too bad the Lakers have to devour themselves as they go. An entertainment colossus like this doesn’t come around all the time, or, actually, ever.

Tinseltown,

mon amour

Showtime wasn’t just on the court. Part of the show was all those gorgeous women walking around the Forum on display. And the players noticed, definitely. They’d be at the free-throw line and on the bench and they’d look too.

-- Cookie Kelly Johnson,

in Magic Johnson’s book “My Life”

Not that anyone suspected what lay ahead when the Lakers arrived in Los Angeles in 1960, as if they had fallen off a turnip truck.

Bringing the Dodgers from Brooklyn required a years-long civic battle that entailed giving them control of a hilltop overlooking downtown.

Bringing the Lakers from Minneapolis required nothing, not even an invitation. Hard-pressed owner Bob Short just dropped them off and went home to his truck company.

It was like sprinkling the bumpkins with fairy dust. With stars like Doris Day coming to see Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, the NBA, still tied to its YMCA-league image, discovered something new and unimaginable ... glamour.

The Lakers minted personalities: bombastic owner Jack Kent Cooke, who whisked them out of the Sports Arena to his “Fabulous Forum” in Inglewood after a fight with the Coliseum Commission; colorful Chick Hearn, who, along with the Dodgers’ Vin Scully, created another phenomenon, the superstar announcer.

In 1968, Wilt Chamberlain forced the Philadelphia 76ers to trade him here, joining Baylor and West. A new age dawned, with the Lakers as NBA players’ destination of choice.

Not that this meant an actual change in the Boston-dominated hierarchy. As the Lakers proceeded to demonstrate, with egos came ego wars.

Chamberlain and Lakers coach Butch van Breda Kolff fought so much, the players called The Times “Butch’s paper” and the Herald Examiner “Wilt’s paper.”

It ended in a Game 7 loss to the Celtics in the 1969 Finals after Cooke had put balloons at the ceiling for the victory celebration, Chamberlain took himself out, saying he was hurt, and Van Breda Kolff wouldn’t put him back in.

Their first title here in 1972 was like a bolt of lightning that fades as fast, with Baylor gone and Chamberlain and West soon to follow, but the parade barely paused.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar forced the Milwaukee Bucks to trade him here in 1975. Magic Johnson came in the 1979 draft and Showtime was born, taking the glitz to a new level.

They won five titles in the ‘80s. Capitol Records President Joe Smith called Magic the biggest star in town after seeing people at Le Dome, who were used to movie stars, go bonkers when he walked through the restaurant.

Lakers Coach Pat Riley, who had never acted, was offered a movie lead that went to Kurt Russell after Riley turned it down. When Riley’s friend, Michael Douglas, won an Academy Award for playing Gordon Gekko with his hair slicked back like Pat’s, Riley wired him, “I have to believe it was the hair.”

There weren’t just stars in the stands now, there were generations of them bumping into each other.

Anthony Kiedis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ singer, approached Jack Nicholson sitting courtside and asked whether he could give Johnson a song he had written about him.

“Don’t bother me, kid,” Nicholson said.

In a five-year period after Shaq and Kobe arrived, the Wall Street Journal counted up four CDs, 17 film credits and more than 50 TV appearances by Lakers.

One night radio announcer Paul Sunderland asked reserve center John Salley if he had seen “The Green Mile.”

“I read for it,” Salley said.

The one and

only Kobe

Bryant was 17 when he arrived, still living with his parents who moved here, so well-mannered that media people used to say, “Don’t ever change.”

Older players such as Byron Scott, whom he looked up to and constantly asked for advice, loved him. O’Neal, who tried to take Bryant under his wing and named him “Showboat” when rebuffed, didn’t, along with most of the team.

Not that Bryant cared. The darling of his close-knit family, he had total confidence, an iron will and no interest in what anyone outside his family thought.

“You ask what Kobe was like as a kid,” said Del Harris, his first Lakers coach, who had to turn down his requests to go into the post, noting O’Neal was there. “That’s just it. He was never a kid.”

Kobe was a kid, all right. A star as a teenager -- he was an All-Star starter at 19, shooting it out with Michael Jordan in a ballyhooed duel -- he wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it.

But he was an incredibly grown-up kid, all but skipping childhood in the belief he had a “destiny” to serve. “I think all of us do,” he said. “I think some of us just figure out what it is ... at an earlier age.”

When did he figure out his?

“I knew it since I was 5,” he said.

He was 21 then.

He had already won the first of his three titles and started the first of his nine All-Star games. By then, there was nothing he didn’t think he could do. I was one of his few media confidants then -- he was highly insular, before anything bad happened -- and I knew how nice he could be and how special he was.

He didn’t understand that everyone else wasn’t as bulletproof as he was. Serenely confident in his destiny, he wasn’t envying anyone and didn’t know why anyone would envy him.

If he infuriated O’Neal, he barely knew Shaq was there. He didn’t even realize O’Neal was upset until Shaq started going off on him in the newspapers.

Jordan took great care of his image, as when he declined to back a Democratic senatorial candidate in North Carolina, saying, “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

It never occurred to Kobe that anyone might not like anything he did, on the court or off.

It was clear that life was going to be a lot harder for him than basketball, but it was a biblical fall: an ugly split with his family over his marriage; seizing control of his affairs from his father and dropping father-figure agent Arn Tellem; his arrest; the dynasty’s fall and the years of decline.

Bryant’s serenity and invulnerability were long gone. From the moment O’Neal left, the question was how long Kobe could hold up.

The answer was always the same, basic Kobe denial: “I don’t think we’re that far away.”

The Lakers were a long way away. Nevertheless, by February’s All-Star game in Las Vegas, a sadder, wiser, but amazingly resurgent Bryant was not only back but more popular than he’d ever been.

He was the All-Star game’s most valuable player. His jersey was No. 1 in sales. His peers, who once shunned him, were as much in awe of his breathtaking exploits, like last year’s 81-point game.

Universally acclaimed as the game’s best player, with his Lakers surpassing all expectations, the world was his. “It’s a good time for me,” he said.

Then the bottom dropped out of the Lakers’ world and Kobe’s mood, which tumbled all the way to last week’s meltdown. Three years of bottled anguish blew like a geyser with no thought to how it played -- like a Lindsay Lohan weekend.

He’s still Kobe Bryant. He wants what he wants, which is out ... wait, he says he didn’t demand a trade ... oops, he just demanded one

They’re still the Lakers, so it’s going to continue. Trust me.

mark.heisler@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Lakers legacy

*--* LAKERS RETIRED NUMBERS 44 Jerry West 13 Wilt Chamberlain 22 Elgin Baylor 25 Gail Goodrich 32 Magic Johnson 33 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 42 James Worthy

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*--* L.A. LAKERS CHAMPIONSHIPS 1971-72 defeated New York, 4-1 1979-80 defeated Philadelphia, 4-2 1981-82 defeated Philadelphia, 4-2 1984-85 defeated Boston, 4-2 1986-87 defeated Boston, 4-2 1987-88 defeated Detroit, 4-3 1999-00 defeated Indiana, 4-2 2000-01 defeated Philadelphia, 4-1 2001-02 defeated New Jersey, 4-0

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