They're Trying To Trim The Lakers' Sales

The Los Angeles Lakers had finished their workout at Loyola Marymount University last Friday afternoon, and coach Pat Riley motioned trainer Gary Vitti into the team huddle to explain how the Lakers could reach their destination for the next night's road game, a far pavilion called the L.A. Sports Arena.

"What's the matter?" Magic Johnson asked Mitch Kupchak, who was getting directions. "Didn't you drive there to see your boy?" Magic said teasingly, alluding to Bruce Springsteen, whom Kupchak has seen in concert numerous times.

"No..." Kupchak said, annoyed, as Magic stared at him with laughing eyes, "...I took a limo."

Somewhere in that scene there was a message that the Los Angeles Clippers—late of Buffalo (where they were known as the Braves), late of San Diego, lately of the Sports Arena and, after falling 108-103 to the Lakers, losers of eight of their last nine games before beating Phoenix 114-109 on Sunday—would love to spread around the city that for two decades has doted on the wildly successful Lakers. It would go something like this: The Lakers may be the darlings of the limousine set, but all roads and all means of transportation lead to Clipper games.

Despite their record, which stood at 5-10 at week's end, the Clippers have cultivated a reputation as The People's Team since moving the 100 miles up the freeway from San Diego last May. They've fielded popular players, most notably Norm Nixon, Bill Walton and Marques Johnson—at popular prices, a $15 top. At the Forum, where the average seat goes for $22, the upstarts are the Inner-City Clippers. To Clipper fans, the rivals are the Inglewood Lakers.

But to Dancing Barry, the light-footed lunatic whose gambadoes in the aisles are a hallmark of Laker games, the Clippers are a form of leverage. When he showed up at the Clippers' home opener, Barry steadfastly ignored the crowd's pleas for him to dance. The next day he called—rather, he had his agent call—Clipper general manager Carl Scheer to find out whether the Clippers wanted to bid for his services. They didn't, so Barry went back to the Lakers—but not until he'd wangled a better deal for himself.

And when Riley heard that he would have to share his practice site at Loyola Marymount with the Clippers, he angrily phoned Scheer. Riley didn't like the idea of rival players fraternizing—of former Laker guard Nixon and Laker swingman Michael Cooper dealing any for-old-times'-sake skin, or of Walton and Laker forward Kurt Rambis swapping trail-mix recipes. "It's like war, Carl," he told Scheer.

"I go to war."

If so, it's a civil war, as a brief genealogy of the two teams reveals. Take a deep breath:

Part of the cash Jerry Buss spent to buy the Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke in 1979 came in a loan from Clipper owner Donald Sterling, who's a buddy of Frank Mariani, whose longtime real-estate partner is Buss, whose Beverly Hills neighbor is Sterling, whose team traded Byron Scott to the Lakers last season for Nixon, whose departure induced the prolonged funk of Laker fan Jack Nicholson, whose reaction was to wear black to Laker games and buy season tickets to the Clippers, whose president is attorney Alan Rothenberg, whose negotiations with the Milwaukee Bucks on behalf of Cooke and the Lakers in '75 brought to L.A. one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whose only peer in the local collegiate hoop pantheon is Walton, whose move from the Portland Trail Blazers to the Clippers in '79 resulted in a compensation case (with grave ramifications for the Clippers) handled for the Blazers by Rothenberg, who also represented Cooke in the sale to Buss of the Lakers, whose original L.A. home was the Sports Arena, where the faithful patrons included a 10-year-old Angeleno named Marques Johnson, whose trade to the Clippers in September reunited him with his former UCLA teammate Walton, whose agent is Ernie Vandeweghe, whose son is Trail Blazer Kiki Vandeweghe, whose current inamorata is Jeanie Buss, whose father is....