Marques, Clippers in Tiff on Contract

Marques Johnson has filed a grievance against the Clippers with the National Basketball Assn., claiming that the club has not honored revisions supposedly made in his contract when he was acquired from the Milwaukee Bucks last September.

The grievance was filed in November but only recently came to light. It is tentatively scheduled to be heard by an arbitrator this spring.

Larry Fleisher, general counsel for the players’ union, said Monday that all modifications of existing contracts must be approved by both the NBA office and the association. Fleisher said that changes in the contract had not been submitted for union approval by the Clippers, and a league spokesman said that the NBA has no record of the revised contract.

The grievance contends that Johnson agreed to have part of his $900,000 salary this season deferred if the Clippers would guarantee the final two years of his five-year contract. Johnson’s complaint says that he is not getting paid at his original salary.

“Since the modified contract was never filed, Marques should be making his original salary,” Fleisher said. “You can understand why Marques would file a complaint. Even if he agreed to the revisions, there is no signed contract with the league that says that. So it’s not binding.”

Fleisher said that the dispute could be heard by an arbitrator as early as mid-April. Johnson and his representatives originally filed the complaint in November, after learning that the modifications had not been submitted.

Clipper President Alan Rothenberg, who negotiated both the six-player trade with the Bucks and the proposed revisions in Johnson’s contract, said that he had not sent the revisions to the league office because Johnson and his representatives, among them former UCLA star Willie Naulls, had not approved the final draft.

“What happened was that we first had an oral agreement,” Rothenberg said. “Then, we had a written agreement, but it wasn’t written on the proper NBA forms. Then, we put it on the NBA forms, and he (Johnson) took it to his representatives. They apparently found something they didn’t like, so they didn’t sign it. And we didn’t send it to the league.” Asked whether Johnson, 29, was getting paid according to the terms of his original or revised contract, Rothenberg said: “I honestly don’t know at what rate he’s being paid. He hasn’t complained about it to me after he went ahead and filed the grievance. If we’re paying him less than 100% of his salary, we aren’t trying to put the squeeze on him or anything.”

Johnson, approached before Monday night’s game, said: “There’s not much to say. The arbitrator will look at it and decide.”

Naulls also declined to comment. “I’m not Marques’ agent,” he said. “I’m just a friend who helped him out in this case.”

According to figures released by the Detroit Free Press in January, Johnson is the seventh-highest paid forward in the NBA, but he will move up the list in future years. Johnson’s original Milwaukee contract calls for him to earn $900,000 this season, $1.1 million next season, $1.3 million in 1986-87, $1.4 million in 1987-88 and $1.5 million in 1988-89. None of Johnson’s salary is deferred under the original agreement, but the final two seasons are not guaranteed.

Obviously, it would benefit Johnson to have the last two years guaranteed, since he will be in his early 30s then.

Rothenberg would not comment when asked if the club would reconsider its offer to guarantee the final two years of his contract since learning recently of Johnson’s treatment at a drug rehabilitation center in July, 1983. But in a Feb. 9 story in The Times, Rothenberg said he would have thought twice about acquiring Johnson if he had known of his hospitalization.

“From now on, we aren’t going to talk at all about the drug thing,” Rothenberg said Monday. “This is so bloody sensitive that I think it’s best we don’t say anything.”

Rothenberg said that his relationship with Johnson has been friendly from the start, and that neither the grievance nor Rothenberg’s comments after Johnson’s treatment became public knowledge has done anything to change that.

“There has been so much written about the (drug) thing between Marques and us that it looks like the daggers have been drawn, but that’s not the case,” Rothenberg said. “This is a friendly dispute, if you can have those these days. This is just a minor disagreement in the language of the contract. It (the grievance) has been sitting around the league office since November.

Johnson, a four-time NBA all-star, is averaging 16.5 points a game this season, which ties his career low.

“Let me emphasize again that, although it looks like our relationship is under siege, it’s a friendly disagreement,” Rothenberg said. “We want to work this out with Marques.”