Ceballos Escapes Shadow of Suns : Laker Forward Steps Into Spotlight After Serving as Backup in Phoenix

Cedric?

A butler can be Cedric. An English actor can be Cedric. But an NBA star? Not likely.

Nor does it help if you’re a 6-foot-3 forward in high school with ribs poking out of a skinny chest and you’ll never get past 6-7 in an era when point guards come that tall. You might have dreamed the dream growing up in Compton, pretending to be Magic Johnson or Norm Nixon but in real life you’re almost off the board.

That’s Cedric Ceballos, the basketball star from left field.

Now the Lakers’ leading scorer with numbers--22 points a game, 50% shooting from the floor, nine rebounds--that might make him an all-star, he was once a skinny sub at Dominguez High, unremarkable, unnoticed and unrecruited.

Well, maybe not completely unrecruited.

“I think I got a letter from Walla Walla, Wash.,” Ceballos said. “That was about it.

“I didn’t make the varsity until my junior year in high school. I didn’t play much until one of the starters got hurt. I just blossomed afterward. I was just an OK player, not really too flashy.”

After two more productive years at Ventura College, he still didn’t get to choose between UCLA and UNLV. He went to Cal State Fullerton, still thinking of himself as a student-athlete.

“I just thought I’d play two years of basketball, graduate and get on with my life,” he said. “I didn’t have any intention of playing in the NBA. Then at the end of my senior year, pro scouts started coming to our games. That’s when I really started thinking about it. I thought, ‘If I’m drafted, I’ll try it for a year.’ ”

But all the while, Ceballos recalled a lesson learned from his junior college coach, Phil Mathews.

Said Ceballos: “He ingrained in me, and I carry it still, a philosophy: Play hard, play hard all the time; if you’re not going to play hard, sit down.”

Ceballos worked hard, all right, with a game appropriate for an afterthought.

He didn’t wait for the ball to be brought to him while his teammates cleared a side. He went away from the ball and dashed here and there tirelessly, hoping to free himself near the basket and that whoever had the ball noticed.

He led the Big West in scoring twice and was among the nation’s top 10 rebounders as a senior. Still a long shot at his size, the Phoenix Suns got him with the 11th pick of the second round in 1990.

Luckily, the gruff, garrulous coach, Cotton Fitzsimmons, had a front-office job waiting for him and worked that way, playing whom he wanted when he wanted. Young Cedric wouldn’t be trapped behind No. 1 picks with guaranteed contracts; he’d get a shot, if he earned it.

“I played good in the summer league but that was just summer league,” Ceballos said. “When the season started, it was back to reality. I sat there and watched other players play, just learning.

“The great thing about Cotton, he’d just throw you in, play you the whole game. The bad thing was, no matter what you did, you might not play the next five games.

“But he was great for me. He always got on me. I don’t think rookies have a rookie year now but I had one with him. He made me carry the bags, yelled at me on every play, never gave me a call in practice. Any discretion he had between me and a player with years, the player with years got the call. He showed me how hard I’d have to work just to get respect in practice, much less games.”

Developing slowly, Ceballos was averaging 13 points a game by his third season and won the slam-dunk contest with his famous blindfold jam, though skeptics claimed he could really see.

The Suns reached the NBA finals but without him; he had broken a bone in his left foot in the Western Conference finals. With flashy Richard Dumas in his place, the Suns took the Chicago Bulls to six games before losing.

Last season, with Dumas back in drug rehab and Charles Barkley hurt, Ceballos scored 40 points twice, 30 seven times and in one seven-game stretch averaged 31.8.

Overall, he averaged 19 points and 6.5 rebounds--in 30 minutes a game--and found himself on the trading block.

The Suns had hit the jackpot with free agents Danny Manning and Wayman Tisdale, needed room under the salary cap and suspected that Ceballos, growing ever more restive, wouldn’t like fighting for minutes as the third forward.

Voila! Jerry West got Ceballos for a No. 1 pick.

Ceballos complained of not having been “respected and appreciated” by the Suns but after he took off with the Lakers, discovered the big picture.

“I wasn’t getting frustrated. . . .” he began.

“Oh man, all you ever talked about was how they wouldn’t play you!” interjected Laker teammate Tony Smith.

“I wasn’t really complaining,” said Ceballos, beginning again, “but no matter what you did, you knew you were expendable. You weren’t going to take over for Barkley, KJ (Kevin Johnson). With Charles and Kevin, I’d be camped out at the three-point line, pointing at the referee to get my man legal, buying me a ticket and watching.

“But they treated me right. I didn’t have a no-trade contract but they came to me. I had a couple options but the light was kind of shining in L.A.”

Well, it was intermittent at first as Coach Del Harris learned how to use a 20-point scorer he calls a “slipping, sliding, sneaking, hiding sort of a ballplayer.

“I tell you,” Harris said, “I don’t know how many points he’s scored. Let’s see, 20 points a game for 20 games--as a coach I can probably take credit for running some good offense that got him 10 of them and he got the other 390.

“As far as the way we use him, ironically, we don’t use him much different than Phoenix did. I have found he has such a unique ability to get open--he gets open more when I call a play for another player. He’s a very difficult guy to set a game plan against. You couldn’t say, when they run play 50, we’re gonna trap or we’re gonna switch. Because they didn’t have anything for him.

“It’s like Dennis Rodman. How do you play him? I mean, he’s in the game, he’s part of your game plan. You can say, ‘Well, block out Rodman.’ But you can’t. Cedric’s the same way. You say, ‘Try to keep Cedric from scoring. I don’t know how exactly you do that but keep track of him, keep your body on him.’

“But everybody’s geared to helping out on defense. Soon as you help out--where’d he go?”

A career 52% shooter, Ceballos shot 43% in his first nine games; since he’s at 54%.

The garbage man the Suns told to stay around the basket is moving out on the floor. Ceballos tried 23 three-point shots in four seasons in Phoenix, making two. This season, he’s taking one a game, making a respectable 36%.

If he always looked like a star--Ceballos dresses expensively, dabbles in the music business as a singer/songwriter, is single, likes to mingle--he’s becoming the real thing. “That’s always a dream, a fantasy,” he said. “Having your own commercial, having your own shoes. Being like Mike. Everybody wants to be Mike now and then.”

And not being afraid to let it out, either. Ceballos has begun noting his contributions to victories and wondering out loud where his shots and/or minutes went in losses. “Well, that’s all right,” Harris said. “He’s such a competitor.”

Last week, he became the first Laker to score 50 points since Gail Goodrich in 1975. The first call he got was from Barkley, congratulating him and telling him not to expect to get that many in the America West Arena.

If there’s something familiar about it, it’s because Ceballos dreamed it as a skinny kid, before he became the NBA’s one and only Cedric, 25 and sneaking up on stardom, at last.

* CLIPPERS LOSE: They can’t win even though Minnesota was playing without leading scorer Isaiah Rider. C2