Sitting in a foldable metal chair, Larry Nance Sr. observed his son’s basketball practice with something peculiar on his head.
To most a Lakers hat in the team’s El Segundo gym isn’t anything to pause about — but for a three-time all-star who battled L.A. in a pair of playoff meetings, it was something few could have predicted to see.
“When I was playing in Phoenix, the Lakers were our tough team that came through and beat the crap out of us all the time,” he said at Lakers practice on Wednesday.
Nance’s Suns went just 13-32 against the purple and gold, including two postseason drubbings, but that hasn’t stopped him at all from supporting his son, Larry Nance Jr., in his rookie season with the Lakers.
“He’s converted real quickly,” said head coach Byron Scott, who played for the Showtime teams that Nance faced. “His son is here, playing and happy. I think the dad’s pretty happy right now.”
The elder Nance is indeed enjoying his son’s first handful of NBA game. Nance Jr. has played meaningful minutes off the bench in L.A.’s last seven games, catching eyeballs mostly with hustle and rebounding.
“He’s playing hard,” Nance Sr. said. “That’s the number one rule in our house: to give 100 percent. And he’s doing that. So I’m really happy with it.”
And while Nance Jr. has given a couple previews of his ability to throw down highlight jams, he insists that his Slam Dunk champion father has him beat.
��I’d say I’m scrappier,” Nance Jr. said. “ He’s obviously taller. He’s a better athlete than I am. He had all that going for him. But all the littler stuff is what I try to focus on.”
Junior encourages people to go online and look up his dad’s dunks, including the series of throw-downs that won him the 1984 contest over Julius Erving.
Yet Nance Sr. claims that his son is “much stronger” and on a faster track than he was.
“At this point in his career, he understands the game better than I did,” Nance Sr. said. “He has a better shot than I did at the beginning.”
Before the Lakers’ game against Phoenix on Monday, Nance Jr. got to see the setting of his father’s beginnings. He met up with a few of Senior’s old teammates and visited the team’s wall of record holders.
But Junior is used to people singing his dad’s praises.
“To everybody else that’s Larry Nance,” he said. “That’s just Dad to me.”
Dad would like to see his son carry his legacy by competing in the Slam Dunk contest, and Junior agrees that it would be “cool at some point.” Maybe by then Nance Jr. will have changed his agenda for the competition.
“He was going to put me in a wheelchair, roll me out under the basket and slam dunk on top of me,” Nance Sr. said. “How’s that? Isn’t that a great kid?”