HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID : Kings’ Rookie Catches Fancy of Forum Fans

The rookie brought the puck down the left wing. The defenseman came out to cover, forcing him wide. While being tackled, skating on one foot, and from an angle nearly parallel with the net, the rookie scores on a sharp wrist shot.

“Luuuuuuc, Luuuuuuc,” the Forum crowd erupts. The fans are chanting for their newest favorite King, Luc Robitaille.

Robitaille, 20, is leading the National Hockey League’s rookies in scoring, goals, assists, shots and shooting percentage.

Luc Robitaille is not the sort of young man to hold a grudge. Good thing for the NHL. He was snubbed in the 1984 draft--Robitaille was picked by the Kings in the 9th round, 171st overall. Small wonder Robitaille’s sensational rookie season has left professional scouts around the league red-faced.

Robitaille was a find, an overlooked player from an undervalued league. He has been trying to beat a rap against his skating, against his defensive abilities. And Robitaille has gone about it in his own honest, hard-working, cornball fashion. To stretch a Canadian metaphor, Robitaille is the Dudley Do-Right of the NHL.

THE BEGINNING Claude and Madeleine Robitaille began to see sports as a way to keep their three children from mixing with Montreal’s growing drug culture. They wanted no idle hands in the family.

That’s the way it had always been for the Robitailles. Claude started working at a scrap yard, eventually working to the point where he owns two used car-parts yards.

After 10-hours at work, Claude would play amateur hockey. He did that until he was 42 years old.

For his eldest son, hockey meant even more.

“For Luc, hockey was before everything,” Claude Robitaille said. “Even in the summer, he played it outside. He’d play with a tennis ball, for his reflexes. I think that’s why he has good hands now.

“We were careful with him. I knew all the potential he had. I didn’t want him to think he was better than he was. I always told him to work hard.”

If ever there was a theme to an athletic career, then the ethic of hard work is Robitaille’s.

Not a naturally gifted skater, Robitaille made up for his lack of hockey skills by working that much harder--mentally and physically.

“My game has always been to pass the puck,” Robitaille said. “I was never a good skater. I was never a guy who would deke a guy and score. My game is to give it and get it back.”

It was said of Robitaille that he could score but not skate. As a boy, while walking on sidewalks, Robitaille would try to step on each crack because he believed it would lengthen his stride. He would walk along playing hockey games in his mind, all but throwing body checks to fellow pedestrians.

The scoring came easily. Last year, while playing in the Quebec League, Robitaille was the League’s Most Valuable Player and its co-leading scorer. He scored or assisted on 45% of his team’s goals. His 63 goals and 123 assists were an amazing output but tarnished by the Quebec League’s reputation for producing one-dimensional players.

“We had a scout, Alex Smart, watching the Quebec League. We were getting reports on Luc,” said Rogie Vachon, King general manager. “We could see that he had good hands and was good in the corners. He is very smart.

“The knock on him was that most of the scouts in the NHL thought that he wasn’t fast enough to skate in the National Hockey League.”

THE DRAFT Living only minutes from the Montreal Forum, Luc and his father were as close to the site of the draft as almost anyone.

Yet Robitaille didn’t want to go to the Forum that day in 1984, such were the dreary reports he received about his chances in the draft. He was told he was rated somewhere in the top 200.

“I didn’t want to put a tie on, I thought maybe I wouldn’t get drafted,” he said. “After each round, when they didn’t call my name, I kept thinking, ‘Next one, next one.’ It started at 10 (a.m.), and I wasn’t drafted by 4.”

Claude Robitaille had sat silently next to his son. “After the eighth round, he wanted to go home. He saw the players who had been drafted ahead of him and he didn’t think he would be drafted. I said, ‘Let’s stay and see.’

“I was disappointed for Luc. He is such a hard worker, so many players got there so easily. They didn’t have to work. This guy, he worked so hard. He did everything they told him.”

Robitaille was swallowing hard. As he watched player after player rise and shake hands with an NHL general manager, embarking on the career he wanted, he swallowed harder. Part of his pride slid down his throat. Ninth round.

“When they finally called my name, I felt like a god,” Robitaille said. “When you have a dream, and you can do it, how can you not be happy? I am proud that I can do what I want. How many people do that? I want to be in the NHL a long time. I love it so.”

THE VETERAN Marcel Dionne had noticed Robitaille in the rookie’s first training camp. This was in part because there is not much happening in and around a hockey rink that escapes Dionne’s notice and in part because Robitaille “was the first French-Canadian I had seen in a long time who had a good attitude,” Dionne said. “At first, I just watched him. I didn’t talk to him in two years.”

Dionne arrived at this season’s training camp, 35 years old and not only the team’s ranking veteran, but the league’s reigning Hall of Famer-to-be. Twenty-year-old Luc Robitaille, as earnest a rookie as ever laced skates, was Dionne’s roommate.

Robitaille was bursting with pride and excitement. “No one will believe me at home, that I was Marcel Dionne’s roommate,” Robitaille said at the Kings’ camp in Victoria, British Columbia.

The rookie soaked up every giddy moment of Dionne’s crash course while playing on his line at camp.

“I knew if I wanted to be good in the NHL, this was the man I had to follow,” Robitaille said of Dionne. “It must be him. He’s been in the league for 16 years, he must be doing something right.”

Never had Dionne seen a rookie so eager to learn. The same went for Jimmy Carson, the Kings’ No. 1 draft pick last summer.

“Jimmy used to come into our room at night, we’d talk hockey for hours,” Dionne said. “If there was another cot for Jimmy, he would have stayed in there.

“With Luc, I knew right away that I would like him. He makes me laugh.”

He made the King coaching staff smile. Robitaille, perhaps trying more to impress Dionne than his coaches, had an outstanding camp.

His skating had improved since he, at the Kings’ behest, trained with power skating instructor Laura Stamm. Robitaille had worked on his defensive game, improving it, too.

The soft hands were still there, and the young man they drafted at 6-feet, 178-pounds was now a strapping 6-1, 190.

“He was just a kid that wanted to play in the NHL so bad, he would do anything in the world to get better,” Vachon said. “He absorbed everything we told him. Personally, there was no doubt that he would make the club. He was a can’t-miss kid. As an organization, we looked at each other and smiled. We knew we really had something here.”

How times had changed. Before, when a scout reported raves about Robitaille, he was greeted with skepticism. Perhaps King management had forgotten how they acquired team captain Dave Taylor--in the 15th round in 1975, picked 210th.

THE BUNKHOUSE “One day he just asked me, ‘If you make the team, what are you going to do?’ I said that if I made the team, I was going to live in a boarding house, I didn’t know the city,” recalled Robitaille of the day his idol asked him to become a boarder.

“Marcel called me from training camp and told me about the boys (rookies Robitaille, Carson and Steve Duchesne). He told me they were special,” Carol Dionne said.

Special enough to be tucked under Dionne’s wing and looked after. “It was like winning the Loto,” Claude Robitaille said. Dionne had once met the Robitaille family and promised to look after Luc for them.

Dionne did that, and more. He found a home for each of the King rookies. He gave Robitaille a bedroom in his home, placed Duchesne with friends, and, with a late night phone call to his next-door neighbor (‘A con job,’ Dionne called it), he found a home for Carson.

This was not a hotel Robitaille had signed into, but a working, breathing household, complete with three children. The adjustments were infinite.

“The kids get up at 6:30 in the morning, and they want to play,” Dionne said, sounding tired himself. At first, they wanted to play with Uncle Luc, but he swiftly discouraged this activity at such an hour.

Instead, Uncle Luc allows Dionne’s son Garrett to nap with him on game days. Drew, 3 1/2, sleeps with Dionne.

“Sometimes we think he’s our boy,” Dionne said, illustrating how well Robitaille fits in.

It has become a substitute family, not a replacement. The Robitailles in Montreal still run up an average of $300 a month in phone bills. “He’s a family boy,” Claude said. “With Marcel’s family, he doesn’t forget us. But it is much easier on him.”

Dionne has eased the pain of adjusting to Southern California. Dionne took the rookies out and helped them open bank accounts. He advised them on buying cars, sensible cars. Often, Carson, Dionne and Robitaille ride to work together.

Of course, much has been made of this unique relationship. “Dionne Also a Superstar in Nursemaid Role.” Nearly all of these stories makes some mention of the ‘revitalization’ of Dionne, how he’s had a better attitude being around the rookies.

Dionne, a man of great pride, bristles at this, but says: “It pleases you to see them work hard. I work hard, I work very hard. Luc needs to remember that in order to stay here, he needs to work hard, too.”

THE REST Dionne leads the Kings in scoring, Robitaille is second. The rookie, however, has scored more goals. So adept at goal scoring is Robitaille, in fact, that he is fifth in the league in that category.

“He’s excellent around the net, he’s got a good sense for the puck,” is the way King Coach Pat Quinn sees it.

Despite his lingering weakness on the defensive side, no one disputes Robitaille’s ability to score, or pass the puck to someone who will.

Dionne sees few pitfalls ahead, but is cautious. “After 30 games, he hasn’t been in a real tight situation,” he said. “Things have been pretty smooth. The only thing that could really hurt him now is overconfidence. I don’t see that at all.

“His private life will change. It’s going to be very, very difficult. Everyone wants to talk to him, everybody is going after him. He’s trying to be nice to everyone. Knowing him, he’s going to say yes to everyone.”

Claude Robitaille says his son inherited his wife’s kindness and his own will to work.

“I have seen a lot of guys in juniors, I used to look at these guys and think they were great,” Robitaille said. “They were drafted ahead of me. Now I’m in the NHL and I don’t see them anywhere. I don’t want to be like them.

“Inside of me, I am never negative. I am always positive. I know that when you want to do something, and you work hard, you can get it. Sometimes I can get down and I think, ‘What’s going on?’ I found out that it doesn’t matter how talented you are. It’s in your mind.”