Word: laker
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...Look. But that was last season. Now, with West back again, this time as Mr. Coach, the Lakers are leading their division and it is their opponents who are lachrymose. The turnaround is all the more remarkable for having been accomplished primarily with last year's goats, not this year's free agents. The Laker starting lineup, with the exception of former Celtic Don Chaney, is drawn from last season's roster. But 33 wins, including 20 straight home-court victories, v. 16 losses are evidence of the turn-around West has wrought...
...dealer is Freddie Laker, 54, a British aviation maverick who has become the self-proclaimed St. George of cheap transatlantic air travel. His $70 million fleet of ten planes-including three 345-passenger McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jumbo trijets-is painted in the red, white and black colors of his racing stud farm. The planes now work mainly on low-cost charters, including Advance Booking Charters, which Laker helped pioneer. But his No. 1 priority -or threat, as heads of the scheduled airlines would put it-is Skytrain, his proposed cheap ($135 one way), no-frills transatlantic air shuttle service...
...Freddie Laker-he never uses his full first name Frederick-was a poor kid who got rich by seeing new possibilities in air transport. The son of a merchant seaman who deserted the family when Laker was six, he has been hooked on flying machines ever since as a kid he saw both the Hindenburg airship and a Handley Page biplane skimming the sky over Canterbury Cathedral. He quit school at 16 and began his aviation career by sweeping floors and making tea at a flying-boat factory. He eventually went on to become both an R.A.F. pilot...
...Later, Laker became the first head of British United Airways, then the country's largest independent airline, but in 1965 resigned to start his own charter line. Laker Airways has grown into a prosperous concern with current net assets of $140 million. Although he is not one for spartan living himself -he buys a new Rolls-Royce every year and maintains a yacht in Majorca -Laker keeps his business operation lean. A staff of fewer than 20 works out of a modest ten-room block at London's Gatwick Airport, where the boss's own office measures...
Over the past five years, much of Laker's energy has been spent fighting red tape entangling his Skytrain project. He has already spent $1.5 million in legal fees and has triumphed in no fewer than eight official hearings on both sides of the Atlantic. Skytrain, however, is still stalled. Although the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington disapproved the proposal, Skytrain could still be okayed by President Carter. But no White House decision is likely to come until the British make up their own minds about Skytrain. A British appeals court last month invalidated a government ruling that...