Updated: March 21, 2000, 5:29 PM ET

I Love L.A.

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By Bob Kravitz
ESPN The Magazine
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The King of L.A. is home again. Three years after a three-year exile in the gulags of Pittsburgh and New York, Kings left wing Luc Robitaille is merrily driving his Cadillac Escalade down La Cienega Boulevard. He and his wife, Stacia, giddily point out the sights like proud and proprietary members of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce.

There, he says, is Rodeo Drive. "Get past the armed guards at Cartier?" he asks with a laugh that never seems far from the surface.

"Oh," says Stacia, a striking L.A. woman he married eight years ago. "Down there is Westwood. So many big, old, beautiful theaters. We've been to so many movie premieres down there. It's a curious thing that Robitaille is more synonymous with L.A. hockey than any Kings player ever -- more than Marcel Dionne, more than Rogie Vachon, more than Dave Taylor, more, even, than the Great Gretzky. "He is our face in this city," says Taylor, now the Kings GM. "He has been since the day he came here as a 20-year-old." It's curious because Robitaille seems like he'd be the last guy to wear wrap-around shades and croon, "I love L.A."

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