A Really Big Show (Ewing) Opens Up Off Broadway

The future of pro basketball, or at least a reasonable facsimile, arrived on schedule Friday night in suburban Virginia before an enthusiastic crowd whose taste in history tended to run toward the kind that wore sneakers.

Who is to fill the very big shoes of our graying NBA stars? Perhaps it will be Patrick Ewing, already anointed as the Next Great Center, who made his professional debut as a New York Knick in an exhibition game against the Washington Bullets at the Patriot Center of George Mason University.

Ewing, the 7-foot, $16-million man, indicated how he will be earning his salary for the next 10 years. The rookie center played 24 minutes and recorded a double-double. Ewing scored just 10 points and shot only 3 for 8, but he also had 15 rebounds, blocked a shot and managed a long, cold stare at Bullet rookie Tony Costner.

What had happened? Maybe not everyone in the sellout crowd of 9,400 saw, but actor Jack Nicholson did.

“Costner popped him in the mouth,” said Nicholson, who was a spectator at an exhibition that was less like a game and more like an event.

In another time, it would have been called a happening. You just had to be there. Nicholson was, only a few hours after taking a lunch with Meryl Streep, who did not attend.

But Ewing’s college coach at Georgetown, John Thompson, flew in from Colorado Springs just to watch the game with the entire Hoya team. What they saw was one young, tall, rich center play pretty well in a pretty awful exhibition game.

He didn’t really control the game, but then nothing really dominated except sloppy play. There were 56 turnovers.

More than 150 members of the media swarmed to the event to capture every nuance of Ewing’s first NBA game. The Bullets figure they could have sold out the 19,105-seat Capital Centre for the exhibition.

The Bullets defeated Ewing and the Knicks, 85-78, but who cares? The game’s principal performer said he did not consider his debut, or his brief meeting with 7-7 Bullet rookie center Manute Bol to be particularly memorable.

“Will I remember it 5 or 10 years from now?” Ewing repeated a question. “I don’t know about that, since that’s 5 or 10 years away.”

Of course, Ewing is now . The NBA’s future is playing in the present tense. Ewing feels no pressure to be good, possibly because most everyone else, like Knick Coach Hubie Brown, feels there is none.

“He has presence,” Brown said of Ewing. “The star quality has presence. That’s what separates him from the rest. Just standing there, you know there’s something great about him.”

There had better be, the Knicks hope, because they have invested a great deal of money in the belief that Ewing’s future will parallel their own.

Ewing will earn $750,000 this season. He also has a $5-million interest-free loan, which is worth a few bucks. He has a reported $14 million in incentives built into his contract, which also has a unique clause that enables him to renegotiate his contract if he falls out of the top four highest-paid NBA players.

To be sure, the crowd knew what it had paid to see. Ewing started strongly against veteran Bullet center Jeff Ruland with a three-point play two minutes into the game.

The crowd cheered loudly.

A minute later, Ewing took an alley-oop pass from Darrell Walker and slam dunked over Ruland on the fast break.

The crowd nearly came apart at the seams. This was similar to how the Knicks’ Ernie Grunfeld felt when he first saw Bol.

“I went over to him and lifted up the leg of his warmups to see if he was on stilts,” Grunfeld said.

Bol does not need stilts, only about 100 pounds. He weighs only 208, which isn’t very much spread over 91 inches. Bol was matched against Ewing for only a few minutes during the game, and nothing spectacular happened either way, which did not surprise Bol, who had six blocked shots in 16 minutes of action.

“He’s big, but I’m taller than him,” Bol said.

Bol is also poorer than Ewing. Bol’s $300,000 contract is much smaller than Ewing’s. Do not, however, ask Ewing about being rich.

“I don’t want to answer anything about that,” Ewing said. “Ask me something about the game. Thank you.”

All right, how did you play? And thank you.

“I played pretty good, but I would have liked to play a little bit better,” he said. “I would have liked to get a few more rebounds and kept Ruland off the boards a little more.”

He admitted he was relieved that he had finally made his debut, no matter how much of a carnival-type atmosphere it generated.

“I consider all games to be a big deal,” Ewing said.

You know why? Ewing’s $16-million contract means he will be paid about $20,000 for each regular-season game in the next 10 seasons.