He Goes From Hero to Just About Zero : After Scoring but 2 Points in Game 1, Sampson Is Like a Sushi Out of Water

The worst thing that happened to Ralph Sampson on Monday wasn’t that he picked a bad time to play a bad basketball game. Far worse was that Sampson couldn’t find a place to eat sushi, the cuisine of his choice, in a town that clearly is not the city of his choice.

“This doesn’t seem like the place I want to eat sushi,” Sampson said Tuesday.

It’s a shame that Sampson can’t live on a diet of newsprint. After his foul-ridden, two-point, 1-for-13 non-shooting performance in Game 1 of the NBA championship series, which the Boston Celtics won, 112-100, there were enough bad things written about Sampson to feed him and a family of four for a month.

Part of it is his own doing. Sampson isn’t a very popular fellow with some of the press.

Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe wrote: “Ralph Sampson earned the right to endorse Milkbone dog biscuits.”

Shaughnessy is the Globe’s baseball writer, who found time to rip Sampson in the first paragraph of his Red Sox story from Cleveland.

There were plenty of similar things written by other reporters. They ranged from the simple (“simply awful”) to the trite (“invisible”) to the more complex (“Bird of pray, not the Rockets’ red glare”), which was a comment on his shooting.

Like many athletes, Sampson said he doesn’t read newspapers.

Or as he put it: “I don’t read the b.s. in the papers.”

When he was asked to name his favorite writer, he laughed.

“I expect to be criticized,” Sampson said. “It’s no big thing.”

No, just a tall thing. If anything, Sampson learned that the fall from hero to goat is a short one. He beats the Lakers by making an impossible shot, and the very next game, it’s impossible to find a better explanation of why the Rockets lost than Sampson’s play.

Rocket teammate Robert Reid took up for Sampson, saying: “He’ll prove to the fans, the media and to his teammates what kind of player he really is.”

But Sampson also got a bit of understanding from an unlikely source, Celtic forward Kevin McHale.

“I know how tough it was for him,” McHale said. “You just have trouble when you get three fouls and you have to sit like that. You come back in the second half and you want to do something, but you feel out of it. You’re trying not to foul. You’re never in the game. All day. You’re never in the game.”

Sampson wasn’t the only reason the Rockets were beaten in Game 1. But he was the only reason who is 7 feet 4 inches. So Sampson took his lumps in fairly good humor, considering he has been getting them for a long time now.

In high school in Virginia, Sampson’s team never won the state championship.

At the University of Virginia, Sampson’s teams never won the NCAA title or even made it to the championship game.

“Something’s always never right with me,” Sampson said. “Being 7-4, you tend to draw a lot of attention. You live and die with it when you mess up. But I’ve been tall all my life. I’ve grown up with criticism.”

Sampson brought along his own cheering section in Game 1. Sampson’s mother, Sarah, and his two sisters, Valerie and Joyce, watched from their seats in Boston Garden as he picked up three fouls in the first five minutes, sat down for the rest of the half, then found himself unable to do anything right in the second half.

“They were coaching from the sidelines,” Sampson said. “They were yelling ‘Stay in the game’ and ‘Don’t foul.’ But they aren’t my worst critics.”

When Sampson dealt with the media, reporters often found him giving curt replies, and at other times he was highly uncommunicative, ignoring everything and everybody.

If this sounds like the way Kareem Abdul-Jabbar acted early in his career, then there is also a parallel between Sampson’s Game 1 Monday and Abdul-Jabbar’s similarly lousy Game 1 against the Celtics last season.

Abdul-Jabbar promised he would make everyone forget how badly he had played, and now Sampson is doing the same thing.

“Hey, I can’t do any worse,” he said. “I’m not Kareem, but I will tell you I can’t play that way for long. Kareem has been through all the ups and downs, all the winning and losing, for a long time and he handles the criticism and the praise very well.

“All I know is that it’s definitely hard to perform well on the court when you’re sitting on the bench,” he said. “I’m the first one to know I’m not playing well because I’m the one out there doing it. Nobody has to tell me.”

Everyone is doing it anyway. In the intensely crowded Rocket locker room, he had to tell only one radio reporter to back off.

“I don’t want to eat that microphone,” he said.

He just wants to find a place to eat some sushi.

NBA Notes The NBA has called a press conference for today to announce that the Celtics’ Larry Bird is the league’s Most Valuable Player this season. . . . Bird, who played 44 minutes in Game 1, was rested only 37 seconds in the first half. . . . The Celtics have the No. 2 choice in the draft and claim they will draft 7-0 center Brad Daugherty, if available, but 6-8 Maryland forward Len Bias was a guest of the team at Game 1 and sat near the Celtic bench. . . . Rocket Coach Bill Fitch said he wasn’t sure he would do the same thing again as he did in Game 1 when he left Akeem Olajuwon on the floor after Olajuwon picked up his fourth foul. Within 30 seconds, Olajuwon had his fifth foul and when he went to the bench, the Celtics closed the third quarter with a 14-4 rally to take a 15-point lead. Said Fitch: “If I had to do it over again, do I sit him down next to me after the fourth? Sure I do. But the reason I felt I wanted him out there was that we were at a point where we couldn’t let up (trailing, 77-72). When the officials took him out, the same thing happened that probably would have happened if I had left him in.” . . . The Celtics announced they have signed backup center Greg Kite to a multiyear contract. . . . In strictly a marketing move, the NBA has changed the name of its championship series. Now, it’s the NBA Finals.