Pets or People, It Doesn’t Matter, He’s Everybody’s Friend

When Karl (Mailman) Malone wants to relax and unwind, he has the perfect partner--Nikki.

Nikki is a baby snake, and what could be more heartwarming than the story of a power forward and his python?

“She loves to be in my belt loops, and to wrap around my arm,” Mailman says. “It’s something that really relaxes me like nothing else, my pets. It’s funny, I used to hate snakes. Now I wake up, I look up at the cage, and there’s a snake in my bedroom.”

Then Mailman looks at his fish tank and sees Maggie the eel and Pete the lobster, keeping all the fish company. Always nearby is Jazzmine, a Rottweiler dog.

Mailman simply loves animals. He browses in pet stores, and his heart breaks to see the little critters in cages, so he almost always buys one. He’s got his eye on a cute little iguana, and he’s in the market for a tiger cub.

“I’ve got a regular zoo up there,” Mailman says of his Salt Lake City home. “My neighbors are pretty good about it. I do have one neighbor, though, she found out I have a snake, and she hasn’t been in my house since.”

I can picture the moment of discovery, when the neighbor drops by to borrow a cup of sugar.

“Gee, Mailman, I like your new belt. Real snakeskin, eh? So real it almost seems to be moving.”

Karl Malone never really set out to be different or unusual. It just worked out that way.

He’s a pleasant young man who shatters backboards (current total: 3), takes his mom fishing, idolizes Arnold Schwarzenegger and Moses Malone (no relation), interacts wonderfully with fans, wants to be the world’s greatest body builder, famous actor or both someday, and has led the once-laughable Utah Jazz to genuine respectability and potential greatness.

Mailman has what you might call a unique style. For one thing, he doesn’t have an aloof bone in his body. He walks through hotel lobbies greeting the employees. When I phoned the team’s L.A. hotel and asked for Malone’s room, the female operator said: “Oh, I know Karl. He’s an old friend.”

That’s a good trick, to be anybody’s old friend at age 24.

I think Mailman’s daily routine says a lot about what kind of guy he is.

On game days, after the team’s morning shoot-around, he naps from 1 to 4. Then he phones his mother in Louisiana, and she tells him how many points and rebounds she expects him to get that night. Apropos of his nickname, Mailman almost always delivers. He is averaging 26.8 points and 11.7 rebounds, which puts him among the leaders in the National Basketball Assn. in both categories. On Tuesday night, Malone scored 25 points and pulled down 12 rebounds in Utah’s 122-111 loss to the Lakers.

The Jazz players are required to report by 6 o’clock for a 7:35 p.m. home game, but Malone arrives at 4:45 at the Salt Palace, which he calls “the gym.”

“You can’t start preparing for a basketball game one hour before it starts,” Mailman explains.

Upon arrival, Malone takes a shower, brushes his teeth, gets dressed, gets taped, takes the floor and shoots for 60 to 90 minutes.

By tipoff, he has already spent about three hours on the court. If the routine wears him down, he hides it well. Mailman has missed one game in three seasons, and he always plays stronger late in games and in the second half of the season. He just doesn’t get tired. He is 6-9 and weighs 254, and is built like a brick Salt Palace.

After games, Mailman showers again, brushes his teeth again and then hangs out in the parking lot until all the kids who have swarmed his pickup truck--license plate: US MAIL--have his autograph. He made an autograph-signing appearance at a local mall one evening, from 6 to 8 o’clock. The security guards finally kicked him out at 11.

In short, a nice guy to have around. He was such a pleasant surprise as a rookie out of tiny Louisiana Tech in ’85 that the Jazz traded Adrian Dantley after that season and trained the offensive spotlight on the Mailman. He responded with enthusiasm beyond all expectation.

“I’m just excited about the game,” he says. “I love the game.”

Excited? When the fans elected Mailman to start in last month’s All-Star game, he treated the honor like the Nobel Prize. He was assigned a locker between Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and was as impressed as a grade-school kid.

On the court, he and Magic made beautiful music, and Mailman might have been MVP if Michael Jordan hadn’t gone berserk.

Charles Barkley, who played for the East All-Stars, called the game “a (doggone) waste of a good Sunday afternoon.” Mailman Malone called it “an experience I’ll never forget. It was awesome.”

Life is like that for the Mailman. His idea of a glorious summer would be to live in Los Angeles, study acting, work out at Gold’s Gym and play basketball with Magic Johnson and Michael Cooper in their pickup games at UCLA.

He’s like a kid in a candy store. Or a pet store.

“Everything has happened so quickly,” he says. “Sometimes I still wonder, ‘Is this really supposed to happen to me?’ ”

Who better?