The Best of the East Meets Up With the Best of the West to See Which Team Is the Real Heavyweight of the NBA

Hoosier Hysteria, it’s not exactly the way it used to be.

Basketball is still a way of life here, but it isn’t like the days when hamlets of 25,000 like Newscastle, home of Steve Alford and Kent Benson, built 9,000-seat arenas for their high school teams.

The storybook single-classification days are over. If Bobby Plump came back and sank another championship-winner for Milan (pronounced MY-linn hereabouts), the shot that inspired the movie, “Hoosiers,” all the little bumpkins would win would be the state Class A title for tiny schools, one of the four competitions now held each season.

Nor do they draw anything like the 41,000 that saw Bedford-North Lawrence win in 1990, after which Damon Bailey ran into the Hoosierdome stands to hug his parents in another authentic, heart-warming Hoosier Moment.

Nor is Indiana University the beacon of pride it was. When IU is in the news now, it’s usually some allegation or investigation of Bob Knight, or a media op where hand-picked reporters pry from him a confession that he has a temper problem and was, in fact, mean to a player--once--in 1975.

That would have been a year before he put a fan bodily into a trash can at the NCAA Final Four, but IU was on its way to a title and such incidents were soon forgotten.

In those days, the professional game was still held in little more repute in Indiana than in the 1930s when John Wooden, the Purdue All-American, got a $5,000-a-year offer from the original New York Celtics, and Coach Piggie Lambert talked him out of it, reminding him that he wouldn’t be using his education barnstorming around the country, and adding, said Wooden, “You’re not that type of person.”

Instead, Wooden got a job coaching basketball and track and teaching English and Physical Education at a high school in Dayton, Ky., for $1,800 a year.

Indianapolis’ first pro team went under in the ‘50s. When the Pacers were born in 1967--and began winning titles--it was in the American Basketball Assn. When they joined the NBA in 1977 under harsh terms, including years without a share of the TV money, they became goldfish in a shark tank, one of several franchises so close to failing by the ‘80s that the players’ union agreed to the first salary cap.

“There were curtains that used to hang down in Market Square Arena to cover the upper deck.” says team president Donnie Walsh, who arrived as an assistant coach under George Irvine in 1984 and became general manager in 1986. “We were drawing about 5,000. I really felt we were like an island off the mainland of the NBA.

“We had four power forwards and a point guard. We had Wayman Tisdale, Clark Kellogg, Herb Williams, Steve Stipanovich and Vern Fleming.

“I started out trying to fill in the spots. I got a three [small forward], Chuck Person. I got a two [shooting guard], Reggie Miller. I went out and got a center, Rik Smits.

“Then when I saw the center play, I realized I got to get a rebounder, Dale Davis.”

What was missing?

Oh, a coach.

ENTER THE LARRYS, BROWN AND LEGEND

By the ‘90s, the Pacers were talented enough to make the playoffs but kept getting KOd in the first round. Finally in 1993, aware his neck was getting close to the blade, Walsh hired his friend, Larry Brown, whose staff he had served on in Denver.

“My owner didn’t act that way, but I felt it because there were people around him who were talking to him and they were going out and contacting other coaches,” Walsh says. “So I had to bite my tongue for about a week.

“In other words, I had to just, like, eat it. I mean, guys were going on TV and saying Rick Pitino [then at Kentucky] was going to be the coach--and I wasn’t the one making that decision. . . .

“Pitino had called me himself and told me, ‘I’m not coming there.’ So you know, basically, when all that BS got over with, with all these other guys, I had three guys I was going to recommend. They were Larry Brown, Lenny Wilkens and Del Harris. We ended up signing Larry.

“I could have gone after Larry before that, but it wasn’t the right time for Larry. My team wasn’t ready. Before he went to L.A. [the Clippers in 1992] I could have signed him but I didn’t want to do it ‘cause I knew, we had too many young players and Larry was going to come in and want to get rid of all of them. And I didn’t want to do that.”

Walsh knew that with Brown come foibles, but you also get a ride for your money and the Pacers’ was a doozy.

After a 3-8 start in Brown’s first season, they won 47, the most since joining the NBA. Then they won two playoff series--also their first since joining the NBA--and led Pat Riley’s Knicks, 3-2, in the Eastern Conference finals before falling in seven games.

Later, after the Pacers fell three more times in the Eastern finals, that Buffalo-of-basketball stuff started, but that’s how it is. When you’re awful, you only have to suffer the scorn of your own community (unless you’re the Clippers). But if you improve enough to fail at a high-enough level, you get national scorn on top of it.

The next season, the Pacers lost in another thrilling seven-gamer to Shaquille O’Neal’s Orlando Magic.

Then things began running downhill under Brown. The Pacers lost in the first round in 1996, and Walsh had to step in to keep Dallas from wooing Brown away.

Walsh kicked himself for that one all the next season, when the Pacers fell out of contention, and Brown began finding faults with all concerned.

Everyone handled it pretty well, perhaps mindful of all they had accomplished together.

Once Brown complained that the Pacer stars lacked leadership ability. Miller was asked about it: “If Larry says we lack it,” replied Reggie, “we lack it.”

As fate would have it, as Brown was nearing the end of his run, Larry Bird was nearing the end of his in the Celtic front office. Bird was a consultant, although he could have had any job in the organization. But living in Naples, Fla., he found himself outmaneuvered by the people who were there every day, starting with M.L. Carr.

The light bulb began flickering above everyone’s heads. Bored, needing a next thing to do, Bird liked the idea of going back to Indiana and coaching the Pacers, who had veterans with something left.

Sure enough, they won 58 games his first season and went seven games with the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern finals. The home team won all seven, with Chicago Coach Phil Jackson comparing his Game 6 loss to the U.S. experience in the Munich Olympics after Michael Jordan tripped/was tripped on the deciding play. But the Bulls got the Pacers back into the United Center and came from 13 points down in Game 7 to escape, even with an exhausted Jordan missing 16 of his 25 shots.

OK, everyone loses to Jordan, although Bird says he was disappointed, because he thought the Pacers were good enough to beat Utah in the finals.

Of course, that was nothing compared to last spring’s devastation when the Knicks minus Patrick Ewing upset them in Eastern finals No. 4, after Jess Kersey’s famous continuation call (which Kersey recently acknowledged was wrong) on Larry Johnson’s four-point play.

Not that Bird took that one hard, but as he noted after the Pacers finished off the Knicks last week: “We didn’t have no four-point play this year and that’s why we won.”

Not that you could exactly see this one coming.

SAME TIME NEXT YEAR?

Actually, the loss to the Knicks uncovered problems that had nothing to do with the officiating, leading Walsh to think hard about their future.

Bird, who had already announced this would be his last season, would be a lame duck. Six of their 12 players would be free agents, including Miller, point guard Mark Jackson, sixth man Jalen Rose and center Smits, who was 34 and had played his whole career on sore feet.

At last spring’s draft, Walsh traded forward Antonio Davis, as well-liked a Pacer as there was, to Toronto for rights to the No. 5 selection, Jonathan Bender, a rail-thin 6-11 high school kid from picturesquely-named Picayune, Miss.

Among Davis’ former teammates, the eyerolls went on for months. Jackson, who was 35 and had already been traded and reacquired by the Pacers, went public in what was in all probability only the tip of the unease.

Acknowledged Walsh: “They probably were in some back room saying, ‘Can you believe that idiot Donnie traded Antonio for some high school kid?’ ”

Jackson is now at pains to explain his remarks.

“The statement was, ‘We are not a better basketball team this year than we were last year,” he said during the East finals.

“The reason being is because we got rid of Antonio Davis. No disrespect to an-y-bod-y in particular, it just simply says you didn’t replace Antonio Davis with anybody else but a 19-year-old high school kid that doesn’t play for us right now. His [Bender’s] future is going to be awesome for him, but right now we got rid of Antonio Davis for nothing.

“So, we got rid of a 6-10 guy who can play the power forward and the center position. That’s a phenomenal basketball player, that has tremendous character--he’s missing. That’s not a knock at anybody else. I understood what they were doing, preparing us for the future. Austin Croshere is a phenomenal basketball player that has a great, great future. . . . But the difference with Antonio Davis is he can play the five [center] position. That was no knock at Austin or anybody else; that’s just saying [Antonio] gave us another big thoroughbred to help us down the road. Are we a better basketball team? No. Are we still the best basketball team? Yes. . . .

“And that is the last time that I’m going to answer this question. Thank you.”

For his part, Walsh wasn’t sure they were going to just pick up where they left off, either.

“You have to worry about that from a lot of standpoints,” he says. “The amalgamation of a younger group with an older group. To me, that was the major thing that I wanted to see, was how that was gonna work out. And I saw very soon that I thought it was gonna work out.”

It took a month, when they started 8-7. Then, as the dire predictions rained down, they arose once more to the top of their conference.

True, it was only the East, but at the start of the season, no one was even predicting they could do that.

Jalen Rose replaced Chris Mullin, adding a badly-needed athlete to the starting lineup, and turned into their leading scorer. Croshere, shopped before the season, became someone. Smits gave them something. Davis became an all-star. Miller exploded in the playoffs.

So here they are, thrilled to be in the finals for the first time.

Of course, the thrill only lasts until the opening tip in Game 1, after which someone is in trouble, and it’s expected to be them.

Nevertheless, the Pacers are professional through and through. They’re crack shooters, with eight players who made 36% or more of their three-pointers (the Lakers have one, Glen Rice.)

After all the Pacers have been through, they’re not here to count the movie stars. They have something different in mind, like the ultimate Hoosier Moment.