His Baldness Shows He Still Has It in Him

He can play. The tall, bald, nameless old man can play. We’d been told so, but who’s to know? The way legends grow, no report is to be trusted until we see it done. We knew the story’s outline, that the old man had been great, so good he might have led the NBA in scoring 10 times, might have won five MVP awards on six championship teams. Some mythmakers insist he could’ve been the best player ever.

But who was to know?

We hadn’t seen him.

Imagine a great player never seen, a shadow, never on television, never on billboards. Imagine that all we know is was what we heard, and we heard only the legend. That every night he did something offensively no one had done before. That on defense he knew what you’d do before you thought to do it. Imagine seeing such a player for the first time.

Word came of his preparation. Camps in Chicago, California, Las Vegas. “He played games every night,” came word from Hubie Brown, a basketball master, once the NBA’s Coach of the Year, now a television analyst. “He was already at his playing weight, he looked fantastic, and he crushed everybody. Crushed them.”

And now, three months into this NBA season, we know.

Myth can come to life.

“It’s a great story,” Hubie Brown says, “You can’t do what this guy’s doing, but he’s doing it. It’s the best damn thing that’s happened to the NBA in years.”

Not that it has been easy. The tall, bald, nameless one at age 38 is too old to be running on wood two hours a day from October to June.

Because his right knee hurt, he sat out practices to save the pain for games. The tendinitis also limited his strength and movement in ways that brought him down from the air; sometimes, grounded, he seemed more lie than legend.

The legend: He made his teammates better.

The 2001 fact: He made his teammates worse.

“We stink,” he said one night when he’d shot poorly and wouldn’t stop shooting and by his insistence on shooting had rendered his teammates irrelevant, perhaps distrustful. The team’s best young player, Richard Hamilton, could build no rhythm because the old man worked to the rhythm of his choosing and demanded, if not by words by actions, that everyone fit their work inside his.

Yet he hadn’t said, “They stink.” He’d said, “We stink,” the plural pronoun bringing the blanket of humiliation over himself as well as the young players there with him. He included himself not for diplomacy’s sake but in the name of truth-telling, cold and hard; as he knew what you’d do with the ball before you knew it, he knew he had played so far beneath his standards as to be embarrassed.

The legend: “I love this game like a wife.”

The 2001 truth: “We stink.”

They’d lost eight in a row even before the night he smelled incompetence. Offended by the odor, here’s what the tall, bald, nameless one did: he said, “I’m his sidekick now,” acknowledging the stature of the young star, Richard Hamilton. No longer would every possession move to the old man’s rhythms. Maybe he wanted the ball so much early on because he’d been away so long. Maybe he was in a hurry to show us what he could do. In any case, he came to know, and, more important, act on this truth: He’s an important player, but not the only player.

His team’s 7-foot rookie center, Brendan Haywood, suddenly owned the defensive boards. Hubert Davis, Tyronn Lue, and Chris Whitney became 3-point gunners. Among the league’s highest-scoring teammates, Richard Hamilton and the old man now move alongside Shaq/Kobe, Pierce/Walker, Stojakovic/Webber.

Shortly after stinking out the place in Cleveland, his team won nine consecutive games, tying the franchise’s all-time record.

“Remember,” Hubie Brown says, “he’s playing with 10 teammates 25 years old or younger. They’re playing for a new coach, an old-school coach who’ll sit you down if you don’t play the game right. They’re all in a new system. It takes months of education to get the timing down, to know where everybody is going to be and when they’re going to be there, how they’re going to play against each team.”

When the old man’s team followed the winning streak by losing two in a row, the second with him scoring six points on 2-of-10 shooting, Brown said, “Again, people in the media murdered him.”

This, despite record crowds home and away, almost-doubled TV ratings and statistics that identify him as one of the NBA’s top 10 players. And, after the six-point night, he came back the next game with 24 points in the first quarter, 51 for the game.

“He claims he’s getting stronger, and I believe him,” Brown says.

“Just to get 50 catches in a game, let alone score 51, is a big deal because the other team always has its best defender on him.”

As to what the tall, bald, nameless one did the morning after the 51-point night, it is a measure of the legend’s validity that at 8:30 a.m. he met his personal trainer. Kids may have slept. The old man worked out.