A Celebration Now Stepped in Tradition

And so tonight the suspense begins, tick by tick, dribble by dribble, a town and its team counting down to the most anticipated sight in the Los Angeles sports landscape.

The fourth game of the NBA Finals could produce it. Emotion will rule it. History can judge it. Millions might never forget it.

The Mark Madsen dance

“Oh, c’mon, you’re not serious,” said Madsen, crinkling his splendidly childish face.

What, you thought we were talking about an NBA title?

Championship, shmampionship.

We know the Lakers are going to win the title. If they don’t win it tonight in a four-game sweep against the hopelessly overmatched New Jersey Nets, they will certainly win it by next week.

What nobody knows is what will happen at the ensuing city celebration.

Will Madsen break out the dance he made famous on a downtown stage after last year’s parade?

Will he attempt a new dance?

Or, as feared last year, will his no-rhythm writhing truly be the result of some sort of tropical intestinal distress?

Who knows, maybe he will disappoint people in five counties by simply not moving at all.

“I don’t know,” Madsen said, smiling. “I didn’t know I was going to do it last year until I just did it. I have no idea what will happen this year.”

Oh, but his teammates know.

“Trust me, he’s dancing like last year,” said teammate Devean George. “He will dance. We will make him dance.”

And why not?

Did anything capture last year’s Laker glow better? Was there a more compelling example of the city’s Laker-infused childlike joy? It certainly made more sense than a Phil Jackson poem.

Surely you remember. It was at the completion of last year’s championship parade, on a stage in front of Staples Center, when the players had just finished thanking everyone.

Suddenly hip-hop music filled the speakers, whereupon Shaquille O’Neal grabbed the microphone, ran to the front and began rapping about the championship.

“Everybody started dancing, so I just jumped in and joined them,” recalled Madsen. “I didn’t think it was any big deal. It was just dancing.”

That would be one description of it.

Another would be, violently contorting.

Yet another would be, behaving as if you were the star of a B-movie western and someone had just put a bullet in your leg.

“You know what it was like?” George said. “It was like Mad Dog was wearing headphones and couldn’t hear the music. It’s like he was dancing to an entirely different song.”

The crowd gasped. His teammates stopped and stared.

At home in Mississippi, future teammate Lindsey Hunter grabbed the remote control.

“I thought, ‘What is that?’ ” he recalled. “I turned it to a different channel right away.”

Later, Rick Fox offered the following review on behalf of the entire team.

“My, my goodness,” he said.

Madsen, who takes this all with wonderfully good humor, said he was just being Madsen.

“This is how I always danced, at church parties and school dances and family stuff,” he said. “When I was younger and danced, everyone was smiling, so I thought it was because I was good. Now I realize, it’s, well ... it’s just me being me.”

It’s this charm that has enabled Madsen to become one of the Lakers’ most popular players, even if he rarely plays.

He has appeared in only one of three games in these Finals, for only two minutes. But when he reported to the scorer’s table that night, the Staples Center crowd roared.

It is the same cheer that has accompanied his every move in two seasons, a cheer for a guy unafraid to be his rah-rah self on a team of sophisticated stars, whether that means waving a towel at the end of the bench or baking a cake for a team trainer.

“Make sure everybody knows I also barbecue,” he said with a laugh. “I barbecue more than I bake cakes.”

Because he was just being himself, Madsen had no idea that this vision of a 6-foot-9 pale guy stomping around amid the world’s coolest athletes last summer would become so popular until later, when the phone started ringing and neighbors started talking.

“So I watched it on television for the first time,” he said. “And I realized, oh, so that’s what everyone is talking about.”

When it comes to Madsen, people have talked about little else.

From the man known as Mad Dog, they have clamored for the dance best titled “Wounded Dog.”

When he’s been on the road, fans have shouted for it.

“I tell them, I just can’t do it on demand, I have to be feeling it,” he said.

When he has been working in the weight room, teammates have turned up the music and begged for it.

“You know what it’s like?” Hunter said. “It’s like Frankenstein at the ballet.”

When Madsen visited the White House during the off-season with the other Lakers, this guy named Bush even talked about the dance.

“The President turned to me and said, ‘Now, I’m not going to ask you to dance,’ ” recalled Madsen.

Of course, he took this as a cue to boogie, and stepped forward to begin his performance when he noticed the Secret Service folks stepping toward him.

“A couple of them suddenly got this jerking motion,” he said. “So I stopped.”

There you have it. Mark Madsen’s dancing is so sorry, it’s considered a national security risk.

And so splendid, I can hardly wait.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.