The game is won. The point is made. Actually 83 points are made. Dennis Rodman has two fouls left and Anthony Mason is off his feet, his ribs exposed.
The cheapest and freest of shots is there for the taking.
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A shoulder. An elbow. A nudge of any kind and the fearsome Mason is in a heap. Maybe on a gurney.
Rodman sneers, turns away and does the most generous, un-Rodman like thing he can do. He allows Mason to have another day, though if the next day is anything like the first one, Rodman has done Mason no favors after all.
In fact Rodman might very well send his limo for Mason just to make sure ol’ Mase isn’t late for Wednesday’s game.
He’ll personally sweep the hallway in front of him just so Mason doesn’t step on something and turn his ankle.
Rodman will stand guard at his hotel door just to make sure Mason gets enough rest, so he is fresh and without excuse.
I bet he’ll even let Mason borrow his dictionary just so Mason will know what he is talking about.
“Rodman was not a factor tonight,” Mason said, not bothering to reveal if he actually understood the word “factor.”
Maybe Mason meant to say Rodman was not a fake or a fluke or a foam-rubber finger, but somebody or something certainly turned Charlotte’s most corporeal creature into sawdust.
And from my seat it looked like whatever it was had stacked tattoos, Crayola hair and a perpetual smirk on his face.
“I don’t play no games with him,” Mason said. “You didn’t see me getting tangled up with him.”
You see there’s that failure to communicate again. What does “tangled” really mean? Beaten like a Waffle House omelet? I saw that.
Here’s how the great, low-post, brute battle turned out Sunday. How to put it? Let’s try this. Rodman used Mason like a chew toy.
Battered him, belittled him, humiliated him, bullied him, dominated him, put a twist-tie around him and left him on the curb.
“No one person can do it all,” Mason said.
True. Rodman would get help from the front, but it was Rodman from the back that kept Mason from turning or driving or leaping or muscling his way to the basket.
“Dennis did a great job,” said Phil Jackson, echoing the majority opinion. “His defense on Mason was solid.”
Solid? It was ruthless, and generally within the rules.
And Rodman still had time and vim enough to help out on Vlade Divac, not the same thing. Here’s the plan: Smother Mason, nettle Divac.
“That Dennis,” said Divac, “he’s always doing something.”
Here’s the result: Inside points for Charlotte–10.
The Bulls do not need Rodman to be Rodman to beat this bunch of chalk outlines from Charlotte, these shaved-head incidentals who look like a team full of drivers-license photos.
Divac must have had to do his hair with a Weed Whacker. You can almost hear it growing.
Unity in baldness? I suppose, in an interior-decorating sort of way. If you are matching doorknobs.
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If you are trying to win an NBA championship, maybe your star player should work more than every third possession. Glen Rice plays basketball like an elevator operator who will only stop at his favorite floors.
“Being a shooter,” Rice said, “you’re going to have nights like this when you can’t hit the side of a barn. You have to believe in yourself and keep shooting. We missed a lot of wide-open shots.”
To beat the Hornets, the Bulls will not need Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen to score 60 a game–just 10 less than the entire Hornets’ team–though it can’t hurt.
A 16-0 run to do away with a 15-point lead won’t be necessary every game, and the passion needed for the Bulls to get three technical fouls–only one on Rodman–won’t need to lurk so close to the surface.
Bring back the Nets, who at least bothered.
“We’ll just have to come out with more force and more energy,” Mason said.
We’ll have to wait until after Game 2 to see what Mason meant by that.