I’ll take things that come in threes for a thousand, Alex. What are men’s underwear, golf balls and Bulls NBA championships?
Whoooonk!
Wrong. I’m sorry. We also could have accepted fork tines, Ho Ho’s and breathing Beatles.
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Try another category.
Three old flops who win the big one in ’98. John Elway. Dale Earnhart. Karl Malone . . .
Well, Utah certainly believes that.
“The awe is off,” said Utah’s Antoine Carr.
In Game 1, there was Michael Jordan, mighty Michael, trying to do everything for the Bulls, just as he did when the Bulls were losing titles instead of winning them.
The Jazz faithful came to see a Jordan show and a Jazz victory, the best of all possible NBA evenings.
Promised Bryon Russell, the designated Jordan stopper, “It will be a lot tougher for him this year. I only needed to look at it (film of last year’s series) on time to see my mistakes.”
As last year, the local motto is “Show Me the Title,” an appeal in the singular as compared to Chicago’s multiple, “Show Me the Six Pack.”
Most surprising about the Bulls’ universal underdog status is how complete it is, how effortlessly it has been accepted, if not by the Bulls themselves, by the larger world.
“The fact is, this is probably the last chance for most of us on this team,” Steve Kerr has said. “I don’t expect the team to be back together again next year, so if it is our last shot, it sure would be fun to go out a winner.”
The local editorial page, under the guise of welcoming outsiders into this insular place, instead took the opportunity to boast of being the “reigning basketball capital of the world,” this based on the fact that the University of Utah finished second in the NCAAs and the Jazz are playing the Bulls in the NBA Finals.
“Not since 1980 when Los Angeles had the NBA champion Lakers and NCAA runner-up UCLA that one city could boast of being home of the national finalists in both the college and professional ranks. So these are heady days for basketball fans in this city and state–with the expectation and hope for an even greater euphoria to come.”
Any place that claims to be the basketball capital of anything will get an argument from North Carolina and Indiana, never mind an address on West Madison. And, by the way, that euphoria probably is only the aroma from the Great Salt Lake.
Only a fool would think that Jordan has had his final say in how this all turns out.
Still, there is a sense that it is time, that both Utah and the Bulls are due, as if some natural force is at work, out of the hands of both teams.
Utah has worked so hard for so long without a single title and the Bulls have so many.
“We are not as, I guess you could say, scared or nervous,” said Jazz forward Greg Foster.
It certainly did not appear so on this night, not just from the more weathered and accountable members of the Jazz–Malone, John Stockton, Jeff Hornacek–but the raw and incidental as well–Howard Eisley, Chris Morris, Shandon Anderson all the way into overtime.
They all took turns pounding on the Bulls, trying to confirm what they may believe but needed to prove, as expressed in this interesting, if contradictory opinion, from Utah’s Foster, once a 10-day Bull himself.
“We have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Foster said before Game 1. “They’re the team that if the Jazz win, people will say what happened to the Bulls?
“So I think that we’re the rabbits, going after the hunter, as Charles Barkley would say.”
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Well, maybe Barkley would make more sense.
Probably not.