This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a bunch of nits.
Turnovers in overtime. Michael Jordan losing track of the shot clock. Seven-foot-two-inch Luc Longley trying to dribble a basketball in traffic.
“He must have thought he was 6-5,” Jordan said.
All that kept the Bulls from upsetting the Utah Jazz in Game 1 of the NBA Finals was a little finger glue, an alarm clock and a crossing guard.
And, oh, yes, John Stockton hitting the ugliest little runner this side of a rat race.
“It was a tough shot,” Phil Jackson said. “We can live with that shot.”
Well, the Bulls will have to live with it down a game to the Jazz, a game that could have been won, might have been won, would have been won if the Bulls were younger or fresher or spunkier.
The Bulls look much like a team on its way to becoming a trivia question.
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, HoHo’s and breathing Beatles.
Try another category.
Three old flops who win the big one in ’98. John Elway. Dale Earnhardt. Karl Malone . . .
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The world is ready for Malone to get his title, ready for the Bulls to pass the flame. Well, Utah certainly is ready anyhow.
“The awe is off,” Utah’s Antoine Carr said.
If Carr means an 88-85 overtime survival by the Jazz over the Bulls, then the awe would seem still to have a bit of lint life.
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. But there was Jordan losing track of time at the worst of times.
“A mental lapse,” said the man who never has mental lapses.
The Jazz faithful came to see a Jordan show and a Jazz victory, the best of all possible NBA evenings. That is just what they got.
As last year, the local motto is “Show Me the Title,” an appeal in the singular as compared with 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 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 is playing the Bulls in the NBA Finals.
“Not since 1980 when Los Angeles had the NBA champion Lakers and NCAA runner-up UCLA could one city 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,” Jazz center Greg Foster said.
It certainly did not appear so on this night, not just from the more weathered and accountable members of the Jazz–Malone, Stockton, Jeff Hornacek–but the raw and incidental as well–Howard Eisley, Chris Morris, Shandon Anderson all the way into overtime.
“We gave a great effort and we had a chance to win,” Jordan said. “On the road, that’s what you look for.”
That may be what the Bulls are looking for these days, a chance. Sounds like something Indiana would say.