Wednesday, May 17
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Gotta love that Ron Harper for keeping it real. As the Lakers continued on their road to what many people believe will be their first NBA title since Jack Nicholson had more hair on his dome than above his upper lip, the former Chicago Bull put the entire exercise in perspective.
|  | | Ron Harper, stopping Allen Iverson here, knows what it takes to win an NBA title. |
"Oh, the Bulls teams?" Harper asked, repeating a question. "We would've beat the Suns by about 200 points."
Where have you gone, Luc Longley?
Wait: Harper probably was speaking more to the whole Michael Jordan concept. But we're glad he stopped by just the same.
It isn't that the NBA upper crust has to find a way to emulate the Chicago Bulls of the Jordan era. That's silly, right? It's an exercise in futility. It comes to an asinine end. Forget we even brought it up.
It's not that. It is more the notion that no one is consitutionally required to look the other way when such an emulation does not, in fact, occur. Translated: It's all right to appreciate the Lakers -- or the Trail Blazers or the Knicks or the Heat, if you're so inclined -- without ever confusing their game with the level of basketball that was being played only a couple of years before.
And it needed to be someone like Harper to say that, to make it right. In fact, it needed to be Harper, period. If Jordan barks off, he's just another old-timer (albeit the best old-timer anyone has ever seen) remembering how it used to be. If Phil Jackson raises the Bulls issue, he is dismissed as a proselytizing mind-tricker.
But Harper played on some of those Chicago teams, and Harper plays on the Lakers of today. There isn't a sober judge on the bench who doesn't believe the guard badly wants to win it all once again, which is what gives his voice the ring of authority.
And what Harper sees -- a team so busy enjoying itself that it hasn't yet figured out how to hate an opponent in the civilized, sporting sense of the word -- that part seems just about right, too.
"The Bulls had a mean thing where, if we had a team that we knew did not have a chance, we would beat them up," Harper said between Games 4 and 5 of the Lakers-Suns series. "We haven't developed that (in Los Angeles), no way -- we haven't gotten there yet.
"We're still trying to see who's who," he added. "No killer instinct at all."
The great thing about Harper's comments, of course, was the fact they were delivered after the Lakers' first loss of the series, which still left them with a 3-1 advantage before the Lakers closed out the series Tuesday night. But that is Harper's philosophical point: The Bulls of old would have done everything within their power to see that a Game 5 wasn't even necessary.
It's going to be the fate of just about any upcoming decent team in the NBA to find itself compared with those Bulls, and such comparison almost always will come to an unflattering end. In some ways, though, the Lakers ought to thank their lucky stars that they're playing when they're playing: They've been set an awesomely high bar to clear.
Jackson certainly knows his way around championship teams, and, while his take on the Lakers isn't as strident as Harper's, he sees some of the same tendencies.
"This is a ballclub that has a lot of trouble just saying, 'My fault, Mea culpa,' " Jackson said. "Take control. Do it yourself. Be the boss of your own situation, and everything will work out."
And, look, everything might. That odd little duck of a first round against Sacramento might have served as a wake-up call to an L.A. team that clearly has the ability to go deep this postseason. And, if not, we'll go with Harper as a reliable backup alarm system.
"I am seeing that if we want to be a championship basketball team ... we are not even near there," Harper said.
Maybe hearing the right guy say it is the significant step to getting there.
Scouting around
More good sports perspective, and just when we were completely in the mood for it: Upon hearing the pronouncement of formal sex-assault charges against Packers tight end Mark Chmura, Chmura's lawyer, Gerald Boyle, expressed his doubt that the player could receive a fair trial in the state of Wisconsin, explaining, "This case is almost like Dahmer. Everyone knows about it."
Refresher course: (1) Jeffrey Dahmer was the serial killer in Milwaukee who committed unspeakable acts upon his victims before and after they were killed; (2) Boyle defended Dahmer; and (3) We sure as hell hope there was some context for this man's analogy beyond the obvious, because if there wasn't, you can add one more problem to the litany of them that Chmura is facing.
There's a great story happening in Cleveland, where Roberto Alomar, once the poster-boy of boorish behavior for spitting at umpire John Hirschbeck over a disputed call, has become friends with Hirschbeck's son and an unlikely ally in the boy's fight against a rare brain disease. Michael Hirschbeck, who is 13, suffers from the same disorder, adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), that took the life of his brother, John Drew, in 1993. Alomar and his brother, Sandy, have been quietly donating jerseys for auction at the fund-raisers John Hirschbeck has conducted to further research into the uncommon degenerative disease. And the player and the ump have mended fences all the way around from their infamous 1996 confrontation: Hirschbeck and Robbie Alomar talked things out last season and now consider each other friends. Spit notwithstanding? "If that's the worst thing Robbie ever does in his life," Hirschbeck told the AP, "he'll lead a real good life." Here's fervently hoping.
Awful thick into Big Ten basketball lately, but the people at Michigan State have to consider themselves lucky -- lucky to have Tom Izzo as coach, and lucky that Izzo is more than that. When the man turned down a $15 million offer to replace Lenny Wilkens as coach of the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, he did so at least as much out of loyalty to the Spartans program as to his own sense of solidity there.
At a newly negotiated salary of $1.1 million per season at MSU, Izzo isn't exactly taking a vow of poverty -- but it's still true that he turned down three times that much in order to stay rather than move to Atlanta. As noted by Peter McPherson, the university president who got to be happy about a sporting matter this week, "This man turned down $15 million. This is a very good man, and this university is very proud of him."
You don't think some other schools in the neighborhood would love for their poobah to be able to utter a sentence like that?
Reasons why the media always loved Rickey Henderson, Chapter 38: After being released from his contentious tenure with the Mets one day after hitting a 355-foot single that he failed to run out because he thought it was a homer, Henderson told reporters, "I don't have any regrets. I say that because I never really never understand it, so I can't have regrets." Just so long as everybody's clear on the thing, OK?
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/. |  |
