Coach's Corner

Writing a time-sensitive column from a distant, foreign land can be a complex, intimidating, and stressful proposition. Editors back home care little about a writer's logistical problems; they just want copy. Now, if I've painted a picture of the conscientious writer -- me -- struggling with a broken computer in a wind-lashed tent on the barren steppe of western Russia, comforted by nothing except an icy, lashing rain, picking up sports news of the day from a scratchy WWII-era BBC transmission on my old shortwave radio ... well, perhaps I've overstated the case.

Truth is, I'm residing in a luxury hotel in Cozumel, Mexico -- a residence lacking in little. It has air conditioning, a nice beach, relatively clean bathrooms, a poolside bar, and most importantly, cable television. With so much modern technology available, it never occurred to me there might be a problem in watching -- for your benefit of course -- the first week of the NBA Finals in the comfort of my room or, at worst, gathered around like-minded sports fans at the beach bar. Alas, there's no television at the beach bar. For a reason far beyond my comprehension, though the cable brings in many peripheral American networks like the Weather Channel (with a handy local feed from Buffalo, New York), absent entirely from the satellite system are ABC, CBS, and most disturbing, the lifeline of the NBA, NBC Game 1.

So it was, I missed game one. I counted on USA Today to at least give me a game story, filling in enough details so I could execute a passable written fraud for the sake of a deadline. Even this proved ponderous and unworkable. For some reason, the Newspaper of America cost $3.50 in Mexico. Balking at this price, I considered placing the paper back in its rack, but instead proceeded with an ugly American end run around the old peso problem by riffling through the paper with my suntan-lotion-smeared hands. The señorita at the gift shop became visibly annoyed -- jabbering and shaking her head in a way as to leave little doubt that, language barrier aside, she did not approve of this modus operandi. OKOKOK, I said, I'll buy the damn paper! But the paper, printed I guess two days ago, had no score, not even a mention of Game 1.

So it was Kelly and I that found ourselves at El Sombrero, a "sports bar" on the square in downtown Cozumel. We expected El Sombrero, a seedy cantina with a 20-year-old big-screen TV -- which, we supposed, is what qualified The Hat as a sports bar -- to be mobbed with American sportsfans. But 15 minutes prior to tip-off, the outdoor patio was empty, save two shirtless, tattooed, skinheaded, besotted American teenagers. Apparently the other hotels on the island carried NBC.

I fully anticipated a Laker sweep. In fact, the week before, I had written something to the effect that the championship matchup between Indiana and Los Angeles was going to be the most one-sided contest since Ali beat up Floyd Patterson. The Pacers peaked two years ago when they lost in the Eastern Finals to the Bulls -- a seven-game war of attrition which demonstrated to anybody paying attention that Chicago was a great team in decline. They had to pull out every veteran trick in the Bullbag to beat Indiana. The Pacers seemed to be the king-in-waiting. What we didn't know then was how much these annual battles with Chicago took out of Indiana. They've never been as good since that Game 7 loss. Good one night, terrible the next has been the Pacers' way the past two years. I thought the Knicks would beat them. I also believed that New York was the only team in the East able to match up at all against L.A.

Once the Lakers got past Portland (Portland lost that Game 7 more than L.A. won it), it seemed the Laker coronation was a foregone conclusion, awaiting only an easy sweep of the badly overmatched Pacers. That, in a long-winded nutshell, was what I was going to say. Due to the immutable laws of space requirements and the unsympathetic demands of the editing process, these poor observations never saw the light of day. I badly underestimated the overworked descriptor of "heart." Aside from Game 1, Indiana's been in every game. They easily could have done something never accomplished since the league went to the 2-3-2 format, and won all three middle games at home.

The Pacers ultimately lost the series in a hard-fought Game 6, but they gained a skeptic's respect with their courageous, utterly professional performance in Game 5, when they beat the unsuspecting Lakers by 33 points. What made that result so impressive is it came in an elimination game for the Pacers, coming only 48 hours after a defeat that had to be catastrophic to the Pacer psyche. The cumulative toll of this disaster -- a two-point overtime loss, which saw Indiana play an almost perfect game only to be whipped by an extraordinary performance by Kobe -- would have caused most professional teams to quit and call it a season.

Instead they took on the personality of their coach, played another perfect game, and spit a gooey gob of sputum in the cocky Laker eye. To this effort, sportsfans, I tip my cap.