Basketball diary

A starstruck fan watches his team collapse -- and learns the truth about locker rooms

by Michael Crowley

The date is March 13 -- Friday the 13th -- and I'm standing in the Boston Celtics' locker room. The Celtics have just lost a heartbreaking game to the Detroit Pistons, 96-92, and the mood in their antiseptic, brightly lit locker room is somber. In a postgame press conference, head coach Rick Pitino has just proclaimed the team's playoff hopes dead.

The reporters forming semicircles around the morose players are respectful, even timid. They wait politely as star forward Antoine Walker, who barely 15 minutes ago had the ball under the basket with a chance to win the game and got stripped, buttons up his shirt. You don't get the sense he feels like talking.

Watching this scene, I feel that I'm somehow intruding, like a guest in a household that's in the throes of a family crisis. I'm not a sportswriter, and the night I've chosen to observe the Celtics turns out to be the bleakest night of the season. Moments ago, despite the fact that 19 games still remain, Pitino essentially declared the season over: "We tried very hard to make these playoffs," Pitino said. "But right now, I don't think it's reachable."

Black as the mood is, however, I'm also feeling a little giddy.

For one thing, I've realized a dream of the hard-core NBA fan: total access. For another, I'm finding that, despite its absolute devotion to seriousness, a locker room can be a difficult place to take seriously. Take, for instance, a motivational sign that hangs near the door:

Champions, evidently, don't have time to write out "like a champion" eight times. Champions also apparently need to be reminded of the BOSTON CELTICS SEXUAL HARASSMENT POLICY, which is posted on another wall.

Champions should also know their own team's win-loss record, but point guard Kenny Anderson, a few lockers down from Walker, talking to a second pack of reporters, actually has to ask whether the team has been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. (That won't happen for a few more weeks, Pitino's pessimism notwithstanding.) He then gets into a spat with a reporter trying to elicit a nasty quote about an old nemesis of his, Atlanta guard Mookie Blaylock. "What you trying to start?" Anderson barks to the suddenly intimidated reporter.

I had hoped to ask Anderson about his marriage to a woman named Tami, perhaps the most inane cast member in the history of MTV's The Real World, but I decide it's probably not such a good idea. He could bark at me, too; but more important, I can't afford to blow my cover.

---

As a kid, I had a consuming fascination with the inside of Snoopy's doghouse. I always figured that the pointy-roofed Peanuts landmark was just like Snoopy himself: a blank, deadpan exterior cloaking an elaborate and complex interior. I imagined an impossibly baroque inner world of toys and gizmos and hidden passageways, even though the whole house didn't look big enough to fit a bicycle in.

When it comes to basketball, I'm still a kid. Which is why, when I picked up my media pass at the FleetCenter last month for the Celtics-Pistons game -- allowing me to walk around any off-limits place I wanted -- I felt as if I were at the big doghouse party I never got invited to in my boyhood.

These Celtics were a far more interesting team than the pitiful Keystone Kops squad of a year ago. There was a new coach, a new crop of babyfaced millionaires, and -- as of February -- Kenny Anderson, a playmaking point guard who'd been landed in a pivotal trade.

By mid-March, the Celtics had gotten a little groove going. The day before I visited the FleetCenter, in fact, Boston Globe columnist Peter May had noted that the team was about to double its number of wins from the previous season, and that "the talk is of an even grander goal: the playoffs."

The playoffs! Of course, for the Celtics, a postseason trip with a first-round Bulls draw would have had results as swift and certain as landing an astronaut on the sun. But still, the young Celts would acquire valuable experience. And the city would buzz over another appearance by Michael Jordan.

No sooner did Peter May mention the playoffs than the Celtics, who wrap up their season April 18, pissed away their chances by losing 8 of 11 games. But as March 13 dawned, hope was still alive. Little did I know that I would show up at the FleetCenter to inspect the doghouse on the very night that the roof came crashing down.

6 p.m. An hour before tipoff and I'm standing courtside in a near-empty Fleet Center, feeling very VIP. Laid out before me is the same parquet on which Larry Bird and Bob Cousy and Bill Russell won a billion championships. And standing on the court a few feet away is none other than Grant Hill, the superstar Pistons forward whom some have anointed Jordan II. In this casual pregame atmosphere, Hill and Rick Pitino are engaging in some friendly verbal sparring.

"I hated that game," Hill says with a laugh, referring to a recent outing in which he'd been upstaged by Miami forward Jamal Mashburn. "I had a shitty game, 'cause I didn't do a dang thing. Jamal just burned me all night."

Feeling as though I've punctured some veil of reality, I react to this unguarded banter like the starstruck fan I am. Gee, I think, that Grant Hill is just a regular guy!

And this is before Grant's sitting in front of me with no clothes on. But first things first.

The first thing is the cafeteria. Yes, the real center of pregame activity isn't the basketball court or even the locker rooms. It's a small dining room tucked away underneath the stands, just off the arena floor.

It turns out that team employees and the media get a free pregame meal, served from steam trays, just like in a college dining hall. As I ponder a swamp of soggy noodles with a thick brown sauce that appears to include mushrooms, it occurs to me that if the Celtics can shell out $3 million a year for center Travis Knight, who doesn't even start anymore, surely they can deliver better food than this.

Reporters hang out here for the food, but also because the cafeteria opens onto the press room -- a spare, dark box with a long table running along three walls, with room for about 50 hacks making phone calls and cranking out stories on laptops after the game. For the press regulars here, this is literally a night at the office. And while tonight's my big night, to them it's just more time at work.

In fact, nobody here is even talking about the Celtics. There's a lot of animated banter about the NCAA tournament. And Kathleen Willey's face is beaming from both of the television screens mounted high on the walls. ("This is a new one," explains one reporter to a colleague.)

Kathleen Willey? Don't these people realize Grant Hill is just 50 yards down the hall?

6:40 Now Grant Hill isn't just down the hall. He's standing next to me again. So, in fact, are all 12 Detroit Pistons.

Tipped off as to when the teams emerge from their locker rooms, I've staked out a spot in the gray-carpeted hallway outside.

The Pistons emerge first. Out comes head-case guard Jerry Stackhouse, singing a sweet R&B song. The lanky Jerome Williams, another guard, smacks his lips over and over. By contrast, Rick Mahorn, a veteran bruiser from the championship Pistons teams of the 1980s, looks deadly serious. You get the feeling he considers it a duty to keep the kids focused.

"Les' go, les' go, we need this one now," he says in a forceful baritone to Williams. "Les' go, junkyard dawg!"

Mahorn is scary. Mahorn looks like he wants to knock somebody out. Mahorn makes Grant Hill look like a big nerd.

Off go the Pistons. And five minutes later, out come the Celtics, in their white jerseys with green numbers. The average age of this team is just 25, and it shows.

The sign in the locker room says ACT " " " AND YOU WILL BE A CHAMPION, but the Celtics are chuckling and guffawing and elbowing one another like a bunch of frat boys. Fair-haired center Travis Knight, who in fact looks like an archetypal Sigma Chi stretched like putty to a height of seven feet, is clowning around with a faux tough-guy schtick that seems to be annoying his teammates. It occurs to me that an old dawg like Rick Mahorn could be just what this team needs.

7:11 Tipoff. I'm seated at the press table, about six feet behind the basket on the Celtics' end of the court.

From this intimate distance, I expect to understand the game of basketball in all sorts of new ways. And it's true that you can't fully appreciate the sheer, humbling athleticism of these players until you see them in person. But it's hard not to get distracted by the sideshows around the game -- the kind of thing that gets glossed over in the sports section or on highlights shows.

The main distraction is Rick Pitino himself, whose manic coaching technique makes him almost as interesting as the players. Most coaches are overbearing and authoritarian, but a lot of them still let the players more or less run their own show once the game starts. Not Pitino. A consummate control freak, he marches the sidelines like a drill sergeant, chopping the air with his hands.

Dana Barros is too itchy with his three-point trigger: "Bad shot!"

Flat-footed Andrew DeClerq gets a rebound snatched from over his head: "Andrew! Jump, jump, jump!"

It's hard to believe that anybody could listen to these rantings for an entire 82-game season. Tonight, the players seem a little slow to respond to Pitino, and I wonder if they've begun to just tune him out.

Eventually, even Pitino seems to give up. The game is a sloppy mess of bad passes, missed dunks, and lazy shots, and he sits down in frustration midway through the second quarter. His team doesn't look like a playoff contender -- it looks like a bunch of second-stringers, even against the sluggish Pistons.

Pitino's histrionics have never been a secret. But Wire Boy is a revelation to me. Wire Boy is a beleaguered TV cameraman's assistant who takes an empty chair next to me; his entire job consists of carrying the camera wire that trails behind his boss. Mostly the cameraman films from just behind the sidelines, and Wire Boy can relax and munch on snack mix. But during time-outs the cameraman will run onto the court to shoot the crowd or a huddle, and Wire Boy, a dough-faced collegiate guy in a baseball hat, bolts from his chair and scurries onto the court, letting the wire play out through his hands and then quickly whipping it off-court before play resumes.

Wire Boy lives in fear of one thing: tripping a player. After every time-out, he returns winded and flustered. But in some touching way, he obviously considers the job of cameraman to be the most exciting in the world.

"That guy likes to live dangerous," he declares, after just barely pulling the wire out from under the foot of Dana Barros. "You won't believe what he does in the second half." What this means will remain a mystery to me.

8:22 The second half opens with the Celtics holding a 38-37 lead. Mercifully, the quality of play picks up as the Celtic shooters come alive.

All the good stuff, though, keeps happening off the court. Tonight, the most entertaining thing of all was something I missed entirely, at least until I watched a tape of the Fox TV broadcast later. That's when I found out What Happened to Heinsohn.

An irritable, gravelly-voiced former player and coach, Tom Heinsohn, the Celtics' longtime play-by-play man, is famously partisan on the air. People have complained about his shameless cheerleading for years -- he once got into trouble for reacting to a foul call with an on-air shout of "Oh, that's bullshit!" -- but tonight he enters uncharted waters.

In the mid-third quarter, Travis Knight has been called for an offensive foul, which he clearly deserves. Heinsohn, who calls the game from a press table alongside the court, goes off.

"I -- I gotta tell ya," says Heinsohn, "that -- that is ridiculous! Now, he's called two offensive fouls on two of the Celtic player--"

Abruptly, Heinsohn stops talking. There is a pause. Then, "Aaah, ya--," and something that sounds like "Bah."

Then there's a long silence.

Heinsohn's partner, the chipper color commentator Mike Gorman, finally speaks up. "Did -- he just threaten to toss you?"

Heinsohn, seething: "He did. Brave man."

This is a fascinating moment. A referee is finally fighting back against Heinsohn's obnoxious nonstop complaining about calls against his team. Gorman is incredulous. "[Referee] Terry Durham just threatened to throw Tom Heinsohn out of the game. That's a first. I've never seen that before," he says.

Heinsohn: "I'm gonna have a little discussion with Terry Durham after the game."

After the game, before I've gone home and heard this exchange on tape, I will wonder why big Tommy Heinsohn is hanging around by the locker rooms with an angry look on his face. Now I know.

9:35 Final buzzer. Pistons win, 96-92. It's a gut-wrenching loss for the Celtics: given a chance to tie with 18 seconds remaining, Ron Mercer bricked a shot, Walker got the rebound -- but lost the ball. Game over. The slump-shouldered Celtics make a quick exit from the court.

After Pitino delivers his grim press conference -- at which he tells one noisy reporter to be quiet, shooting him a long, murderous stare -- it's back to the locker room, where an elusive truth is quickly revealed: yes, they're naked back there.

I knew reporters were allowed into locker rooms, but I'd assumed that lavishly paid celebrities like NBA players would never really stroll around in the buff before a bunch of anonymous hacks with notebooks. I figured that there was a private "real" locker room for showering and dressing, and another for greeting reporters. But no, there's just one locker room, and it's not very big. Maybe 15 feet by 30, it could pass for a dentist's office decorated in green and white. (The visitors' locker room, supposedly upgraded from the unsportsmanly penitentiary-like conditions of the old Boston Garden, is even smaller -- and unlike the Celtics', it's a total mess.)

Having discovered the truth about the locker-room dress code, I pour every ounce of my energy into ignoring it. I do my best to imitate the jaded reporters who congeal into small crowds around one player after another, furiously scribbling down notes.

I feel silly for thinking about the nudity question at all, but it's the most interesting thing about the postgame quote-gathering ritual. For instance, the moment of the night comes courtesy of the Pistons' Brian Williams, a 6-foot-10 center with a Charles Barkleyesque big mouth and a reputation as an eccentric.

Williams is standing in nothing but flip-flops and waving a white towel around angrily. The visitors' locker room door opens right onto the hallway, where Williams has noticed a twentysomething woman hanging around.

"Yo, tell that girl to move from the door! Yo! Tell her to move over!"

She doesn't move. She doesn't seem to realize she's the object of this yelling, which suggests she probably wasn't paying attention to him in the first place. But Williams, who apparently hasn't thought to simply move out of her line of sight, doesn't seem to care.

"Yo, fat chick! Move over! That broad is trying to cop a look."

Williams should take a lesson from Grant Hill, who emerges from the shower wrapped in a towel and, in an artful, well-practiced move, slips on his red-and-blue Tommy Hilfiger briefs underneath in mid-interview.

As I try to blend in with the regular reporters, I notice an uneasy dynamic between the players and the press. The two sides seem to regard one another with suspicion: the players look down at these 40-grand-making plebes who flood their locker room and try to trick them into saying controversial things they'll regret. The reporters, one suspects, consider themselves smarter than the spoiled twentysomethings they cover, and no doubt resent the players' seven-figure salaries.

Ultimately, however, it's almost always the players who have the upper hand in this relationship. For evidence of this I need look no farther than the bold type on the back of my press pass: NO AUTOGRAPHS ALLOWED DURING MEDIA ACCESS PERIODS!

10:15 PISTONS DELIVER A JOLT TO CELTICS will be tomorrow's headline in the Boston Globe. PITINO FIGURES PLAYOFF BID IS OVER. Tonight's defeat was a morale-breaker for the Celtics, a team that was simply too young, too small, and too erratic. Pitino will go from hoping for the playoffs to hoping for 40 wins to that last-resort goal, "laying the groundwork" for next season.

That next season will have a lot to do with the three young stars I'm watching now. Wringing every last drop of access out of my media pass, I've tailed Antoine Walker, Walter McCarty, and Kenny Anderson out of the arena, to a small parking lot where they climb into three sport-utility vehicles.

I'm somewhat surprised to see that there are no stretch limos, no thuggish bodyguards. Walker, in a black-and-white checked jacket and a black T-shirt, gets into a silver truck that shudders from the booming bass of its stereo. McCarty is headed out with an awfully cute young woman. Anderson is joined by David Falk, the white-haired, balding "superagent" who has secured endless millions for the likes of Patrick Ewing and Michael Jordan.

In their short column of urban tanks, the players slowly leave the lot. McCarty rolls down his window to sign a few programs for a small group of fans who have staked out the parking lot. Patiently waiting in the cold March wind, the fans don't care that this season has been written off. They just want to see their heroes up close.

Mike Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com