Orlando Has Right To Ask

While the question around here should be, “Where can I get a meal that is not deep fried?” it is instead, “Why not us? Why not now?”

The “us” would be the Orlando Magic, a basketball team young enough to need a curfew. It’s the first game of the NBA Finals. Do you know where your overgrown children are?

As a matter of fact, they are down, 0-1, to the incumbent champion Houston Rockets after blowing a 20-point lead at home, missing four free throws at the end of regulation and wasting a second chance in overtime.

The “now” would be a generation or so ahead of schedule. In a mere seven years, the Magic are where it took, for example, the Bulls 25 years to get. However this turns out, chances are greater the Magic will be back before the Bulls are.

Only the Milwaukee Bucks, three years old at the time, made the NBA Finals faster, and that was because of the combination of two Hall of Fame players, the legendary Oscar Robertson and the rookie Lew Alcindor.

Alcindor then decided that Milwaukee was too culturally bereft for him, and forced his way to Los Angeles, becoming Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson’s long time companion.

Two things about Shaquille O’Neal, the Orlando heap and the present-day Alcindor. He seems not anxious to change his name nor to move out of the smallest pond in the NBA. This place makes Milwaukee look like Rome.

Besides, anything that exists somewhere else is duplicated just down I-4, including Main Street, Morocco and the Mississippi. Phony as it is, this is Shaq’s World and one admission ticket is good for the whole stay.

Still, how interesting would it be if O’Neal changed his name to Hakeem Jamaal and the originally designated Hakeem Olajuwon, who wants to play for the U.S. Olympic team and very likely will, Americanized his name to something like Bubba Wilson?

Well, maybe whichever one wins these Finals can do whatever he wants. Why not them? Why not then?

“Hakeem is Michael Jordan playing center,” said Horace Grant. “Hakeem is like Michael, Magic and Larry Bird all rolled into one.”

None of that trinity ever made a more stirring shot than Olajuwon at the end of Game One, a basket of will and opportunity, a shot that will help make less counterfeit the growing enshrinement of Olajuwon as one of the all-time greats.

Olajuwon divided Orlando’s Brian Shaw and Nick Anderson like slices of cheese and soared up over Horace Grant to tip in the rebound of Clyde (Why Not Me? Why Not the Third Time?) Drexler.

O’Neal and Olajuwon hugged before the opening tip, sincerely it seemed. Then they proceeded to keep cameras focused on them all the way to the final tip by Olajuwon that won it for Houston.

“It was so quiet I didn’t realize the basket was good for a moment,” Olajuwon said.

Each had his poster moment at the expense of the other - Shaq slamming home a lob over Olajuwon and Hakeem doing his rolling shoulder, triple fake, up and under flip hook while O’Neal looked like he suddenly realized he was on the wrong bus.

“This is the classic example of what we have been going through the whole playoffs,” Olajuwon said.

Both teams played their Hope Defense: Hope the shot doesn’t go in. Both teams shot so quickly, the shot clock couldn’t be sold as used.

It made for the kind of breathtaking basketball not usually seen at this stage when teams tend to use caution and thuggery. Not only did each side let the other go wherever it wanted, it didn’t even check IDs.

“These are the teams everyone wanted to see in the Finals,” said Hardaway. “I’m not knocking Indiana or San Antonio, but both our teams like to run and have great centers. It will go down in history, this 1995 NBA Finals.”

Probably so. Even Kato Kaelin will go down in history.