The Spurs played their first game without Tim Duncan on the roster. (Photo: Soobum Im – USA TODAY Sports)
By Sarah Cilea
Follow @WildHorses65
I met Tim Duncan once.
Well, met is perhaps a strong word. It was at an open scrimmage at the AT&T Center some years ago. Admission is free and seating is first come, first serve.
Following the scrimmage, those of us near enough the tunnel gathered on the steps surrounding it as the players began to file off the floor. I feel almost certain most of the Spurs stopped to give the fans a few moments of their time en route to the locker room. In truth, I cannot recall the details.
What I do remember is Duncan ambling toward me, taking a miniature basketball from my hand, signing it, and handing it back to me. I held in my hand the autograph of one of the greatest basketball players of all time—for about a second.
The ball actually belonged to the small boy to my left. He merely lent it to me because my long arms were to better advantage for reaching the souvenir down to the players from our position near the top of the tunnel.
The better story of the day is my mother, who was positioned directly to my right on the highest step with a vantage point not blocked by the overhang. She had nothing for the players to sign either, but held out her open hand anyway.
After he returned the ball to me, as I was returning it to its rightful owner, Duncan grasped my mother’s hand. Only the momentary connection turned into a somewhat awkward handhold when my mother forgot to let go. Think Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man meeting Captain America in Civil War.
“I’m shaking your hand too long.”
As the encounter stretched on, each second felt like 45 to my mortified mother who eventually got the message from her brain to her fingers to release. For his part, Duncan was gracious about the whole thing and somehow avoided giving her the wide-eyed are-you-kidding-me look he usually reserves for referees.
Honestly, it was nowhere near as embarrassing or drawn out as she remembers it. But of course that’s no reason we should ever let her live it down.
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On Tuesday night, the San Antonio Spurs opened their season against the Golden State Warriors in Oracle Arena. Right out of the gate, they had the distinct privilege of meeting the 73-win juggernaut that just happened to pick up a four-time scoring champ and a considerable grudge over the summer.
It was the first time in history the Spurs or any other team have walked into an Opening Night matchup with a team that boasts that particular list of bullet points on their resume. The Warriors’ fresh memory of their record collapse in the Finals and their newly constructed roster is a unique combination of just enough heartache and corresponding fury to obliterate complacency and motivate them to do unspeakable things to any and all-comers, as well as the skill level to do it.
The Spurs handled it well. They surprised most of the NBA world by handing the Warriors a 129-100 loss on Opening Night.
The bigger challenge the Spurs face, however, the one that will stay with them long after Oracle has emptied on Tuesday night, has less to do with who they will be lining up against on a given night and everything to do with who they will be lining up without. For the first time since 1997, when the Spurs took the court to open the NBA season, Tim Duncan was somewhere else.
That’s like jewels without ice
That’s like China without rice
Or the Holy Bible without Christ
- Big L
When Duncan announced his retirement in July, it promised to leave a gaping hole in the hearts of fans the world over as much as in the center of the Spurs’ vaunted defense, where he patrolled the paint and protected the rim as if it were an endangered species over nearly two decades.
For 19 years, that No. 21 would be the cornerstone of San Antonio’s roster was a given. Even as analysts prematurely buried him more than once before finally affectionately dubbing him Old Man River Walk, even as the grey follicles, knee brace and limp became fixtures in his appearance, there he was. You could count on it: death, taxes, Tim Duncan and the Spurs (winning 50 games).
Among big men, only Robert Parish, Kevin Willis, Kevin Garnett, and Kareem played more seasons than Duncan. None played longer with one team. The only player ever to spend more time in a single uniform is Kobe Bryant who, you may have heard, also retired this summer after 20 seasons in Los Angeles. However, longest tenure without ever threatening to demand a trade belongs to Duncan and John Stockton. (Sorry, Laker fans. I lash out because I’m in pain.)
So how do we say goodbye?
The thought alone is daunting. I’ve yet to come up with an answer beyond sitting in a dark room listening to “Just Hold Me” by Maria Mena. I wish I were joking. The same two lines always get me:
“I can’t remember life without him. I think I did have good days?”
The Spurs once knew life without Duncan. There were even some damn good days, engineered by pioneers like Angelo Drossos, Red McCombs, James Silas, George Gervin, and David Robinson. Duncan was the missing piece to make their dream real, the perfect player to carry on what they started. The franchise is better for having had him. It will never be the same without him.
The incredible part is, there is no such thing as life without Tim Duncan for an entire generation of fans. There are college freshmen and sophomores who were not alive the last time the Spurs began a season without Duncan on the roster. Never mind those who have no memory of or never saw a Spurs team without him. This is uncharted territory. This is a brave new world.
Personally, I started following the NBA and the Spurs in particular in the postseason of 2003, when I was a freshman in high school. The first time I saw Duncan play I was 14-years-old; when he walked off an NBA court for the last time, I was 27. Without missing more than a couple games in that span I still somehow only saw about 75 percent of his career, to my great regret. There were no less than two transitional phases in my life through which he was a stabilizing constant. I know the same can be said for so many others.
I have no idea how to sum up a player and person whose impact was so great. All I can offer is my small perspective of what it was like to live in San Antonio and love the Spurs during the Duncan era. Looking back, attempting to look forward, so many vignettes come to mind: a thousand memories, so much to appreciate, to miss dearly, and to never stop owing him for.
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What Is and What Should Never Be
In March of this year, a good three months before Duncan would announce his retirement, the San Antonio Express-News released a “fantasy” themed issue of the paper’s weekly magazine, Spurs Nation. “Nightmare” may have been more apt.
In it, staff writer Nick Moyle posited an alternate timeline wherein Duncan left for Orlando in free agency of 2000. It is a frightening piece of science-fiction on par with Wells’s Time Machine or the original Planet of the Apes. Do not read it to your children before bed.
Yet the moral of the tale is not likely lost on any San Antonian. Because whatever it was that led us here, there was always a better chance of it not happening than otherwise. If Duncan never falls out of love with swimming for reasons beyond his control, if the ping pong balls bounce another way, if Doc’s promises of Grant Hill and Disney World are too tempting to pass up, where does that leave us?
There is a parallel reality somewhere—the same one where DeAndre Jordan is a Maverick and Chris Paul a Laker—in which Boston lands the number one pick in ‘97, as they were supposed to. The Celtics end up with 20 championships, Bill Simmons ODs on pure joy, and the Spurs wind up playing their home games in Anaheim, because California needed another team.
The Spurs were the subject of relocation rumors even after Duncan was drafted in our world, so it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine there was nothing to hold them here without him. The new arena deal hits a snag, the city refuses to budge and the team just picks up and leaves.
San Antonians gather outside the Alamodome on winter nights without knowing why. They mill about awhile then wander home. The Tower of the Americas sinks into the San Antonio River.
The 1979 Conference Finals are as close as San Antonio ever comes to a championship. The 7-game loss after taking a 3-1 lead becomes the ultimate symbol of opportunity lost, the question of what could have been. There is no relief 20 years later. There is only waiting.
Thankfully this godforsaken dystopia never came to be. We never had to imagine our city without Tim Duncan, cannot really even if we try. The Spurs are an integral, inextricable part of the city, and Tim Duncan is the Spurs. The island boy who became the city’s favorite son despite growing up 2,270 miles and an ocean away, he is as much a staple of San Antonio as the Alamo, the River Walk, puffy tacos or Big Red and barbacoa.
“Every time I walk around the house, once a month, I tell my wife, ‘Say thank you, Tim.’” – Gregg Popovich
Duncan gave the city more than can be accurately measured. Beyond the scope of his contribution, so much of his giving was done in secret, the realization of the biblical advice to “let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” As he so plainly put it during the retirement interview he gave to his childhood friend (a very Tim Duncan thing to do), Rashidi Clenance, “It’s not about me.”
Suffice it to say, Duncan is kind and generous like a Natalie Merchant song. Rather than share some of the stories that have slipped past his intentions and would probably only serve to embarrass him, I will just share a civic gift that was publicly given and enjoyed by all.
There is much to love about living in San Antonio. One of my absolute favorites is playoff time. Duncan was so good, so remarkably consistent over the course of his career that the NBA playoffs became an annual holiday season here, a time-honored tradition as commonplace in San Antonio as NIOSA-goers winding through La Villita in April or campers in Brackenridge Park over Easter Weekend. The start of the NBA postseason may as well have been printed on local calendars.
As April gives way to May, the telltale signs pop up all over the city. The giant “Go Spurs Go” flag billowing over the Dixie Flag Company and the banner draped from Trinity University’s Murchison Tower announce the arrival of playoff time in San Antonio as surely as the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree ushers in the yuletide season in New York. Spurs flags adorn a shocking number of vehicles, turning the daily commute into something of a parade. A wave of excitement envelops the city.
We don’t have an MLB team, or an NHL team, certainly not an NFL team, but the Spurs unite us. To experience San Antonio when the Spurs are in the playoffs is to see the seventh largest city in the country give its best impression of a small, west Texas town awash in the glow of Friday night lights.
Local businesses and institutions clamor to display their spirit and pride: from AT&T, the SAWS (San Antonio Water System) building and the Whataburger headquarters to car dealerships, nurseries and corner taquerias. The most endearing of these and my personal favorite to scavenger hunt are the mom and pop spots decorated with hand drawn art. Murals of the Big Three, the Coyote, trophies, and simply the word “Spurs” emblazon windows and walls. Some even become permanent.
Duncan delivered that for each and every one of nineteen years. Five such playoff seasons were punctuated by championships. The pure joy of those five wins, from the first to, most especially, the last, is indescribable. But as much as the five Larry O’Brien trophies and the five river parades, the totality of winning seasons and succession of playoff berths is something to savor.
That kind of sustained success just doesn’t happen. That no NBA team in history and no other team in North America’s four major sports leagues can match the Spurs’ .710 winning percentage of the last 19 years is proof. It was only possible because of Duncan, his talent, his longevity, and his willingness to sacrifice in the name of fielding the best team possible. He certainly left his mark on the city in more ways than one.
Thank you, Tim.
I don’t know how to put Tim Duncan’s career into words except to say: No matter how good you think he was, he was better.
— Jeff McDonald (@JMcDonald_SAEN) July 11, 2016
The fun thing—besides all of it—about watching Timmy all these years was how often he defied the notion of impossible. Now that I think of it, he was part of an Adidas ad campaign built around that very concept. He appeared in a plain, black sleeveless cutoff (the most Tim Duncan thing ever?):
We know about the championships, the two MVPs, three Finals MVPs, 15 All-Star selections, 15 All-NBA selections, 15 All-Defensive selections, Rookie of the Year. God is in the detail. Here are a few:
He came two blocked shots shy of a quadruple-double in Game 6 of the 2003 Finals with 21 points, 20 rebounds, 10 assists and eight blocks. No one else in the NBA has put up those numbers since all categories were first tracked in 1983, per basketball-reference.com. He averaged an absurd 24.7 points, 15.4 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 3.3 blocks per game while shooting 53 percent from the floor through 24 games that postseason.
In the 2005 Finals he took on Rasheed Wallace and Ben Wallace, probably the best defensive frontcourt since he and Robinson hooked up, on a bad ankle, and won.
In 2008 he became the only NBA player to reenact a movie scene in a double-overtime playoff game for his own amusement. If you grew up with the Mighty Ducks movies like I did, try to tell me Manu Ginobili driving left then throwing it back to Duncan for three is not shot-for-shot accurate to Charlie Conway skating toward the net, faking the goalie, and dumping it back to Goldberg the former goalie for the win.
Even the commentary is eerily similar. Listen as Mike Breen arrives at the unlikely conclusion; hear the utter disbelief in his voice as he says Duncan’s name:
They give it back to Ginobili. Nash all over him (lol). O’Neal with the help (lol). Takes it to the basket. Duncan, a three-pointer. Puts it up! It’s GOOD!
It’s excellent play-by-play work, but every time I see the play, all I hear is the kid from D3 saying, “He passes back to… Goldberg???”
As much as we know about Duncan’s greatness, I suspect there are more gems to be mined from the ever-widening vein of analytics. In a terrific piece for Today’s Fastbreak, Kelly Scaletta determined that the Spurs outscored their opponents by 10,000 points while Duncan was on the floor.
On the other end, twitter user GamePhreak845 snapped this screencap from NBATV regarding their defense:
This stat is ridiculous. Ridiculous, folks. pic.twitter.com/hm5binojTl — Celtics 50 wins (@GamePhreak845) October 11, 2016
Strange coincidence that many of the Spurs’ records run for exactly 19 years. That’s the definition of franchise changer. Undoubtedly, however deep we get into the numbers, history will always look favorably on Tim Duncan.
Overall he averaged 19 points, 10.8 rebounds, 3 assists, 2.2 blocks, and shot better than 50 percent for his career on bad knees and an average 34 minutes a game. His playoff averages? 20.6 points, 11.4 rebounds, 3 assists, 2.3 blocks, 50 percent shooting. I guess that’s how you end up with a nickname like “Groundhog Day.”
Duncan was so good for so long, he actually challenged the veracity of his own basketball mortality. The one thing we know about every athletic career, about everything, really, is all things come to an end. Still, Duncan made it seem like he could play forever.
Tim Duncan will be putting up 15 and 10 in 2035 and we’ll still be saying “HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?!”
— Quixem Ramirez (@quixem) June 16, 2014
November 21, 2035 — Tim Duncan logs his 1,344th consecutive regular-season game with a rebound
— Jeff McDonald (@JMcDonald_SAEN) November 22, 2015
Our editor-in-chief at BBALLBREAKDOWN, Jesse Blanchard, even drew a pretty iconic image of Duncan posterizing Father Time. All of it masked our fear of losing in humor and homage. Even though the 2035 references were made in jest, there was an enticing kernel of truth in them.
Who could have predicted Duncan would still be lacing them up in 2016? He defied the odds thus far. Maybe he could go on doing it, one season at a time. I don’t think I ever really believed he would play forever, but it somehow seemed more reasonable than the unthinkable future without him.
The idea of Duncan considering retirement was like Rocky Balboa telling Adonis Creed “Time beat [Apollo]. Time, you know, takes everybody out. It’s undefeated.” What he’s saying makes sense—but not for him, not while Balboa as a character is making his seventh onscreen appearance in a franchise that could not have been expected to go beyond two films and certainly was not favored to survive the fifth.
Father Time may be undefeated, but Duncan put up a fight for the ages. Hell, he’s still up in the cards by any reasonable scorekeeping. It’s worth a reminder that in the first round of the 2015 playoffs—just a year prior to his final game—when his knees were cooperating at least slightly more than they reportedly were through much of 2016, Duncan gave arguably the most athletic frontcourt in the NBA all they could handle.
In that epic series against the Clippers he averaged 17.9 points, 11 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 1.3 steals, and 1.4 blocks per game and shot nearly 60 percent from the field. He eclipsed 20 points and 10 rebounds in Games Two, Four, Five, and Seven. He was a clipped fingernail away from blocking Chris Paul’s game-winner and sending the Spurs to the second round.
Duncan’s peak was white hot beauty that probably gets overshadowed by just how long he remained really, really good. His game never aged.
“I remember one time Kevin Garnett was mushing him, and shoving him in the face; and Tim Duncan didn’t do anything, he didn’t react. He just kicked Kevin Garnett’s a–, and won the damn championship. You know what I’m sayin’? That’s gangsta. Everybody can show emotion, dunk on somebody, scream and be real cocky; but Tim Duncan is a … he’s a pimp.” – Ron Artest
For all his skill, if I were to make a list of everything I’ll miss about Tim Duncan, actual basketball might not even make the top three. Though it will be well-nigh impossible to replicate his career, there will be other shot blockers, great defenders, even other bigs with exceptional footwork in the post. Occasionally, a player will even come along who encapsulates all three. But Duncan’s demeanor, his personality and his leadership were truly unique.
Mario Elie was already a two-time NBA champion when he joined the Spurs in the fall of 1998. Early in the season he was underwhelmed by his new teammates and not shy about saying so.
“This is the first team I’ve been on where, I mean, after nine games I think I may have got one chest bump,” Elie said. “You know, these guys are really not emotional guys. It seems to puzzle me why you can’t get emotional out there. Guys are talking bad about you. Guys are being physical with you. You know? Retaliate.”
Reports alleged David Robinson and Sean Elliott were the main targets of Elie’s call out, but Duncan’s general lack of violent emotion fit the bill too. Not that he minded.
“I knew what he was trying to do but I play my game,” Duncan said. “I think I play as hard as anybody out there on the floor. Just because I don’t go waving arms and stuff doesn’t mean I don’t have any fire.”
Duncan will probably go down as one of the least interesting superstars in NBA history. Not that it matters but that’s kind of a shame. There was always more than met the eye with Duncan. Much of that was by design.
“People don’t know anything about me,” he once said in an interview with Sports Illustrated, “and it’s good.”
Coming into the league after four years at Wake Forest, the psych major had plenty of polish as both a player and person. He knew who he was and was not interested in changing. Nor was he looking to reveal it.
As SI writer S.L. Price explained, “It’s an old saw of negotiating that the less you say, the more your opponent reveals.”
Duncan absolutely understood that. When he refused to respond to Garnett or anyone trying to rile him, it wasn’t because he was soft or stupid. He did it because he knew how to win. If trash talk and physicality are all about getting into the mind of the opponent, the most effective way to counter such a tactic is of course to pay it no mind.
“You destroy people’s psyches when you do that,” Duncan explained. “You absolutely destroy them. They can’t get inside your head. They’re talking to you, and there’s no response other than to make this shot, make this play, get this rebound and go the other way. People hate that.”
If no response is the most effective counter to attempted mind games, the most devastating counter is mirth. Have you ever tried to intimidate someone and all they did was laugh at you? Utterly deflating, not to mention frustrating and infuriating. Duncan was a mastermind of this.
Exhibit A: Game Three of the first round playoff series between the Lakers and Spurs in 2013. The Lakers were well on their way to being swept by a Spurs team destined for the Finals. Aside from missing eight of 15 free throw attempts, Dwight Howard was actually having a pretty good game. He would finish with 25 points and 11 rebounds on a 9-of-16 shooting night. But Old Man Timmy essentially played him to a standstill, putting up 26 points, nine rebounds, and three assists on 12-of-16 shooting.
He also drew a few fouls on Howard that put the Lakers big man in foul trouble and so frustrated Howard he had to come out of the game to cool off. Howard sending an “f— you, man” in Duncan’s direction as the wily vet sits on the scorer’s table grinning is perfect. In the end, the Spurs handed the Lakers a 120-89 loss, the worst loss the Lakers have ever suffered in a playoff home game. Timothy Theodore, you are a treasure.
Exhibit B: A late season game against the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014. Kendrick Perkins does his “Perk the Jerk” routine. Duncan laughs. I really don’t remember how this game ended, but the Spurs would go on to win the title, eliminating the Thunder at Chesapeake Arena in the Western Conference Finals along the way.
Crowning achievement: Well, we all remember the time Joey Crawford was so incensed by Duncan’s laughing that he actually threw Duncan out of the game—from the bench. It was not a fond memory for either of them, but Crawford has called the incident the one regret of his 39-year career.
In at least the first two examples above, you get the impression Duncan enjoyed when people tried to get him to crack and he was able to flip the script without lifting a finger. Price put it best, observing, “He enjoys what happens when he doesn’t speak…. He delights in the power of his silence.”
Too many times opponents brought checkers to a chess match with Timmy. It was checkmate before they even figured out what the game was. As a spectator, it was fun to watch that game within the game. The unflappable Crucian stood out in a league filled with bravado. I will miss that.
While Kawhi Leonard seems willing and capable of replacing of Duncan’s quiet brand of dominance, not all silence is the same. Leonard may very well enjoy dismantling opponents nightly—he must—but he betrays no hint of it. His stoicism gives silent film legend Buster “The Great Stone Face” Keaton a run for his money in the blank expression category. Still, we have seen more smiles from Leonard this preseason. Maybe we’ll get an actual giggle in a few years.
More than anything I appreciate that Duncan unequivocally disproved the notion that quiet is the same as not caring. To poorly paraphrase Vincent Van Gogh, some people have a fire inside them even if no one stops to warm themselves by it and passers-by see only a wisp of smoke. The way Tim Duncan won made his victory all the more delicious for anyone whose heart has been questioned simply because they don’t scream and shout.
“I think the thing that made him happiest, beyond the fans and his teammates and all that sort of thing, was the time he spent with his two children before games on the bench over there. That’s who he was. That’s who he still is.” – Pop
Duncan was a wealth of endearing quirks and rituals, many of which manifested in his pregame routines. As this summer dragged on and the reality of life without Timmy attempted to work its way through the denial forming a protective, Stan Van Gundy-esque wall around my mind, it was those pregame moments that kept coming to mind.
Almost every day brought the realization of one more Duncan trademark I’d never again see. Insignificant as it may seem, I will miss so much of what Duncan did every night before the ball was even tipped.
The ball hug is well known. Any number of NBA photographers could easily present an entire exhibit of Tim Duncan hugging the basketball through the years. Subtle changes in hairstyle and color would be the only clues to the passage of time. It would be beautiful and worthy of a room in the Louvre. Anyway, perfect as the ball hug is, it was just the capper to Duncan’s very busy pregame.
For starters, he’d usually bully Sean Elliott a little bit. Captain’s duties always drew him to midcourt with Parker. Once he was finished warming up he would take a seat on the bench. His children often joined him then. It was not uncommon to see him wipe his son’s face with a Gatorade towel. Mostly they just sat there and enjoyed each other’s company.
Once the kids left for their seats Duncan and Parker were left on the bench, a seat or more separating them. Most nights they did not speak, just sat staring ahead. During the anthem he took his place near the sideline with Ginobili and Parker. They lined up smallest to tallest, with Parker on the end.
My favorite pictures from this time are ones like the above, with each member of the Big Three standing in his own way: Parker with arms folded in front, Ginobili behind, Duncan at his sides. It seems to visualize how each individual brought his own unique gifts to the table, that they were disparate but always together.
As the lights went down for intros Duncan headed for the basket, reaching up to grab the rim and hang majestically from it for a few moments. At some point he picked up a habit of hassling Leonard with dummy punches as the visiting team’s starting lineup was announced.
Photo: Scott Ball
Over all these, my favorite to look for the past few years was the touchdown pass. It always happened right after layup lines. He’d line up on the sideline across from the Spurs’ bench with Danny Green on his right. Duncan dropped back, Green ran a route across the court, Patty Mills rushed the passer, Duncan lofted the pass and Boris Diaw tried to break it up. If the play ended in a completion, Green danced.
I don’t know if it ever made it to broadcast like Steph Curry’s multisport demonstration or Russell Westbrook’s dance routine with Cameron Payne, but it was real. I have the Zapruder footage to prove it. Just before the first home preseason game the Spurs tweeted this:
The tradition lives on pic.twitter.com/2UDkEW08hh — San Antonio Spurs (@spurs) October 9, 2016
And I felt my heart twist like a wet towel being wrung out. I love Patty to death for stepping up, but it makes the change all the more stark when you replace a 6’11” quarterback with a 6’ one. Imagine Patty trying to see over the line.
“He’s been the best teammate anybody could ever imagine. Think about how many people have played with him. And all Tim Duncan has to do is he raises one of those arms, right or left, and he puts it on their shoulder, and it’s a warmth and a comfort that they feel that allows them to become the best possible player they can be.” – Pop
When I played AAU basketball in San Antonio, our assistant coach (okay he was the coach’s son, but he was also an assistant) once told me, “Now don’t get a big head because you’re nowhere near as good as this guy, but you’re kind of like our Tim Duncan.”
Hand to God, qualifier and all, that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Of course it’s a completely inaccurate comparison to which I pale in every way but who cares. No take-backs. All I ever wanted to be was like Timmy.
His influence was in the reverse pivot-jab-step-pull-up-off-glass that I practiced at the park down to the Adidas D-Cools that I wore in high school even though the black and silver clashed horribly with our blue and gold school colors. Most of all, I wanted to be that kind of teammate.
Bar none, what I will miss most about seeing Duncan on the court is the kind of teammate he was. Even from the outside perspective of a fan, it was palpable.
Sports teams are often referred to as family. With the Spurs, it rang true. Duncan had as much to do with that as anyone. If Pop was the aptly monikered father figure, the caring if occasionally ill-tempered disciplinarian, Duncan was the calm older brother. It was impossible to watch a Spurs game and not see him drape a reassuring arm around a teammate.
In 14 years of collecting newspaper clippings I realize I cut out just as many of Duncan with teammates as I did of him dunking on people, which, contrary to popular belief, he did plenty of. From baby-faced-sophomore-season Tony Parker to doorstep-of-retirement Steve Kerr in 2003, all the way up to Boris Diaw and Danny Green, it’s all there. Those are the moments I thought were most worth remembering.
He palmed teammates’ heads as if he was about to dunk them. He checked on them when they went down in pain, was there to pick them up and back them up when necessary.
From time to time, he forgot his teammates were not Labrador puppies. (The best part of these videos is how comfortable Parker is with the whole thing, whereas I think that is an actual moment of abject terror on Leonard’s face.)
In truth, he was as much a mother hen as big brother, and ever the unflinching leader. He was always the last one to step off the court, a basketball version of General Hal Moore, never leaving before giving each of his guys a high five. No one archetype really captures it. That’s not easily replaced.
Who’s going to be there to drape a towel around Ginobili like a mother wrapping her child in a blanket after a bad day of school? Who else has the class to execute the gentleman’s handshake with Patty? Who will karate chop Kawhi in the head? Or do whatever the hell this is to Patty’s? What if Manu’s shoulders get cold? This is not a world I want to live in.
“When I leave, there won’t be any cake in the break room. I’ll just be gone.”
The words were spoken by a graying, admitted nerd with a quiet but effective style of leadership. William Petersen’s Gil Grissom, the night shift supervisor on the original incarnation of CBS’s long-running “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” says them to a member of his team early in the second season. He wants to prepare his team for his eventual absence, but there’s no way to do something like that. He walks away in the ninth season. The show goes on successfully for many years but it’s never the same.
The quote obviously calls up Duncan, whose farewell to life as an active NBA player was as Tim Duncan as it gets. On May 12, 2016 Duncan played out the final quarter of an elimination game against the Thunder in Oklahoma City. There was no early exit for an ovation, no curtain call. Duncan finished his last game on the court. He congratulated the Thunder players, took one last look up, then walked off with one finger raised. That was goodbye.
So what now?
“He’s gone. I’ve put it out of my mind. Same culture, same philosophy. I only know what I know. We’ll hang our hat on defense. We just don’t have the greatest power forward of all time playing for us anymore.” – Pop
Oh. Well, if that’s all.
On Oct. 14 I attended the Spurs preseason game with my family as part of our celebration of my mom’s birthday. It was our first game since Duncan’s retirement. Coming from dinner, we arrived a little later than usual. It was probably for the best. We didn’t have to lament the end of the touchdown pass as we knew it, or see the Big Three reduced to two during the anthem.
By the time we got to our seats the starters were taking the floor for tip off. Only there was no Duncan seeking out the head official in search of his traditional moment with the basketball, and suddenly my face was wet.
When my grandfather died, we went to his house to stay with my grandmother before the funeral. I was nine. When we got to the house I embarked on a strange walk-through: back to his bedroom, down to his basement workspace, around the living room and kitchen, up to the loft. I was looking for him.
Driven by instinct more than logic, my feet carried me forward in a desperate desire to just see him. After searching everywhere, I distinctly remember checking a coat closet by the front door before the emptiness of the house without him finally fell in on me. Somehow the possibility of him sitting in a coat closet made more sense than going to his house and not finding him there.
Sitting in an AT&T Center seat on game night and not seeing Duncan felt a lot like that. Losing Tim Duncan to retirement is really nothing like losing a loved one to a heart attack, but the well-attended arena had that same heavy, lonesome feeling. Someone important was clearly missing.
Quiet as he was, Duncan’s presence was everywhere. It pervaded the entire building, was wrapped up in everything the team did. His absence is inescapable. We’re going to feel it for a while. We should.
How do we let go? After all this—and if you’ve read this far, bless you—we come back to that impossible question. But I finally came up with an answer: why should we?
Popovich told reporters at camp, “We’re not ready to say goodbye to him.” Duncan, who has already made several visits to practice, seems to feel the same. He has a standing offer to be coach of whatever he wants. He’s still figuring out what that is.
However involved Duncan decides to be going forward, we will continue to hold on. We’ll hold on because he was that important. He meant too much to a franchise, to a city, to the game. By some lucky stroke of fate, he was ours. Through all the invitations to leave, he stayed.
The last time my mother and I talked about her meeting with Tim Duncan, after her requisite embarrassment passed, she told me something. She said she thought maybe the whole thing went down the way it did because she was only prepared for a fleeting high five. Instead, Duncan surprised her with a light squeeze of the hand. She never expected him to embrace her back.
There’s a city of 1.5 million who know exactly what she means. So hold on. There’s no shame in forgetting to let go.
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