ESPN.com: Telander

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Based on? First of all, I love the number 50.

Second, when Ed Badger was the Bulls coach in the late-1970's, he was all about positive attitude, and he ordered the Illinois vanity license plate "WIN 50" for his car and something got screwed up and he got "WIN 30" instead. I always thought that was unfair.

Especially when he was fired.

Third, I'm thinking of the acquisition of Ben "My Fro's in Rows" Wallace at the center spot and the fact forward Luol Deng has grown two inches since the Bulls drafted him in 2004. How smart was that pick? Speaking of which, general manager John Paxson is the guy who signed Wallace and drafted Deng and everybody else now on the Bulls, like Kirk Hinrich and Ben Gordon and Andres Nocioni, since old GM Jerry Krause got canned in `03 and slipped off behind a pillar. Just a mention here of an extraordinary name on the current team -- new 7-2 kid Martynas Andriuskevicius -- all 23 letters of him. I believe one of the Heaven Boyz will help us with the pronunciation and personal items in a coming entry.

	John Paxson showing off his NBA Finals winning 3-point shooting form.

Anyway, you think Pax and I aren't down? Me and then 9-year old son Z-man went to Paxson's Father-Son Basketball Camp in June, 2000, out in suburban Chicago. Pax was a radio announcer or something back then. What I remember was staying in the college dorm with Z and eating chow together and having so much fun and how we had to play two-on-two against other dad-son combos, and how some of them were, like, a 14-year old son with a 35-year old dad, and how we got smoked a couple times because Z was 4-foot-9 and I was already old and had a partially-torn Achilles. Z, by the way, is now 6-3. Me, I'm shrinking. But we are in kick-ass mode.

I digress. Though not that much, because I remember asking Paxson back then how to shoot threes, and long-twos, recalling his famed NBA-title game-winning shwisheroo against the Suns in 1993. He showed me, but it didn't stick. So I asked him again before the Bulls-Grizzlies tussle.

"What do I think of the new ball?" he repeats nervously after I ask him. "Ha, ha. When they first handed us these balls back in February, it felt different than this one. It felt real tacky. But with wear it seems to lose that feel. I've shot a little with it, but the players are the best judges. It's composite&"

He won't flat-out say it sucks. Guys like Steve Nash and Shaq have, however. "It feels like one of those cheap balls that you buy at the toy store," Shaq quoth. "Indoor-outdoor balls."

But commissioner David Stern says shut your pie holes and play. "Some of the dramatics around it were a little overstated," D-Stern said of ball criticisms. It's here for good, so deal with it.

"The reality is the commissioner came out and said `This is going to be the ball,' so guys are going to have to adjust to it," says Paxson. "We've been told every major sport plays with a composite ball, and the NBA went out and did a lot of testing and Spalding came up with this thing. It is a little slick. No question about it. And the more it's used the more the tacky feel goes away." We study the orb. Paxson spins it, looks it at it the way you might handle a sandwich with bad cheese. We note the way the lines don't intersect, how the texture is un-leather-like, and that the NBA logo is everywhere.

"Yeah, it's a only a two-seam ball," says Pax. "So there's really only two parts to the ball. And Jerry is all over the place. One, two, three, four& five logos."

We study the thing. Jeez, commissioner, where are the subscription cards, the holograms?

"But, you know, the intentions were the right thing," says Paxson in his most charitable tone. "I've got to be politically correct. The league doesn't like me, anyway."

OK. Three-point shooting.

"I've always thought the guys who are the best make it simple," he says. "Watch the best shooters in the game, like Ray Allen -- his shot is very simple, doesn't look like much is going on. It's your legs, your depth perception, your repetitions. Have a real good base, like Ben Gordon. (Gordon catches a ball next to us on the side, rises up in full focus, drills a 20-footer.) If Ben gets that base, he can make them."

I'm thinking. Something churns in my little brain. Paxson was a first team All-America his senior year at Notre Dame, the same year a younger guy named Michael Jordan was second-team All-America at North Carolina. But did Pax ever play with a 3-point line in college? What about that?

"No, no. I never did," he says, nodding. "There were none. In fact, 1982 and 1983, those were my last two years in college, and a lot of conferences were experimenting with the 3-point line and the shot clock."

And you never got into one of those experiments?

"Well, we had the choice, because Notre Dame was an independent back then. And Digger (Phelps) always chose not to use it, because he always said we'd be more prepared than anybody come NCAA tournament time." Paxson laughs ruefully here. He has a way of being self-deprecating and semi-gloomy that sometimes reminds one of Eeyore, or a penitent flogging himself with a hair brush.

"Well, we didn't make the NCAA tournament. We ended up playing in the NIT with a 30-second shot clock and a red-white-and-blue ball. (grimace and sardonic grin.) So I never had the chance for it. In fact, I think that year the ACC had a 3-point line that was INSIDE the top of the circle, 17'9''. Inside the top of the circle at the top of the key."

We marvel. For Paxson that would have been a layup. Paxson was shooting normally from there. Actually, farther back. "I was best in that 19-21 foot range. That was my shot."

Indeed, the three-point line might have been the biggest change in basketball besides the neck tattoo. "We should just add 300 points to your college stats," I say gently.

"Yeah, right," says the saddened man.

Out on the floor Ben Wallace, the free-throw challenged enforcer with the bulging biceps, lies flat on his back as the trainer bends his legs back and forth. I recall for an instant the last great rebounding forward-center the Bulls had, a lunatic named Dennis Rodman. Worm might have been, in fact, the greatest under 7-foot rebounder in the history of the game. No, he quite simply was.

But his penchant for wearing lipstick, eyeliner, fuschia feather boas and hanging with gorgeous transvestite Mimi Marks made him different. Rodman was ahead of his time, or from another time, entirely.

Now, if you've been to an NBA game lately, you'll notice they've gotten louder than motorcycle races. And there are fancy people everywhere. And music and dancing and magic acts and jugglers and bicyclists and pole-dancers and just more damn confusion and noise than rush hour. At the United Center there are six new seats on the floor next to the visitors' bench -- and they cost $2,500 apiece. And they're all bought up for the entire season -- $615,000.

Poof. Nothing., just a little whip-out for the swells. Little Mike Fratello, Memphis czar, will sit in your lap for an extra grand at this contest is what I hear. And as the Bulls-Griz game revs up I notice that half the media seats have been given over to fans, as well, for prices from $200 to $750. We media vermin have been left, like directionless pilgrims, to wander the vast NBA arenas with lanterns, forever unwanted, forever homeless.

	The press room at the United Center.

But I abide. Please notice the candid shot of the press room at the UC. Those are my brethren, such as the Trib's Sam Smith and the Sun-Times John Jackson and the Daily Southtown's Phil Arvia concocting their lies. I make up my stories usually the night before.

I run into old Bull and bud Norm Van Lier in the hallway.

	Stormin' Norman posing for a picture.

"It's only rock and roll, but I like it," says Stormin' Norman, playing the air bass that he pretends is low on his waist. Norm and I go way back, back to when I wrote one of my first stories for a Sunday magazine section of the Sun-Times called Midwest Magazine, when I was just out of Northwestern. Norm was only a year older than me. He was wild on the floor back then, barely in control off of it. He had more bruises and scars on his skinny body than a beating victim. I watched him try to kill Calvin Murphy one time, pulled his jersey til it nearly ripped and threw punches like the Tasmanian Devil. I saw Norm pick up a folding chair to use on Sidney Wicks.

"I was going to get his legs," the Flying Dutchman said back then. He and fellow guard Jerry Sloan were like two Dobermans set loose on foes. Van Lier had no business playing in the NBA, and yet he started for the Bulls for seven years. He was in his own world of ferocity and anger and passion.

But Norm and I love music, and the former wild man has mellowed, and we have hung and talked about stuff from time to time, been on radio shows together, helped each other out. In fact, Norm is a fun guy to be around, a wounded old warrior, taking it a lot easier these days. His glasses are the latest softening touch. Pardon the photographer if they shine a little too much. Now the other thing I have always enjoyed at Bulls games is watching the mechanical blimp, a red and white replica of Benny the Bull, as it floats around inside the arena without ever actually crashing into anything and bursting into flames like the Hindenburg. OK, so it isn't filled with hydrogen. But what if it was?

	A little plug for a good book.

I talked to the man who controls the blimp, and he told me to sit next to him at halftime and watch him steer the thing with its little propeller and tiny ailerons. So I did. And it was cool the way the guy could make Benny go up the rows and just over the people's heads and never get close enough to crash or even get grabbed by a nutcase or hit by a popcorn box.

In a recent book I wrote called "String Music," a novel for young adults, I have a scene wherein a character not too much different from Rodman rolls a towel into a rat tail as the team is leaving for halftime and stalks the blimp, then snaps the towel up at it, ripping the fabric apart, and the thing sizzles around in an uncontrollable, vapor-spurting circle, up-down, all over, until it loses all its juice and collapses like a thrown bed spread over the far backboard.

I highly recommend the book for all hoop head young folks. And for hoop head adults who haven't grown up.