Boo ball

They surround him with their cameras and tape recorders, vultures picking apart their prey. And Dallas Mavericks point guard Steve Nash--the co-captain of this team, the six-million-dollar man, the man who cost Dallas next year's first-round draft pick--sits there like a gentleman, absorbing every blow like a punch-drunk fighter against the ropes, waiting for the bell to ring. Only it never does.

The reporters and microphone jockeys keep coming with their questions, wanting to know how it felt to be so roundly booed by the home crowd. Wanting to know whether he's ever felt this bad. Wanting to know why he's playing so poorly. Wanting to know whether it could get any worse.

By the time they're done with their questions, some of the reporters feel so damned awful for the guy that they extend their best wishes, telling him it's just one game and not to worry about it, man. It's almost like a condolence call, only the corpse is alive and well and ready to get the hell out of the locker room.

Nash, already showered and dressed, says all the right things. He smiles weakly and says, yeah, he sure was surprised by how the Reunion Arena crowd booed the hell out of him. And, yeah, they had every right given his awful performance--one for 10 from the floor, his sole basket a three-pointer near the game's end.

"But I've worked hard," Nash says, not so much apologizing as trying to figure in his own mind how things have gone so wrong. "I really have. I don't know what else to do. I've never seen anything quite like that."

It began during the third quarter of the Mavericks' March 24 loss to the Houston Rockets, the very moment Steve Nash came back into the game. The boos were so loud they felt tangible, solid. You could feel them in your bones--your marrow--each time Nash even touched the ball. They rained down from the stands with such vitriol, you could taste the hate as it slid down your throat and into the pit of your stomach.

"Shoot it, Steve!" came the cries, spat out onto the floor by the sneering customers who were paying his exorbitant salary. "Shoot it!" Nash would take only two shots during the final half of the game, dishing it off every chance he got. No way was he going to give the crowd any more ammunition. Things were already out of hand.

But despite all the things written in the newspapers about that night, the boos were not aimed solely at Steve Nash.

They were aimed at Robert Pack, more fragile than a porcelain doll. At Erick Strickland. At Shawn Bradley. At Kurt Thomas. At Samaki Walker. At Dirk Nowitzki. At Chris Anstey. At Hot Rod Williams. At Don Nelson.

They were the culmination of a decade's worth of frustration, broken promises, lies, losing. Nash, heralded weeks ago by coach and general manager Don Nelson as the Future of the Franchise--at least this year's model--happened to be the poor bastard at the wrong place at the wrong time.

He's just one more poster boy for a failing organization that long ago stopped being a laughingstock, if only because there's nothing too funny about a decade spent in the NBA's basement. Nash got booed last week because Nelson told the remaining Mavericks fans that he was the answer to all that ailed this team, the point guard of the future, the man who would lead Dallas to the Promised Land--which, in the Mavericks' case, means Not Last Place. He got booed because Nelson managed to convince the locals that the 1999 lockout-shortened season would be one filled with optimism and victories.

And one more time, Don Nelson was wrong.
"I was quietly optimistic about the team's chances at the beginning of the season," says team president Terdema Ussery, the man charged by owner Ross Perot Jr. with running the team's business operations. "We didn't want to brag and boast, because we felt that we had made a lot of representations to the fans over the last seven, eight years, and the last thing we wanted to do was start bragging about what we were going to do this year. But there has definitely been disappointment."

If Ussery was quietly optimistic, then Don Nelson was just the opposite, telling anyone who would listen that the Mavericks were ready to contend for a playoff spot, especially with forward Cedric Ceballos on board. Ironists might note that Nelson didn't even want to sign Ceballos before the season began, and that he wound up with him, at bargain-basement prices no less, only when the former All-Star couldn't find any other takers. For a while, Nelson stopped talking playoffs when Ceballos fractured both of his wrists in a February 25 game against Denver, benching him for the season.