I have seen the lump on Pat Croce's left leg, and it made me nauseous. It is a lump the size of a tangerine, and it is there because of the gruesome motorcycle accident he had a couple of years ago, and it is there because the only way he could keep his leg was if doctors grafted his shin back together.

And so, once you get to know Pat Croce a little bit, he will ask you a question. He will say, "You wanna see it? You wanna see it?" And before you can say, "Not especially," he will have rolled up his pants leg and shown you.

And then you will hear him say he's thinking of having the lump tattooed -- into a bloodshot eyeball. And you laugh a second. And then you realize he's one of them. Or that he wishes he could be one of them. He wishes he could be a Sixer.

And so get ready for him. As the Eastern Conference Finals now swing into full gear, get ready for the man who made all this possible, for the man who drafted Allen Iverson, for the man who talked Larry Brown off a ledge, for the man who went into training camp last October and told the Philadelphia 76ers: "We will win the title."

They probably scoffed at him, the way most people want to scoff at outrageous optimists, but Pat Croce -- the president of the 76ers and the man most in need of a valium of any man I've ever known -- truly believed it. I used to think he was an act, the way Tommy Lasorda is an act. Lasorda, the old Dodger manager and a Pennsylvanian himself, used to see a camera coming, and he'd light up and do his hyperbolic show, and you'd think he was this amazing guy. But then the camera would shut off and you'd be sitting in his office and Tommy would be crude and Tommy would be intimidating and he would burp and he would pass gas right in front of you.

But this Pat Croce is no act. He is on all the time. The camera can be pointing at him or the camera could be nowhere in sight, and Pat Croce is in the middle of a run-on sentence. And that is him, that is the genuine him. He could motivate me, he could motivate you, he could motivate your grandma. But at the moment, he's too busy motivating the Philadelphia 76ers.

I'm not saying he's in their pre-game meetings, and I'm not saying he's in there at halftime, but he is the only one in the organization whom Iverson truly trusts, and he's one of the rare ones who could keep Larry Brown in the same place for more than three years, and he's probably speaking to Dikembe Mutombo right now, as you're reading this, in Mutombo's native tongue.

Back when Iverson was coming out of Georgetown, it was Croce who wanted him most. The other option was Stephon Marbury. I love Marbury's game, but Marbury does not have Iverson's heart or Iverson's gait or his fearlessness or his edge or his hunger. Somehow Croce saw that, and even when there were many in the organization who wanted to unload Iverson later, who thought he was just a punk troublemaker, it was Croce who resisted it most.

It was Croce who went to Iverson's charity softball game last summer and warned him one last time to shape up. Brown had been saying it, teammates had been saying it, but Croce got through.

"I don't just talk and yell," Croce says, when asked how he gets through to his players. "I know each one of them. I know their buttons. That's what I do! And how do I push Allen's button? I push his through love. Not adulation. But love, respect. He wants to know you're real. If you're not real, he doesn't give a ----. He doesn't care who you are. Doesn't care, doesn't care.

"I think Magic Johnson might have had something to do with me getting through to him that day. Magic was down there, Magic was the pitcher. I was the coach. And I think Magic had his ear, and he respects Magic. And me, Magic and Allen met in the locker room down there for some time. And Magic had told him. He said, 'Allen, you got your Jerry Buss right here, and you got to listen to him.' And he was talking how Allen wanted to be a professional, and he used the word professional, and that's when it dawned on me ... I think Magic had influence on him."

The thing is, Croce has to treat Brown, the mercurial coach of the year, the same way he treats Iverson.

"When we hired Larry," Croce says, "and I picked Larry up for the press conference here, at the Marriott, I saw the shoeshine man was so excited to meet Larry Brown, and I said, 'See, Larry? Everyone here loves you." And we drive down I-95, and cars are coming up and beeping the horn and waving to him. And that's when I said, 'I want you to be a coaching legacy here like Billy Cunningham.' I said, 'You can do it, no one else has done it, and I'm going to help you every way I can.' Now, I'm driving, and he probably thinks, 'He don't know me that well.' He thought I was a little loony anyway. But from that day on, I've created an environment that's conducive to him."

It may sound like he's playing Iverson and Brown, manipulating them, but this is what Croce does and this is what he is -- he is a people person, always has been. There is no better sports CEO out there. He'll be talking about Iverson and Brown, and he'll say, "Oh, the sensitivity! The, whatdayacallit, the headstrongness, the genius, the talent. Believe me, we know there's a fine line between genius and craziness. And I have to make sure they don't cross that line. I talk to each one. All the time. That's why I'm in that locker room always. Every day I'm at practice or games."

You think he's a phony? Get a load of this. I was talking to his doctor one night, the doctor who was on call when Croce was ambulanced into the emergency room with his mangled leg. And, it turns out that Croce had to cheer up the doctor that night.

"He's sitting up, we're in the emergency room, with his leg in pieces on this cart, and he's got a big smile on his face," says that doctor, Bill DeLong. "And I walk up and I've never seen anyone hurt this bad look this good. And he sticks his hand out and he says, 'Hiya Doctor, I'm Pat. How are you? I think I've got a little problem here.' And he's got a smile on his face. And that's the way he was the entire time. Through this whole thing, he had about 10 minutes of post-traumatic depression, and people usually have that problem for months. He had about 10 minutes."

And so this is the grinning face that greeted the Philadelphia 76ers after their Game 1 victory Tuesday night, and this is the grin that will greet them throughout the Eastern Finals and perhaps beyond. He will be watching them each game, in case they need a good talking-to. He will be watching them with all three of his eyes -- the two in his head, and the eyeball down near the foot he'd like to kick the Milwaukee Bucks with.

Tom Friend is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at tom.friend@espnmag.com.