| | |  | | Sprewell would just love to drop 30 points on Golden State Saturday. |
Spree said he was sorry.
Once. OK, twice, maybe three times.
Enough so that he's lost count.
"I think I've apologized over and over again," Latrell
Sprewell said Tuesday. "I don't see why I have to apologize
again."
This was in Denver, four days and 1,200 miles before Spree's
current team, New York, was scheduled to stop off on its swing out
West and beat up his old one, Golden State. Games against the Jazz
in Utah and the Suns in Phoenix were sandwiched in between, but
they were just that -- games, not vendettas.
The Warriors were different. Spree wants a bite out of them, he
wants to "crush" them.
"I'd just love it," he said, "if we just killed them."
Nearly two years after he grabbed the coach by the windpipe and
threatened to kill him, after being drummed out of the NBA and then
ordered back in, after choking his own career on one coast and
resuscitating it on the other, Sprewell is coming back to Golden
State, his victory nearly complete.
All that remains is for him to drop 30 or so points on the
Warriors in a lopsided win, to remind everybody from coach P.J.
Carlesimo to general manager Garry St. Jean to owner Chris Cohan
why they put up with so much grief in the first place.
And to remind the organization that powerless as it seemed when
arbitrator John Feerick reinstated Sprewell in March 1998, they
wield even less power now. They can't even force an apology from
Spree. Nobody can.
Not his old coach, his new one, or even the Madison Square
Garden suits who sign his hefty new paychecks. They couldn't get a
straight answer from Spree on why he didn't show up for training
camp on time. Ditto for NBA commissioner David Stern. But that's
not the worst of it.
|
“ |
Bitterness, hatred, whatever you want to call it, it's
there. ” |
|
|
— Sprewell |
With each passing day, with every additional minute of face
time, Sprewell argues for a new version of events, one that blurs
fact and fiction a little bit more. The only thing sports fans
revile more than villains are losers, and Sprewell is shedding both
of those skins.
Everything else about the story looks and sounds different, too.
The Spree who choked Carlesimo is no longer around. He's been
replaced by the one with snapshots from last season's NBA finals, a
new attitude and a new $60 million contract. The Spree who comes
into our living rooms now through his play and carefully
constructed commercials is a fierce competitor, not a madman. That
Spree didn't jump, he was pushed over the edge by a coach, then
left to free-fall by an organization that could have saved him.
"Bitterness, hatred, whatever you want to call it, it's
there," Sprewell said. "I think they could've handled it better.
It happened behind closed doors in practice. No one knew. I don't
know how it got out. It was an in-house thing and could've stayed
that way."
Carlesimo's side of the story gets told less and less. The day
Sprewell showed up to make his first public apology a knot of
teammates stood in support behind him. Carlesimo knew then the more
points he scored with the public, the less chance he had of hanging
onto his credibility among players in the league.
Asked about Sprewell's recent remarks, Carlesimo passed on the
opportunity to respond one more time, "The last thing I want to do
is revisit something that happened a couple of years ago."
The jury may still be out on Carlesimo's in-your-face approach
to his work, but the results are in. And after two losing seasons,
he will be lucky to see one more in Golden State through to the
end. After that, the consensus is that he'll call in some chits and
wind up working in television. There, he'll be remembered less as
the guy who took Seton Hall to a Final Four once, or Portland to
the NBA playoffs several times, than the guy Sprewell choked in a
fit of rage.
What makes Saturday night so intriguing is that Carlesimo said
he wants to share a handshake and a private word with Sprewell.
"If we get a chance to talk, I'll certainly want to talk," he
said during a conference call Wednesday. "But whatever I want to
express, I'll express to Spree, not the media."
It may be during warmups or after the final buzzer, but take
note when the two are standing side by side. Sprewell stands a
half-foot taller, is maybe 20 pounds heavier and more than 20 years
younger. It was a mismatch from the start. But given where the two
men have been since, who would have dreamed Sprewell would win the
rematch, too. | |
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