Three and a half minutes after he became a Spur, Tim Duncan swiveled back and forth in his chair, slouched over in a baggy taupe suit, and divulged his grand plan in all of its audacious glory.
“Hopefully I can fit in,” he said that June night in 1997, and if the kid had any inkling of how much humor the world someday would find in those words, he didn’t show it.
We know now he would have won anywhere. There is not a basketball city in this world that, once graced with Duncan’s presence, wouldn’t have celebrated him, embraced every part of him, and bent over backwards to ensure he’d stay forever.
Boston would have remapped its “Big Dig” to include an express tunnel to St. Croix. New York would have let him hook his PlayStation up to the TV in Times Square. Los Angeles would have set him up with a lucrative movie franchise as a plaid-shirted superhero who never uttered a line. They would have made sure he fit, and that the extra trophies that came with him did, too.
But whether or not Duncan realized it 24 years ago, he was onto something. If by fitting in he meant finding a place that would bring out the best version of him, and a place that would be the best version of itself with him in it, he was right to hope for such perfection.
And by the end of the first day he spent working and sweating with the team he would come to symbolize, in the city whose ethic he would come to represent?
“From the very beginning,” Sean Elliott said this week, “we felt he was one of us.”
Elliott was speaking in this instance of Duncan’s original Spurs teammates, but he might as well have been referring to San Antonio. Duncan’s path to Saturday’s induction in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame was marked not by any rapid rise to stardom but instead by steady, diligent greatness, and a genuine disinterest in popularity or adulation.
He is an undisputed top-10 player in the history of the sport, and probably merits higher praise than that, but he will not be the featured attraction at Saturday’s induction ceremony. That honor will go to the late Kobe Bryant, Duncan’s longtime rival, and lest anyone believe this does Duncan a disservice, rest assured he loves it this way.
One of his greatest gifts was the ability and the willingness to lift those around him without them even realizing he was the one doing the lifting. Those who played with him longest still marvel at the moments when they were sure that they were the one who made the big play, that they were the one who figured out how to make a play work, that they were the hero, even though it was Duncan who was making it happen all along.
Tim Duncan and the late Kobe Bryant are entering the Hall of Fame today after leading their teams to a combined 10 NBA titles.
Staff file photo“It’s his patience,” former teammate Bruce Bowen said. “Guys who maybe weren’t on his level physically, or on his level intellectually, he made them feel like they were on par with him.
“With some guys, if they know the answer, they blurt it out. With Tim, it’s being secure enough to help somebody else figure it out.”
Speaking of security, has there ever been a superstar more comfortable in his own skin? Of course Duncan won’t mind ceding the spotlight to Bryant on Saturday. In a 19-year career the only thing that ever really bothered him was when people wanted to know a little too much about him, and he usually managed to avoid such intrusions while trying to live what passed for a normal Alamo City life
Every now and then his fame would barge in. A fan might snap a photo of him waiting in a drive-thru lane, or browsing at Best Buy. There was another time, a decade ago, when a local sports writer attended a gathering at the home of a friend. Unbeknownst to the newspaper man, among the invited guests was a conspicuous 6-foot-11 fellow, who happened to be seated in the living room in a comic-book T-shirt and cargo shorts when the writer entered.
A mere seconds later, in the kitchen, the host looked down at his phone to see an urgent text message from Duncan.
“Did you invite a reporter?!?!” it read.
Mostly, though, San Antonio let Duncan be Duncan, and what Duncan was is something the NBA is unlikely ever to see again. At occasions like Hall of Fame inductions, it is almost cliche to classify the honoree as one of a kind, but in Duncan’s case it seems appropriate.
Has there ever been, or will there ever be, another player greater than him? It’s a short, short list, but sure. Has there ever been, or will there ever be, another player of his stature who spends his entire career in one city? Perhaps.
But has there ever been, or will there ever be, a better player who willingly spends his entire career in a place like San Antonio, shunning the opportunity for greater fame and more lucrative endorsements and free-agent superteam hookups elsewhere?
Almost certainly not. In that way, Duncan’s story is both unprecedented and unrepeatable. Not only did he bring five championships and a new arena to a city that had fretted about losing its team before he arrived, he made that city believe it deserved all of it, and more.
And when he enters the Hall of Fame on Saturday?
Here’s betting he will fit in there, too.
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