You can never take back your final conversation with a dying relative, and the last words I ever remember uttering to my nearly lifeless cancer stricken grandfather wasn’t some deep insightful realization about what he meant to me or advice on how to become a successful man with a nice suit and a hot wife.
“Poppy,” I said to the man who was so sick, he told the nurse to bring him an original Coke, with diet no longer able save him, “the Heat just traded for Jamal Mashburn. They’ve really made it.”
Poppy died, the Heat wouldn’t reach the NBA Finals for nearly a decade, but if you were a 14-year old South Florida sports junkie you felt on top of the sports world. Alonzo Mourning, Tim Hardaway and Jamal Mashburn? That’s a hell of a team that people will notice.
Miami, of course, still belonged to Gloria Estefan, Scarface, glamour, glitz, crime, cocaine, sunbathing strippers on South Beach, Spanish billboards and shiny buildings. No more.
Now, a basketball team that months ago couldn’t give away tickets to the homeless have transformed into the face of an international city. “I’m surprised there was enough media left for you guys to get here,” Magic coach Stan Van Gundy told the Orlando Sentinel. “ESPN is all Heat, all the time.”
ESPN has a studio set up at Heat training camp in the panhandle. Reporters from Italy and Japan crossed two oceans to attend Miami’s media at the University of Miami.
If only Al Qaeda could spend a few days with Dwyane, LeBron and Chris, we’d finally win the war on terror and boost our struggling export industry by shipping Heat jerseys to the Middle East. Give us your WMD and we’ll give you DLC.
When LeBron made the unprecedented decision to team up with Wade, Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley cried the death of parity, the end of competitiveness, the worst thing to happen to the NBA since Oliver Miller treated his Phoenix teammates to a Sizzler buffet.
For Jordan, who desperately wants to be considered an astute business man, he’s missing this one completely. David Stern loves every minute of this spectacle, witnessing NBA training camp overshadowing the NFL. And it’s not the Lakers, the Knicks or the Bulls.
It’s the Miami Heat, suddenly and for the foreseeable future on the same level as the Yankees and Red Sox, Lakers and Cowboys.
It will never be the same for Miami. Even when the show inevitably ends after a few championships and years of hoopla fades, Miami will be the city of the Heat, like Chicago and the Bulls.
The Heat already have a much more illustrious history than the Bulls had before Jordan arrived to Chicago, and MJ – even more so than Capone and Obama – forever represents the Windy City.
Poppy never knew LeBron or Wade, but he knew Miami, he knew sports and he’d want his city, once a haven for crime and corruption, defined by basketball.
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