It is late February of a wild, fractured season, a season as strange as any in memory. The Lakers have just defeated the Suns, 104-92, in Phoenix, the fourth victory in a row for a team struggling to live up to immense expectations.
Two of basketball's reigning stars, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal, are engulfed by writers and camera crews in separate groups that push at the gray locker room walls. One after the other, the two athletes finish answering questions and slip out into the dim cinderblock tunnel that leads to the team bus.
Fans have come down from the stands, pressing against metal barricades. Their shouts swell through the tunnel.
"Kobe! Kobe!"
"Shaq! Hey, Shaq!"
Bryant stops for a moment to sign autographs. O'Neal moves past and pauses a little ahead of Bryant, taking scorecards and pieces of paper in his huge hands, scrawling his name. Bryant drifts ahead of O'Neal. He poses for pictures with VIP guests in the tunnel. O'Neal goes ahead again, his gaze aloft, ambling toward an open area where he spends a few moments with a young boy in a wheelchair.
Not once do O'Neal and Bryant look at each other. Not once do they exchange a quip or casual remark. It is as if each journeys alone, treading through parallel realities. It's the same at arenas in Atlanta and Minneapolis, in hotel lobbies in Oakland and Boston, after wins and losses alike. Teammates and Laker employees, who see the two stars in places where the public and the media do not, insist that they do find occasions to talk, that they often joke and laugh like old buddies, but after eight years they share no real friendship.
Neither takes time from the routines of the road to sit down together over dinner, for example. At Staples Center, the Lakers' home court, Bryant's cubicle is in a corner opposite O'Neal's; they could be prizefighters staring across the ring, except there is no eye contact at all, never even a glance. Nothing of the casual repartee or tacit acknowledgments of men at peace with each other.
Their war of wills -- a standoff that threatens to shatter one of the most talented basketball teams ever assembled -- is most evident in the spaces of what is not said, the cold silences that make it clear something is amiss. No one can fix it. Few dare try. The fissure runs too deep between these gifted, headstrong men, who suggest the best and worst of American professional sports.
Under the gloss and smokescreens lie fearsome competitors, titans of marketing and popular culture, who crave more than the glory of winning championships -- who seek the acclaim of individual greatness, a glory that outshines all of their riches and awards and titles. One thing Bryant and O'Neal have in common -- one of the few things -- is an acute awareness of the legacies they are shaping; and underscoring their rival campaigns, like a line drawn in the sand, is a persistent and prickly issue:
Is this Shaq's team?
Or is it Kobe's team?
In the hard-smack society of the National Basketball Assn., the elite define their kingdoms in that loose possessive vernacular. They talk of "my team" and it is understood that they claim a status above their teammates, a leadership role ceded to them by stardom. The implications extend beyond personal pride. Along with it comes the power to influence the entire character of a team, even in some instances who coaches it, which players are traded, what offensive and defensive schemes are followed and who gets to take the shots in the crucial late minutes of a game.
NBA coaches wield a fragile authority, because top players are usually far better paid and more highly valued by a franchise. Most teams, therefore, need a single strong leader on the floor and in the locker room to command the sort of unity that brings success. The Lakers have three official captains -- O'Neal, Bryant and veteran forward Rick Fox -- but for years there has been no clear answer as to who is really the man. No one has emerged the way Magic Johnson did on the championship teams of the 1980s.
Nothing has given O'Neal -- the most powerful force in the game -- a clear enough edge to consign Bryant, a basketball prodigy, to No. 2.
The uncertainty is one culprit, along with injuries and off-the-court distractions, in a rocky Laker season that began in October with a flurry of wins but has since disappointed fans who expected basketball's most glamorous team to become a juggernaut.
The Lakers now trail the San Antonio Spurs, two games to none, in the second round of the NBA playoffs. Should they overtake the defending champions and survive two subsequent series, the Lakers would walk off the court in June with their fourth championship in five years. Given the talent and experience of the Lakers' roster, anything less would be considered a bust.
