Air Apparent

Hakeem "the dream" Olajuwon, the Houston Rockets' Nigerian-born colossus, was discontent. He'd been the most talented center, the king, for four or five years--a lifetime in the N.B.A., where reputations snap like cruciate ligaments. But when he read the sports pages, an uneasy feeling crept upon him, a sense that he was last week's Dream.

The new top gun played for the San Antonio Spurs, just 200 miles down Interstate Ten. His name was David Robinson, one of those nice American monikers that never get spelled wrong. It was only Robinson's second year as a pro, but the media loved the slender seven-footer as they never would Hakeem. They loved his Naval Academy background, his affection for Beethoven, his talk-show-guest facility, even his posture (erect, unwavering) as he sang along to the national anthem.

To Hakeem, this was an insult. It was one thing for people to hold up Patrick Ewing as his peer; it was something else entirely to defer to a dabbler who put more time into his blues chord progressions than into his hook shot. Last December 18, Olajuwon shared his feelings with USA Today. Robinson, he insisted, has "got to pay his dues before he's on the level with Patrick and myself."

That very evening, shortly after the Spurs and the Rockets tipped off at Houston's Summit for their second meeting of the young season, Robinson express-mailed an installment. With three minutes left in the first quarter, Houston led by eight. A few moments earlier, Olajuwon had milled past the slender Spurs center along the base line for a mighty dunk, and it was time to put Robinson on tilt. Olajuwon moved the lieutenant with a professional forearm, slid into the foul lane and stuck his right hand up like a flag. Robinson flailed helplessly at Buck Johnson's pass as it found Hakeem in a center's favorite setting: four feet from the basket, no obstacles in sight. Olajuwon flexed his knees, left the floor (few centers have ever jumped so quickly) and pulled the ball behind his neck with two huge hands. He was poised to lunge and snap his two points through the net as he had a thousand times before----

But not this time. This time, the Houston center would not hold. A beat after Hakeem went up for the slam, Robinson rose as well, barely seeming to gather himself, yet--and the video tape shows this clearly--somehow rising both faster and higher than Hakeem, in a sharper flight path, until his left hand was poised well over the Rocket's head, 11 feet or so above the floor. When Hakeem brought the ball up and forward, it met that long, tapered hand--the same one that can span 12 white keys in a Rachmaninoff prelude. The ball never reached the rim. It bounced off Hakeem's head, then his shoulder, before Robinson backhanded it out of bounds. There was something stylized about that final, dismissive flick, a bite of body language that told us, This is no fluke. Stick around and see what happens next.

Robinson would block four of Olajuwon's shots that night, and by the fourth one, Hakeem was silly with disbelief: haranguing the refs, missing clusters of fall-away jump shots. With Robinson scoring four of his (continued on page 142) Air Apparent (continued from page 136) team's last five points, the Spurs won by one.

"Let me ask you something--is he gifted?" squealed Mike Newlin, the Rockets' TV color man, in a burst of word love rarely spent on rival players. "Is he versatile, gifted and graceful?"

•

Last season, in his first encounters with Olajuwon and Ewing, Robinson felt out of place against the behemoths he'd watched for years on television. "I made up for it with a lot of extra effort," he says, "that kind of panic effort, where you've got to play hard. I didn't have any choice, and I think that helped me. After I had played against them once or twice, it made it so much easier; I learned to believe that I could play with anybody."

Two days after the Spurs' conquest in Houston, Robinson had spooned his 85 inches into an aisle coach seat on the team's charter plane for a road trip to Phoenix. Dressed simply, in black slacks and white dress shirt, he put down the music book he was studying at the moment--Jazz Improvisation for Keyboard Players. Lately, he'd been traveling with both an electronic keyboard and his new love, an alto saxophone. "I don't really listen to a lot of jazz pianists," he explained. "I'm listening more to jazz horns. With the piano, it's either background or high-speed stuff; you can't break it down. With the horn, it's more linear--with the sax, you don't have to see the music, you can just play it. So I study piano and learn through listening to the horn."

Robinson has the face of a Modigliani, with generous features--high cheekbones, broad smile, strong jaw--set upon a narrow, angular head. The face is grown-up (he is 25 years old), but it retains a youth's transparency, as does his deep giant's voice. It's easy to see why he made the beat writers' national all-interview team as a rookie; he offers that rare parlay of spontaneity and thoughtfulness.

He hadn't been offended by the Olajuwon quote in USA Today, he said. "That's the competitive aspect of his nature. You see how hard Hakeem works, how hard Patrick works to be as good as he is. They have a lot of pride. They don't want to see a kid coming up and in one year or two years be able to play as well as they can, and I don't blame them. I'd be the same way.

"But I have no doubt in my mind that I'm on that level. I've outplayed both of them at times and they've outplayed me at times. I just feel like there's no gap between us."

Who could argue with the man who would supplant Olajuwon as the West's starting all-star center (halting Hakeem's four-year reign), who was being favorably compared to that ultimate intimidator among pivot men, Bill Russell? And yet, for all of Robinson's self-assurance, both on and off the court, it was important to remember how new all of this was for him. Only two years earlier, he'd been stuck behind a desk at a submarine base in the swampy backwaters of Kings Bay, Georgia. Only four years before that, he'd been a bench-warming plebe who'd sought "a little recreation" on the Navy team. The ensuing events--Robinson's emergence as the greatest college player of his time, his rookie-of-the-year season, his glory as a sneaker salesman supreme--had flown by in a blink. There was no time to react, much less to assimilate.

"I got to coach David Thompson and Danny Manning and Bobby Jones," noted Larry Brown, who agreed to coach San Antonio only after Robinson was signed, "and people expect those guys to do great things every night. A lot of kids have grown up preparing themselves for that kind of pressure, but not David. It just happened."

Robinson's confidence is a bit fragile. There remains that nagging need to show and tell. At Phoenix, he led an unlikely Spurs comeback from 14 points down in the fourth quarter, fouled out the Suns' starting center, Mark West, then abused forwards Tom Chambers and Tim Perry to help clinch a soul-feeding road victory in overtime. In the locker room, still riding his adrenaline, he held forth in his Garfield the Cat boxer shorts before a nest of microphones and note pads.

"Perry is not a good match-up for them against me," Robinson said. "I'm sure that's not something that they like to see." It was a fair statement, but there was also a small, gloating chuckle underneath it. Robinson was rubbing it in, ever so mildly, like a cocky adolescent who knows how good he is but wants to make sure you know it, too.

•

The David Robinson story is not a moral lesson, not a cautionary tale for you kids at home. It counters all we've been taught about success in basketball, as in life--that you have to be a gym rat who puts up a thousand foul shots on Sunday morning or a playground obsessive winging your jumper by feel into the darkness, and that even then, the odds are that you will bump your head on your limits long before you reach the top.

But Robinson is the exception that moves the rule. He is the Lotto champ, the Natural, Roy Hobbs writ tall. Sean Elliott, the Spurs' fawn-faced small forward, likes to tell his friends that "Michael Jordan made a deal with the Devil--there's no way anybody can be that good. And now I think that he and Dave are into something together. A lot of people work hard on developing their game, work years, and here's Dave, just some hum-de-dum guy. Someone just touched him with a talent wand, and he took advantage of it."

Robinson's basketball career has been seamless. Here is a player who found pickup games boring, who ignored his high school team until his senior year, who coasted while playing against 6'8" centers from colleges such as William & Mary, who left the sport cold for two years of active military service. And then, in his very first game in the N.B.A.--against the Los Angeles Lakers, no less--Robinson went to work: 23 points, 17 rebounds, a rude swat of a Magic Johnson lay-up in the third quarter, an eight-point win. No rust, no fuss. If you hadn't seen Robinson's right knee--his personal nerves barometer--bouncing at 100 miles per hour, or if you hadn't known he'd thrown up at half time, you might have thought he'd forgotten where he was.

"Some rookies are just never rookies," Johnson remarked after the wondrous debut.

It was the best of times, that rookie year. All was fresh and anything seemed possible. Robinson averaged 24 points, 12 rebounds and four blocks per game last season. He was the league's Rookie of the Year by acclamation and placed sixth in the Most Valuable Player balloting. At that, at least one fair authority thought he'd been slighted.

"I think David is the best player in the league," asserted Don Nelson, the highly regarded coach of the Golden State Warriors. "It's clear-cut for me: He should be the M.V.P."

If value is measured in the win column, Nelson had a point. The retooled Spurs hung up a 56--26 record and a Midwest division title and were just (continued on page 182) Air Apparent (continued from page 142) barely beaten by a powerhouse Portland team in the conference semifinals. San Antonio's regular-season improvement over the year before--a walloping 35 games--set an N.B.A. record. Robinson had plenty of help, to be sure, but there is no question that he carried the largest load. In the process, he punctured the revisionism of the day--the notion that dominant centers were dinosaurs whose time had passed. Robinson reminded us that every N.B.A. dynasty, dating back to George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers of the early Fifties, has been anchored by a big man in the middle (or, in Detroit's case, by three big men--James Edwards, John Salley and Bill Laimbeer).

While the Spurs have yet to reach their conference finals, they are widely feared as the team for this decade--if only because Robinson has yet to reach his potential. By his own admission, he remains "young in the game." This season, he is posting up with more confidence, passing with more poise, defending with more focused aggression. He is less prone to doze against weaker opponents. All of his key numbers are up, and at season's mid-point, he tied for fifth in the league in scoring, first in rebounds and first in blocks.

Even Robinson's foul shooting, an old weak spot, has tightened: from 63 percent during his college career to 73 percent as an N.B.A. rookie to 75 percent this season. "I love to work on what I need to improve on--and it shows," he declared, as if to rebuff the critics who have questioned his industry.

So rapid is Robinson's progress that Brown, a harping perfectionist in the best of times, no longer shrills at him five times a minute to run back on defense and contest every close shot. "There were a lot of games last year where I thought he'd get his twenty-five and twelve and three blocks, but he probably played at forty percent," said Brown, who once rated the rookie Robinson as a three on a scale of one to ten. "Now I see him starting to realize how important he is to the team."

All things considered, the great center debate may be over almost before it has begun. Robinson has married Olajuwon's balletic energy and hunger for every free ball to Ewing's controlled fire and self-discipline, and has surpassed them both for speed, smarts, vision, creativity and that elusive quality known as team sense--a grasp of what the group needs at any given moment.

"At this stage in my career, the most important thing by far in making the team successful is rebounding and defense," Robinson said after the Phoenix triumph, in which he'd tried only six shots--making them all--in the first half, then seized the offensive load in the fourth quarter. "If I can do those things, we will win.... I just have to remember what makes the team good."

This is Mozart to the ears of the N.B.A. lifers, the weathered men who have seen their fill of killer egos and warped talents. These insiders need no more convincing. Robinson, they agree, is the way and the light.

"He may be the best ever," said Frank Layden, president of the Utah Jazz. "He won't let his team lose, which is what great players do."

"He's the best athlete ever to play the position, hands down," said Jim Lynam, coach of the Philadelphia 76ers.

"He does everything--that's why I love him so much," said Don Nelson of Golden State. "He's as close as I've ever seen to being the perfect center."

To these men, Robinson has but one unforgivable fault: He does not play for their teams.

•

The game is not as easy as it looks for him, Robinson insists. "Nothing came naturally. I had to work at my timing, my sense of court. I didn't play street ball, so I didn't have the moves, the intuitive stuff.... The only thing that came naturally was that I grew."

But what a body he grew into. Other seven-footers--even the relatively fluid ones, like Ewing--tend to be massive and rawboned, or gangly, or both. But Robinson is a center from another planet. At 235 pounds, his body has room for bone and muscle and connective tissue but little else; then he turns sideways, he nearly disappears. His chest is broad but flat, and it tapers absurdly to a 33-inch wasp waist and what one observer called "the smallest butt in the N.B.A." It's a body that might be deemed wiry, save for the pomegranate implants in his shoulders, biceps and lower legs; his calves are nearly as large around as his thighs. His arms require 41-inch sleeves, and the kicker is that he's left-handed, which just happens to lend him ideal position to block a right-hander's shot.

When Robinson first joined San Antonio, team officials assumed he would have to add some bulk to endure the sumo frays near the basket with men who outweighed him by 20 to 70 pounds. They soon found that he was stronger than he looked; Robinson can bench-press well over 200 pounds, even more than Terry Cummings, the Spurs' granitic power forward. While he will never look like Wes Unseld, Robinson has thrived in Brown's passing game, which gets him the ball while he's moving, rather than forcing him to post up for seconds at a time. "He's so mobile he doesn't have to play a power game," noted Milwaukee's Jack Sikma. He is also, it would appear, indestructible; Robinson has yet to miss a game on any level from a basketball-related injury.

The man's most startling attributes are sheerly athletic: his flat-out, end-to-end speed; his paralyzing, first-step quickness; his baby-soft hands on the catch; his gymnast's agility. (One of his favorite schoolboy tricks was to walk on his hands across a basketball court.) He is, by consensus, the fastest man on his team, and one of the fastest in the league, able to strip smaller ball handlers from behind. During last fall's training camp, the Spurs lined up for "suicides"--a series of wind sprints that culminates in a run from one end line to the other and back again. Robinson was grouped with a number of speedy guards, including Willie Anderson and David Rivers, but opened so large a lead that he ran the last leg backward, giggling every step, and still won the race.

In basketball, speed kills. If a center can beat his man to the hoop, there is little that anyone else can do to contain him. Add Robinson's dizzying vertical leap--measured at 36 inches from a standing start when he was 15 years old--and the result is the most prolific dunker in the league: 197 slams last season alone.

Because he grew late--he was only 5'7" in the ninth grade and reached his full height at the age of 20--Robinson played forward through his freshman year at Navy. In his formative years, his coaches had no reason to leash him within a center's game, nor did he ever have a clumsy phase.

"I've always felt like I could run," Robinson said. "I always felt like a small man; I never felt like a big man." He could always handle the ball, as well. When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for the Lakers, the crowd would go nuts if he dared two or three ungainly dribbles. Robinson will take the ball all the way upcourt if the spirit moves him, and he does it so smoothly that the fans barely notice.

To spend a few weeks in Mr. Robinson's neighborhood is to see the improbable made routine and the impossible become a matter of opinion. If you want to watch Robinson, you must follow the game with new eyes. He will snap off a rebound or control a blocked shot, whip off the outlet ... and suddenly rematerialize on the left wing, in a feat of trompe l'oeil, ahead of San Antonio's quite-last-enough-thank-you guards, to accept a return pass for a slam. Or he will take that pass on the run about 12 feet from the hoop in traffic (a normal big man's point of no return--he must shoot) and needle a finger-tip touch pass across the lane to the lanky Anderson, the Spurs' best finisher. Or he will be asked to stop a star forward, some pinball point machine like Orlando Woolridge or Tom Chambers, and will stick with the desperate gunner every step, like a beach umbrella on wheels. Or he will confound Philadelphia's Rick Mahorn, one of the smartest post defenders in the business, by hitting two consecutive jump shots from the foul circle, and then (as Mahorn inches closer to plug the leak) using a sleek crossover dribble to cruise by for a lay-in. Or he will execute the Spurs' dreaded Five Play, in which Robinson receives an alley-oop along the base line and thunder-dunks--either facing the basket or (if the pass is late) backward and blind.

Seven-footers do not do these things; at least, no one ever has before Robinson. Such feats are the province of lithe and smaller men, guys whose brains are much closer to the door.

"It's unfair, that's what it is," said Sikma, who came of age when centers were more dully reliable creatures.

"He's the prototype of a new generation," said Mahorn, "and I'm glad I'm not going to be around."

•

"We were in the shitter," drawled Spurs owner Red McCombs, talking about his pre-Robinson team on the way home from Phoenix. "I don't know how we would've climbed out of it."

They "climbed out of it" in storied American fashion: with a pile of dumb luck and an even bigger pile of money. First, Spurs vice-president of basketball operations Bob Bass plucked the number-one pick in the 1987 N.B.A. draft lottery, a six-to-one shot, giving his team the rights to Robinson; then they anted up an eight-year, $26,000,000 contract--at the time, the most generous annual compensation in the game--to the satisfaction of Robinson and his agents.

After the deal was done, and San Antonio began its breathless, two-year wait for the tallest civil engineer in the Armed Forces, the skeptics surfaced. They said Robinson wasn't intense enough, or strong enough, or mean enough to survive the pro game. He failed to rule at the 1988 Olympics, where he'd clashed with his my-way-or-the-Beltway coach, Georgetown's John Thompson, while losing to the Soviets. He just didn't seem to care enough.

Rarely has such a public life been so misread. The critics had mistaken ease for apathy. Robinson had been known to drift against inferior competition and had once been booted from a college practice for loafing. But he had also risen to the academy's every challenge. At Navy, he was at his best against the toughest opponents; he'd scored 35 against Syracuse, 45 against Kentucky, 50 against Michigan in his final college outing. As Navy coach Pete Herrmann remembers, "Every time we had a big game, a game on national TV or a league play-off game, he was terrific. He has always been highly motivated when he's real interested in something."

In his grade school math class, Robinson was one of those kids who would whip through their problems and then slam their books shut, to let everyone know they'd finished first. "The competitive spirit is something that grows inside you," Robinson said. "I was always competitive academically. My dad really pushed it." But it was only as a high school senior, when he'd grown to 6'7" and finally deigned to join the varsity, that he could channel that passion to the basketball court. With his new-found competence came a new enjoyment of the sport. "And when I start to enjoy something, I take a lot of pride in it. When I get focused on something, I'm tireless. When I want to be good at something, I will, be."

But was he tough enough?

"When I first came into the league, they said I didn't have enough tenacity. They said I was a little bit soft and too much of a finesse player to mix it up. But you don't have to be a jerk to have that competitive drive.

"Sometimes it's necessary to snarl. Sometimes it's necessary to hit somebody a lot harder than he hits you. When I step out onto the floor, I'm protecting my territory, and I can be as nasty as I want to be."

In guarding his turf, Robinson enabled the Spurs to hang on to their own. The team now regularly sells out the 15,908-seat HemisFair Arena (a remarkable achievement, since 1500 of the seats have partially obstructed views), and management has cut off season-ticket orders at 12,500. Revenues have tripled, and McCombs estimates that the value of the San Antonio franchise has doubled--to $100,000,000--since he bought out his partner, Angelo Drossos, in 1988.

In less than two years, Robinson has grown into a national marketing phenomenon. As of the summer of 1989, just before he entered the league, the Spurs' logo-identified licensed products--jackets, T-shirts, caps, posters, watches, mugs--ranked 22nd in the league in sales. Last summer, they ranked 13th; this season, they have moved up to sixth.

Robinson's broadest exposure to date has come not on the basketball court but in the studio--as the anchor man for Nike's Force line of basketball shoes, a tidy $250,000,000 concern.

The "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood" series of commercials, a take-off on public television's Mr. Rogers, became an instant classic. "What impressed me about David is that he's such a nice guy," noted Jim Riswold, the copy writer who conceived the series. "And so I thought, I can't think of people any nicer than children's talk-show hosts...."

Robinson's foil in one of the ads, the classical pianist Rudolf Firkusny, agrees wholeheartedly. "He's a very nice man, and very cultured," Firkusny graciously reported. "I would like to play basketball as well as he plays piano."

•

The arrival of David Robinson comes just in time for the N.B.A. With only five players per side, basketball is more star-driven than any other team sport. But the league's strength is also its vulnerability, because for all of the N.B.A.'s superb performers, there are damn few real stars around, and they can't be manufactured by some PR wizard: The fans who shell out for $50 seats know the difference. Larry Bird and Magic carried the N.B.A. in the Eighties, but their careers are now twilit. Jordan remains a nonpareil, but he won't fly forever.

Enter David Robinson, our Air apparent--yet a different sort of national treasure. Jordan's lure flows directly from the spectacle of his game. He exists for us only in his red jersey and baggy shorts; he is pure basketball, the sport's soaring spirit made flesh. But we celebrate Robinson for his diversity, for his hobbies, as if to pull him closer, to make him a dabbler, like the rest of us.

And in contrast to some less felicitous idols (who among us, for example, has felt an urge to dial the Jose Canseco 900 hotline lately?), Robinson's persona shows no sign of wearing thin. He is a sober sort who drinks nothing harder than virgin strawberry daiquiris, a good Christian who doesn't preach, a wealthy young man who doesn't flaunt it (not-withstanding the obligatory Porsche), an officer who doesn't wave the flag. (When asked about the possibility of his being sent to the Persian Gulf--a remote scenario under the terms of Robinson's special reserve arrangement with the Navy--he replied, without bombast, that he would serve "eagerly" if called.)

Does he have a vice? "Well, he doesn't like to make his bed," conceded his father, Ambrose, who moved the family to San Antonio to help oversee David's business affairs. "But he knows how to make it--he made it very well in the Navy."

•

David's mother, Freda, grew up in South Carolina, where she was bused 25 miles past five white schools to a ramshackle building set aside for the black kids. Ambrose Robinson was in 11th grade in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Governor Orval Faubus barred Central High's door to the first wave of black students. Both had lived "separate but equal" and knew it for the lie it was.

When they had children, they were determined to raise them in a white, middle-class neighborhood and get them into white, middle-class schools--even if they were the least well-off family on their block. They sensed the racism around their home in Virginia Beach, but they could live with that. "It pays off in the long run to endure some things," Freda said. She was sipping her coffee in the sun-drenched house that son David bought for them in San Antonio. She is a vehement, straight-from-the-belly talker; Ambrose, a retired Navy sonar technician, turns strong and silent in her presence.

"In the long run, you're going to win out," Freda continued. "As my mother used to say, 'Patience wins.' "

Such was the emotional setting where David, the Robinsons' middle child, learned to read at the age of three (though he'd never finish many books), to peck out tunes on the piano by ear at the age of five, to thrive in his school's gifted programs from second grade on, to score 1320 on his S.A.T.s, gain a Presidential appointment to Annapolis and live happily ever after.

Except that it wasn't always quite that simple. Robinson had lived an unexamined life until he was 16 years old, when he went to a party thrown by the daughter of a white naval warrant officer. He was the only black kid there, which didn't mean anything until it was time for spin the bottle--and David was asked, ever so politely, to sit out and "referee." For, an instant, he didn't understand--these were his friends, weren't they? And then it hit him, and he took the first of many steps back inside himself.

The incident "made me realize that wasn't really my place," he said, nine years later. "I was with them a lot of the time--I never really thought of myself as not being one of them--but they weren't my people. That shocks you a little bit.

"I'd never really spent a lot of time around blacks, so socially, I was kind of backward. I really didn't know where I belonged."

The Naval Academy promised refuge from such confusion. At Annapolis, there was no social ambiguity. Relationships were defined by rank and class standing: "It's hard to have a best friend there, because it's such a competitive atmosphere, and you're worried about your own self more than anything else. I like talking to people and being friendly, but I learned my lesson real quick." Robinson despised the academy's macho competition and the lack of privacy, but he found the measured life there--the order, above all--reassuring.

"David loved the security of the place--the idea of someone's telling him when to eat, sleep, work, play," said his roommate, Carl Liebert. "The only negative was [lack of] freedom, and David wasn't a drinker or a partyer, so he didn't need that."

Robinson found his freedom on court. But even in the fraternal haven of the locker room there came a dark reminder that excelling was not the same as fitting in. Going into his senior season, Robinson had assumed that his teammates would elect him captain. He'd made Navy basketball matter again, until the admirals were screaming along with the rest of the full-capacity crowds, and he wasn't a half-bad public spokesman, either. But when the votes for captain were counted, the Middies' point guard, Doug Wojcik, was the winner.

Robinson never discussed the incident but now concedes that it "really upset me.... I was hurt by it."

Freda Robinson was blunter: "I know deep down in my soul that it was because he was black. It just goes to show you how deep instilled things are."

Regardless of how big you are, racism will find you in America. Robinson saw it all around him in Kings Bay, Georgia, where some of the grammar school teachers gave bad grades to black children out of habit. He saw it back in Washington, D.C., where a cop stopped him in his BMW for "wavering" and demanded to know to whom the car really belonged. He saw it even in the welcoming city of San Antonio, when Freda asked for her son at a local golf course and was brusquely informed that the caddies weren't working that day.

While Robinson's fame and status protected him from many routine indignities, they also marked him indelibly. When you are seven feet tall, and a black man, and one of the nation's megastar athletes, you cannot hide behind dark glasses. You are always on display.

A generation ago, when the stakes were lower and the city smaller, George Gervin took his stardom for a ride and let the fans jump in the back. "Ice--I love him like a brother," said George Valle, the president of the Spurs' fan club. And Robinson? "He's a nice guy, but he's so"--Valle searched for the word--"multifaceted. He's got so many interests in life that he wants to do other things."

As a rookie, Robinson deemed all the attention "embarrassing, because I'm still trying to make my place in the league. It's easy to lose your priorities and your identity--particularly when you don't even have an identity." This year, he said, the challenge was to remain "a giving and a loving person, because no matter who you are, if you're in this situation, you're going to start building up these walls inside you."

Giants are easier to celebrate than to love. We hype their mystiques, thrill to their hegemony, blurt stupid weather jokes and secretly wait for some misadventure to cut them down to (our) size. But the big men aren't fools. They sense our Lilliputian need for revenge, and they react to it--they cut us off at the pass. Wilt Chamberlain turned to compulsive braggadocio. Bill Russell became a rude eccentric. Abdul-Jabbar cherished privacy unto paranoia.

Robinson has yet to retreat that far, but the strain is showing. He is always articulate, always courteous, yet it's as if he's putting people at bay with analysis and verbal power--that if he gives them enough words, they won't demand something more. He rarely goes out with women--"distractions," he calls them. Friends such as Sean Elliott sense that he has "a harder shell around him than most people." Even Larry Brown, the N.B.A.'s Father Flanagan and Robinson's off-season golfing buddy, finds that his star pupil "doesn't know if he should really be a true friend or whether he should keep a distance." A typical evening will find Robinson in his sparsely furnished two-bedroom condominium, alone with his baby grand and his saxophone, until he can't stand the isolation any longer and starts chiding his parents for not visiting more often.

And so it becomes clear just how much David Robinson, for all his interests and abilities, needs the game of basketball--as much as, or even more than, the game needs him. He needs the liberty it grants from self-consciousness and identity crises, for the clean-cut geometries that define his role on the court. In basketball, he can blow his solos within an ensemble. He can be himself without being alone.

And if Robinson's journey of self-discovery seems heavily freighted, it's because he is recasting his sport along the way. "David Thompson was Michael before Michael, but he was limited because of size," said Larry Brown. "But David is bigger, he's faster, he jumps higher. He can dominate a game. If he can find the love for the game like Magic has, or like Michael has, it's over. He could be as good as anybody in this league, or better. He could be the dominant player."

"I want to be the best center in the league--not just the best center but the best player," Robinson said. "I think that's a very realistic goal."

These days, there is less and less doubt that David Robinson will get there--triumphant, all-powerful and very much alone at the top.

" 'Michael Jordan made a deal with the Devil. And now I think that he and Dave are into it together.' "