Spurs That Jingle Jangle Mangle

The scene belonged in a bad television sitcom about a basketball team: the players are toweling off in the visitors' dressing room, their long faces and a heavy silence letting you know that they had lost, badly. There is a desperate need to dispel the gloom. So the superstar, the class cutup, the one with the pipe-cleaner body, close-cropped hair and stick-out ears, starts humming, quietly at first. Then as his teammates begin to crack smiles, the humming becomes full-blown Smokey Robinson.

"Mama said there'd be days like this, there'd be days like this my mama said," he sings. The others—the veteran guard, the big white kid from Minnesota, the two new centers, the rookies—join in a cacophony that is equal parts R&B and off-key Texas Country.

In comes the coach—a real white shadow, short and skinny with frizzed-up hair, a pearly grin and a high-pitched twang.

"Where the hell is Ice?" he pipes before exploding in laughter. "Ice! Four for 23! Four for 20 bleeping 3! I thought it was bad, but...."

But no, it isn't television. The place is Salt Lake City, the time last Wednesday and the San Antonio Spurs have just lost to the Utah Jazz 109-96.

"You thought it was bad?" says Ice, otherwise known as George Gervin, three times the NBA scoring champion. "I knew it was bad. Some guy in the stands kept yelling to me, '0 for 11, Ice! Two for 16, Ice!' Whew, boy." Gervin bends down and shuffles through a pile of laundry on the floor. "Anybody seen my jump shot?"

Things could have been a lot worse. The defeat was only the Spurs' first since the second game of the season, and although it had snapped an eight-game winning streak, the team still had a 9-2 record and was 3� games ahead of Utah in the NBA's Midwest Division after less than three weeks of the season. There was still plenty of room for optimism. The Spurs had a new philosophy, a new attitude, a new coach, a new niche in the Western Conference and a new team that had, ostensibly, proved it was no fluke three nights earlier by beating the defending-champion Lakers—and in Los Angeles—108-102. Because the Lakers lost only four times on their home court in all 41 dates last season and are considered to be even stronger this time around, the Spurs could afford to laugh at the absurdity of their defeat by Utah.

To be sure, the Spurs had always been a loose bunch, playing in one of America's great fun towns, with the NBA's most fun fans. San Antonio is the home of the original Baseline Bums, who have inspired togetherness by dressing up as six-packs of beer (six Bums, that is), presenting an oversized bowl of guacamole dip ingredients to Denver Coach Larry Brown and inventing pithy chants, some of which are printable. One current favorite: "Rootie Toot Toot! Rootie Toot Toot! Who's that monkey in the referee suit?"

The Spurs have the distinction of being the only team to have gotten to the playoffs every year they've been in the NBA—they entered with the 1976 NBA-ABA merger—and in fact have made the playoffs in 12 of their 13 years of existence, and they've always entered and exited laughing, while the rest of the league has laughed even harder. First in offense, last in defense was the way the Spurs seemed to rank every year, with two superstars—Gervin, unanimously acclaimed, and Forward Larry Kenon, self-proclaimed—fighting for points and payroll dollars, and the league's most laid-back coach, Doug Moe, who could work up more sweat in an afternoon gin rummy game than in a month of Houstons, Washingtons and Philadelphias.

But by the start of this season a remarkable transformation had taken place in San Antonio. Kenon had become a free agent and fled to Chicago; the Spurs had all but packed his bags for him. Moe had been fired, and Stan Albeck—a man half Moe's size and, more important, with half Moe's ego—was at the reins. Albeck is a meticulous student of the game and a tireless worker who, at age 49, earned his shot at the big time after heroically serving time as assistant to the likes of Alex Hannum, Hubie Brown, Wilt Chamberlain (ah, the San Diego Conquistadors) and Jerry West, and spending last year as head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. "You better believe I'm ready for this," he said last week before the Utah game. "With my southern Illinois twang I can pass for a Texan. I even have my authentic elephant-hide cowboy boots. Only problem is the ten-gallon hat. Can't wear one. Leaves a ring around the perm."