Utah guard Shandon Anderson was waiting for the call and it finally came Wednesday afternoon.
His father, Willie, lay dying in an Atlanta hospital room, fighting an uphill battle with throat cancer. During his playoff travels with the Jazz, Anderson had checked in with the hospital every morning when he awoke. The return call he dreaded–informing him his father had died–came hours before his Utah Jazz lost to the Bulls.
“Just the fact of not being there is the frustrating thing,” said Anderson, who played 26 minutes and had 5 points Wednesday. “You never know when that call is going to come.”
Anderson left the Jazz once during the playoffs to be with his father, flying back across the country on game day, arriving 90 minutes before tipoff of Game 5 of the Western Conference finals.
But like many who have suffered personal tragedies, Anderson seems to welcome the distraction his work provides. He said he had his father’s blessing to play.
“He’s a big sports freak,” Anderson told a Utah reporter recently. “And this is the thing he wants. He wants me to play–and play well.”
Anderson has been doing that. He turned in 19 strong minutes in Game 1 of the NBA Finals and never once looked like an awestruck rookie.
That’s because he isn’t an awestruck rookie. Anderson has been surprising his teammates since he made the club last fall as the 54th overall draft pick out of the University of Georgia.
“He’s a mature young man,” Jazz forward Antoine Carr said of the lone rookie on the roster. “We really don’t think of him as a rookie, except when it comes to rookie things like carrying our equipment bags.”
Anderson has carried more than that this season. Anderson averaged 5.9 points and 2.8 rebounds during the regular season. But here was a stat that provided a more telling measure of his value: The Jazz went 56-11 when Anderson was healthy, but only 8-7 when he missed January with a stress fracture to his left foot.
The 6-foot-6-inch, 208-pounder quickly gained a reputation for his rugged play, a trait that impressed Jazz coach Jerry Sloan and the club’s veterans.
“He keeps his nose in there and stays after it,” Sloan said.
Anderson needed a different sort of toughness against the Bulls. Mental toughness.
In Game 1, Jordan threw in one of those patented fadeaways on his first trip down the court against Anderson.
When Jordan saw Anderson check into the game in the second quarter, he must have been thinking, “Fresh meat.”
Anderson had a different thought when Jordan burned him: “Damn, already.”
Anderson knows that the defender hasn’t been born who can deny Jordan that shot. But as the ball dropped through the net, Anderson began to envision gruesome headlines in the next morning’s paper: Jordan pours in record 50 points in second quarter. Jazz waives rookie guard.
“You know if Jordan scores on you, your friends are going to be calling you,” Anderson said. “It’s hard to guard somebody who you know is looking to score everytime down the floor.”
“A lot of rookies–especially the past few years–come into the league and don’t know how to play the game,” Utah guard Jeff Hornacek said. “But for a rookie to do well in our system, with so many plays, so many options and so many reads–it’s obvious he knows how to play the game.”
