Sunday journey of a 'faloup'By Chris Sheridan
ESPN Insider

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. and NEW YORK -- Anybody else hate college basketball? Kindred souls, this column is for you.
It may seem strange that any NBA writer would not want to watch the nation's pre-eminent college basketball tournament on the one weekend per year when it can actually draw in a few casual fans, but my days as a casual fan ended a long time ago -- somewhere around the time when I was a college intern for the Milwaukee Brewers and caught a glimpse of Cecil Cooper's pay stub.

Given a choice between doing laundry and watching college basketball, I'll choose a tidy stack of fresh, clean tighty whiteys 10 times out of 10.

So you can be certain I wasn't going to spend the day staring at players I've never heard of on the tube, and the Queen of Babysitters, Carmen from El Salvador, had already knocked off the laundry duties a day earlier. Sure, I had a chance to go see kids' musician Dan Zanes at SUNY-Purchase, but the thought of hearing the lyrics "all around the kitchen, ****le-doodle-doodle-doo" one more time inspired me to take on a rare daily-double that was a lot more to my liking -- Mavericks-Nets at the Meadowlands at 1 p.m., then Heat-Knicks at Madison Square Garden at 7:30 p.m.

The first game was lame; the second was interminable, but I decided along the way to revisit one of my column ideas from earlier this season: The highlights of covering two NBA games in one day.

11:10 a.m. Not one, not two, but three different members of the East Rutherford parking lot authority wave me into the press parking lot despite my temporary misplacement of this season's parking pass. This is no small thing, because if you have to park in the main lots with hoi polloi, you're looking at a 15-minute trek through a howling, cold wind to make it to the press entrance.

11:30 a.m. Stop courtside for a chat with Mavericks assistant coach Del Harris, who I spent a lot of time with in 2004 when he was coaching the Chinese National Team and I was covering men's basketball at the Olympics.

12:20 p.m. Harris looks up at the clock and realizes he should have been inside the locker room five minutes ago. I retreat to the press room to begin working on this blog entry, stopping for just an instant to see a television in the press room tuned to the NCAAs. The score box in the lower right-hand corner of the screen tells me Brad is playing Pitt, but there's still nothing that can convince me that it's a good-looking game.

1:04 p.m. Glance up from the computer screen to see the Nets-Mavs game is already two minutes old. ABC doesn't mess around when it says the game is starting at 1 p.m., I guess.

1:22 p.m. Interrupt my conversation with a Japanese reporter about the troublesome size of hotel rooms in her country to watch Vince Carter knock down a 3, Jerry Stackhouse miss a 16-footer and Richard Jefferson bury a 19-footer. That makes the score 29-8 in favor of the Nets as Dallas opens 3-for-21 en route to a 10-point first quarter, the Mavs' worst of the season. The conversation along press row turns to how late the Mavericks must have stayed out in Manhattan on Saturday night.

1:26 p.m. The Nets dancers come out, and p.a. announcer Gary Sussman announces they are sponsored by "Applebottoms by Nelly." It's the strangest thing I've ever heard Sussman say over the mike, and that's saying something.

3:43 p.m. Josh Powell steals the ball from Zoran Planinic and finds Darrell Armstrong for a breakaway layup, and suddenly Dallas has used a 15-0 run to pull within seven after the Nets pulled their starters (Sussman announced it as a "line change.") Coach Avery Johnson re-inserts Dirk Nowitzki and draws up a play in the hopes it will lead to a four-point play, but Nowitzki is short on his 3-pointer and does not get fouled.

3:57 p.m. Coach Lawrence Frank walks into the press room for his post-game news conference, only to see all heads turned the other way to watch the final seconds of the Cavs-Lakers game. After a few uncomfortable moments, Frank decides to begin.

3:58 p.m. Kobe Bryant nearly knocks down a 30-footer at the buzzer, but the shot rims out. Coach Frank is not watching.

4:18 p.m. Nowitzki is dumfounded in trying to come up with an explanation for his team's slow start, noting that the Mavs also had a putrid opening quarter late last month in Toronto before coming back from a 24-point deficit to win in OT. "Maybe we need to get up a little earlier and run around the block six times, I don't know," Nowitzki says.

5 p.m. Arrive at Madison Square Garden following a 30-minute drive in from Jersey. (My Winston Wolf alter-ego does not come out to play on Sundays. Too much traffic, especially coming into the city from the Garden State).

5:06 p.m. Enter the press room, where a few boxscores are lying around from the city championship games played earlier in the day. (Epiphany Prince was held to 33 points, 80 below her career high, but her school Murry Bergtraum, still defeated Francis Lewis 81-66.) In the boys' game, the next great point guard to come out of Brooklyn, ninth-grader Lance Stephenson, led Lincoln (Stephon Marbury's alma mater) past Grady 73-51.

5:07 p.m. Notice a college game on TV between "Conn" and "UK." Make mental note to question what the heck the Brits are doing in the NCAAs.

5:35 p.m. Run into Michael Lee of the Washington Post, who covered the Olympics in Athens with me two years ago. One day we stopped at a small café across from the American College of Greece where the U.S. team was practicing, and Lee asked the waitress if they had any chicken. Judging from the reaction of our waitress, Roxanne, it appears no one had ever ordered chicken there before.

6 p.m. Larry Brown walks into his pre-game news conference and I needle him with a two-word question: "George Mason?" "Hey, they've got a Baby Shaq in the middle, and he's a pretty good player." After rehashing why Marbury was not on the floor for the game-winning shot against the Pistons on Friday night, Brown goes on to explain why he won't be going to any set rotations in the final four weeks of the season. "We're not going anywhere, so I don't get caught up in rotations too much. I'm going to play guys, see what we have and move forward."

6:15 p.m. Walk into the Knicks' locker room, where the other reporters are in a tizzy after Marbury had just called people in the media "faloups." It's easily the most mysterious f-word thrown out by a Knick since Tim Thomas added 'fugazy" to the NBA lexicon.

6:40 p.m. No one in the Heat locker room knows what faloup means, but Gary Payton really wants to know. "I'm going to ask Steph during the game," he says.

6:41 p.m. The conversation turns to Brown, and Payton recalls playing for him on a U.S. Junior Olympic team that played in Italy in 1988. Payton goes on to tell how his teammate on that club, Dwayne Schintzius, grabbed a bottle that someone had thrown onto the court and whipped it back into the stands, which prompted the crowd to hurl every projectile they could find at the U.S. team.

7:25 p.m. Payton can't contain his curiosity, so he walks over to Marbury at midcourt and asks what "faloup" means, and Marbury tells him it's a euphemism for people who are full of baloney. Silly me, I thought it was a new item at Taco Bell combining the fajita and the chalupa.

7:34 p.m. Run into Knicks p.r. official Dan Schoenberg, who introduces me to the two women he's escorting to the celebrity seats. They're both supermodels, and they're both much taller and younger than me. Sometimes it sucks to be married, 40 and less than 6 feet tall. I later learn that Marbury fell on the two models while going for a loose ball during the game. Bet he didn't call them "faloups."

7:50 p.m. Jason Williams throws a long, long alley-oop pass to Dwyane Wade, who rises high above the rim -- seemingly 4 feet above it -- to grab the pass and flush it. The crowd goes nuts.

7:59 p.m. Malik Rose dunks on Alonzo Mourning and gets a technical foul for being a little too demonstrative afterward.

8:03 p.m. Jerome James dunks on Mourning and actually gets a call, then converts the three-point play.

8:04 p.m. During a dead ball with the arena completely quiet, referee Joey Crawford yells to both teams: "Everyone stop their moaning!" The whole building can hear him.

8:42 p.m. Halftime arrives. And since they were serving fried fish fillets as the pre-game meal, I go out for pizza, re-establishing a connection with my Inner Mr. Wolf and zipping down to Greenwich Village to make my purchase from Famous Ray's on Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, the only pizzeria that was paying attention when the good Lord created the ultimate recipe.

9:20 p.m. The game is dragging like no game I can remember, the Heat staying ahead by five to 11 points throughout the third quarter as Crawford, Violet Palmer and Jack Nies are giving their whistles a workout.

9:26 p.m. The game ain't dragging anymore. J-Will tosses an alley-oop to Wade from near midcourt, and Wade reaches behind himself to get the pass and flush it. Stunning.

9:28 p.m. Jamal Crawford feeds Eddy Curry an alley-oop pass, and the big heavy fella is able to get up and dunk it. Wade answers with a jumper from 22 feet and a pretty feed to Mourning for a dunk. Mourning closes the quarter with his eighth block of the night, and Miami is up nine.

9:46 p.m. Jerome James goes one-on-one against Shaq and gets off a shot that hits the bottom of the backboard.

9:46:30 p.m. Shaq scores over James, putting the Heat up 13.

9:49 p.m. On the Knicks' first play out of a timeout, Jalen Rose fires up an airball from the corner.

9:54 p.m. Wade gets ahead of the field for an uncontested dunk. He has 30.

9:54:30 p.m. The Knicks are called for a 24-second violation, and the first boos of the night are heard. Miami calls timeout, and half the fans head for the exits.

10:02 p.m. Wade goes one-on-one against Steve Francis at the top of the key, gets around him and threads a pass to Shaq for a dunk.

10:04 p.m. Antoine Walker hits a 3 with 1.4 seconds left, the final points in the Heat's 111-100 victory.

10:22 p.m. Riley compares Wade to Michael Jordan without mentioning Jordan's name, although it's plainly clear who he's talking about. "[Wade] will one day make his place in this game, and we're seeing it day-in and day-out."

10:39 p.m. Wade emits an embarrassed chuckle when asked if he believes he'd go No. 1 overall if the 2003 draft was done over. "You can't do drafts over, but I'm sure Jordan wouldn't have gone third. LeBron deserved to go No. 1 to Cleveland, and I deserved to go fifth to Miami."

10:42 p.m. O'Neal ducks out the back door of the locker room and is about to sign autographs for two fans with hallway passes, but a Heat security official waves them off. O'Neal walks away and ESPN's Stephen A. Smith emerges a second later from the same doorway, walking over to the two fans and making sure they don't leave without someone's John Hancock. Having now officially seen it all, I call it a night.

Chris Sheridan, a national NBA reporter for the past decade, covers the league for ESPN Insider. To e-mail Chris, click here.

Well, Steph just gave himself a new nickname.

question...does the media interview anyone besides marbury and brown? how often do you see quotes from david lee in the paper??