The Impossible Nemesis—A Suns Fan Bids Goodbye to Tim Duncan

I was standing in the shower when I realized Tim Duncan was my mortal enemy. I was 13 years old. He was 31. It was a relationship that could only end in one of us destroying the other.

The morning of April 19 was a typically sunny one in Arizona, but the atmosphere was shuddering. People sort of drifted along and smoldered, like the cigarette butts that stunk up the receptacles outside U.S. Airways Center downtown. No one seemed to know what to do. Tim Duncan had done it again. Done it to us again, and we were stupid to not see it coming. His dominance was as inevitable in Phoenix as a heat advisory in August.

The 2008 Suns were one of the Steve Nash-lead run-and-gun teams that, even in the fickle and cutthroat world of sports analysis, are considered to have deserved greatness. Since Nash re-joined the Suns in 2004, the team had built an offense around speed, flash and finesse. While the rest of the NBA was coveting monster-truck offenses, using giant bigs like Shaquille O’Neal, Rasheed Wallace and yes, Tim Duncan to bully teams inside, the Suns drove a Ferrari up and down the court, zipping long passes around the perimeter and splashing down moonshots from three-land. As a young kid, it was impossible not to be sucked into the hype. If we weren’t the best team in basketball (though we were good—55 wins in 2008), we were certainly the most entertaining. Nash and Co. were appointment viewing, and if I didn’t catch the live broadcast on TV, I’d always turn to 620 KTAR on the shower radio the next morning, to hear Suns broadcaster Al McCoy recap the game while I prepared for school.

Meanwhile, on the other side of New Mexico, the San Antonio Spurs were busy being everything the Suns were not: methodical, boring, traditional, quiet and consistent. While the Suns’ blistering pace had exploded into being upon the arrival of Nash, the Spurs, from my barely-teenage perspective, had always been good. They had never missed the playoffs. They had never been irrelevant or struggling. They had never been without Tim Duncan. (The first aspect of this viewpoint, remarkably, is not entirely wrong: Since the Spurs joined the NBA in 1976, they have missed the playoffs exactly four times, and only once has it happened in my lifetime—the 1996-97 season, when I was three years old.)

Duncan embodied everything a young basketball fan wanted to rebel against in organized sport. He was technically perfect to the point that a reel of his career highlights looks more like a how-to video than a celebration of an all-time great. His dunks were quick and emotionless—no rim-hanging or chest-thumping or flexing at the crowd. His mouth appeared to be sealed shut during games. He never talked trash. He never flaunted. He never once advertised that he was the greatest player to ever play his position. If you were 13 and your first impression of basketball was Steve Nash throwing passes behind his head to a skying Amar’e Stoudemire—“Wham! Bam! Slam!” shouted Al McCoy over the radio—you had no idea that Tim Duncan was a legend in the making. You just wanted him to leave your life in peace. Because, son of a bitch, did he ruin everything for a young Suns fan.

Entering the 2008 playoffs, the Suns and Spurs might have constituted the NBA’s best rivalry. The Spurs had bounced those circus-act Phoenix teams from the playoffs in two of the past three seasons, and the prospect of three times in four seasons felt like a potential killing blow to an all-time Arizona sports era. No one wanted these Suns teams to disappear, but Tim Duncan and his reptilian, monolithic Spurs had no such sentiment. In fact, the impression was they didn’t feel anything at all. They only knew how to win basketball games and destroy the dreams of Arizonan children. In 2008, the teams would meet in the opening round of the Western Conference playoffs. First blood. It was the night of April 18.

The game was an impossible classic, and that word is apt to describe how the game provided archetypal performances from all its key players. Nash scored 25 points and dialed up 13 assists. Stoudemire added 33 points and 7 rebounds. Leandro “The Brazilian Blur” Barbosa left some dust on the bench with a neat 12 points, 8 rebounds and 2 assists. The Suns hummed, but so did the Spurs. Tony Parker scored 26. Manu Ginobili had 24 with 3 steals. Everyone was out of their minds, and since a matchup this good required bonus material, the game stretched itself to double overtime. Duncan, of course, was brilliant and invisible. Except for one moment.

There are 12.6 seconds to go in the first overtime. Suns 104, Spurs 101. San Antonio ball. Manu Ginobili inbounds to Tony Parker at the top of the arc, who hands it back after Ginobili reenters the court. Nash scrambles to guard Ginobili, and the Spurs guard takes a few dribbles before working back to his left. There’s a screen to block Nash, and Ginobili loops around it and begins tearing to the basket. Nash fights through and picks up Ginobili again and there’s a brief thrill when the pair are racing toward the hoop together and you know—hold your breath—that this is it. The shot is moments away. But something’s happened. Ginobili isn’t going to shoot. Instead, he passes.

The man who sets the high screen for Ginobili just seconds earlier is Tim Duncan. After Ginobili clears his hip, Duncan steps back and stands behind the three-point arc. He’s straight up and down. Not in a shooting stance or a particularly athletic position—just a bystander. Unnoticeable. Completely miss-able. Wide open. Ginobili passes him the ball. No one is even close. There are canyons of court space in between Duncan and the closest defender. He has the shot if he wants it. But he has not made a three-pointer all season. He never attempts them. He probably barely practices them. But there he was, a country mile away from anyone in a Phoenix jersey and that basket was just staring at him.

To say that time slowed down would be a cliché, but when Tim Duncan caught that pass behind the arc and looked at the basket, he took an extra moment. The void between his body and the hoop yawned and as you watched you were so aware of the distance and the discomfort and the pressure of the moment. Suns win if he misses.

Tim Duncan made the shot. The Spurs took the game to a second overtime and won by two points: 117-115. Duncan finished the game with 40 points, 15 rebounds, 5 assists and 3 blocks. The three-pointer was his only trey for the entire season—he didn’t make another one in the playoffs, but of course he made that one. He’s Tim Duncan. Invisible, silent and forgettable, until he isn’t. Until he lets the ball go and it splashes through and he runs back down the court and for the only time in your life you see him pump his fist and scream and he hugs his teammates and the announcer, like an air raid siren over the southwest, yells over and over: TIMMMMMM DUNCANNNNNNN!!!! TIMMMMMM DUNCANNNNNNN!!!!

I stood in the shower on the morning of April 19 and I knew I hated him. Duncan was never like other NBA superstars in the sense that everything he did felt earthly and possible. His statistical output was always wow-worthy, but the numbers never seemed to come from anywhere except lunch-pail tradition and passionless work. Growing up we knew we could never be like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant—they were impossible talents—but we knew we could be like Tim Duncan (not that we would ever want that to begin with) because everything he did was possible. The Suns of my childhood defied basketball norms every game. They did things no one had ever seen before and they changed the way offenses were built, and yet, Tim Duncan owned them. How could such a possible man continually wreak havoc on those impossible teams?

Over time, as the Suns’ Ferrari sputtered and the Spurs’ monster-truck (more like a Honda Civic, really, after 2010) continued to rumble on, I learned the answer. I kept watching Tim Duncan show up and put in work and grab rebounds and toss in bank shots and jog down the court and whisper with Coach Popovich and it was always like that, year after year. He won another championship. He kept showing up on All-Defense teams. He earned the odd MVP vote. After a while, I understood why Duncan was an unbeatable nemesis: He was impossible. He was so good, so coachable, so smart, so poised. He never faded; he was constant. Permanent. Immortal.

Tim Duncan never came across as talented or competitive or passionate, but he was so undeniably all of those things that I came to love him. I hated loving him just as much as I loved hating him, but here, as the night falls on his impossible career, the memory of his triumphs—even at the awful expense of my beloved Suns—feel special in a way that is as unique as he was. No other NBA big man makes that shot in 2008; no other big man even has the confidence to attempt it. It was impossible and inevitable. But that was Tim Duncan. Impossible. Inevitable.