GINOBILI TURNS BACK CLOCK
SAN ANTONIO — Everyone in the building traveled into the past at once. The memories came surging back, many of them different, some of them older than others, but each of them unforgettable, like 18,418 moments frozen in time.
This is what Manu Ginobili can do to a room.
But in the middle of this, two men went further into the past than anyone else. They zoomed to a gym in Italy 18 years ago, when they both had full heads of hair and heads full of ideas about where basketball would take them.
Ettore Messina never imagined it would take them to Sunday at the AT&T Center, where he filled in for Gregg Popovich and Ginobili filled the rim. Who could have known that the first impression Ginobili made on him — at a 2000 practice for Virtus Bologna — would apply today?
“We were thinking, how can we have this guy on the bench?” Messina said, recalling his earliest reaction to seeing the running, dunking irrepressible ball of energy the hoops world would later come to know. “He should play.”
That was the right coaching move in Italy way back when, and it was the right coaching move again Sunday, when Ginobili, 40, scored 16 points and dished out five assists against Golden State in a 10390 Spurs victory that might not have saved their season but at least cleansed their emotions.
‘A lot of flashbacks’
Like a year ago, the arena chanted his name, paying homage to perhaps the most beloved player in franchise history in what fans feared could be his final game. Like a year ago, Ginobili was more embarrassed by the attention than motivated by it, although he once again rose to the whatever people thought the occasion was.
If he allowed himself to conjure up any memories, they were ones of Messina, the Spurs assistant who coached him to a EuroLeague title in Bologna.
“A lot of flashbacks,” Ginobili said. “It was good to see him coaching on this stage. Good memories.”
In a vintage fourth-quarter outburst that kept the Spurs from a sweep and sent the first-round playoff series back to Oakland, Calif., Ginobili provided plenty more of the same.
After the Warriors cut their deficit to 93-88 with four minutes left and looked poise to put the Spurs out of their season-long misery, Ginobili sidestepped into a 3-pointer.
A couple of minutes later, at the end of a slashing drive that could have been pulled directly out of a 2003 NBA Finals video, he up-faked to his right to get Draymond Green into the air, spun back to his left while appearing to lose the ball in the middle of the lane, then gathered it in time to shot-put it through the net.
The crowd roared. Ginobili did, too. As he did, he threw a roundhouse punch into the air, and his awestruck teammates wondered why anyone would think he was ready to walk away from this.
“When you see Manu out there, do you think he’s going to retire?” Rudy Gay said later.
Ginobili, for what it’s worth, continues to insist he has no idea if he will be back. He has another year on his contract, but he said he plans to take the same approach he did last summer, when he waited until July to decide if he had the desire to keep going.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who played alongside Ginobili in 2003, joked that even though he’s “old as dirt,” he should come back for two more years. When Ginobili hit one more 3-pointer in the final minute, this time right in front of Golden State’s bench, Kerr could not help but smile.
“It was just so typical Manu,” Kerr said.
So, too, was a moment a little earlier than that, when Ginobili banged legs with a Golden State defender and went down in a heap, grabbing at his knee and writhing in pain. When he got to his feet, limping badly, it looked for a second like he would need to leave the game.
But the second the ball was passed to him, he unleashed a series of cross-over dribbles so vicious that the crowd gasped, and followed it with a fadeaway jumper that spun out of the rim. If he had made it, the arena might not be standing.
“Maybe tomorrow it is going to hurt a little bit,” Ginobili said of what he diagnosed as a quad contusion.
Another shot at glory
He will be ready for Game 5 on Tuesday, just like he always has been, and chances are there will be another moment that makes everyone marvel.
Messina will be one of them. He does not revel in the task of replacing Popovich while the Spurs coach mourns his wife, but Messina does have an appreciation for the symmetry of it all.
“Nobody would like to be in this situation, for the obvious reason,” Messina said. “At the same time, there’s a little part of that that moves me a lot, to be there with Manu in this playoff game.”
As long as Ginobili is capable of going back in time, Messina is more than happy to accompany him.
And as long as Ginobili will let them, the Spurs will come along, too.