The line stretched outside the bank door and spilled into the parking lot. The police were there to make sure no one got out of line. Anxious mothers tried to calm babies tired by the waiting as fathers craned their necks for a look inside the bank, assuring their sons they'd get what they came for.
A bank run? Had Wall Street crashed? Another Black Friday?Nope. The Karl Malone Truck Tour 1993 had arrived.
Or is it Karl MaLoan?
NBA ballplayers choose a variety of ways to spend their summers. Some go shopping for cars. Some play golf. Some buy golf courses. Others fly to the Riviera and leave no forwarding address. Malone, he shows off his truck.
It's a custom made 18-wheel Freightliner with a C.M. Russell paint job and a cab you wouldn't mind living in if you could afford the rent. Karl drives it whenever he has a load to deliver or a reasonably good excuse, which is what brought about his summer-long bank tour. He was already a pitchman for Zions Bank, and the idea for a series of truck stop appearances was a natural. He didn't have an Olympics to do this summer, and they have big parking lots.
For much of the summer now, Malone has been driving the byways and backways of Utah, hammering down the white lines in his big rig listening to Dave Dudley songs and stopping at banks. Once completed, his tour will have stretched from Logan in the north to St. George and Kanab in the south. Nobody in Utah can say they haven't been within a tankful of gas of Karl and his outfit. Unlike the Delta Center, they've come to them.
Not a lot of professional athletes who make millions of dollars a year have gone into trucking. When they do, this is what it looks like. Neither the truck or the trucker is easy to miss. Karl is, well, Karl; he has no visible gut hanging over his belt, he doesn't wear shirts with snaps on the pockets, and you just know he's never been behind in a log book in his life.
And the truck isn't at all like the basic model you'd generally see parked outside Rip Griffin's or some other place off I-80 that sells mud flaps, radar detectors, chicken fried steak, and has tableside phone service reserved for professional drivers only. On account of many of them don't have cellular.
Then again, you can just imagine what a professional driver would look like if he suddenly became an NBA player.
If Malone had any fears that people might not flock out to see himself and his truck on their Truck Tour 1993, those fears vanished into his rearview mirror a long time ago. At every stop, the people have come, the people have gawked, the people have taken videos with their slimcams, and the people have bought T-shirts.
In Provo it was more of the same. The Mailman's truck store - an on-wheels version of the original Mailman's in Sugarhouse - did a nonstop business as the crowd continued at a slow pace toward the bank door. The store was conveniently located about halfway along the line, a mandatory stop selling shirts, banners, posters, pins, caps, hats and, of course, official Bank Tour 1993 paraphernalia.
These items were bought cheerfully by the line-full of Karl Malone fans - who would give them to him to sign before they were another half-hour old - although anyone who thought they were in the world's longest teller line would have been genuinely confused once they got to the truck.
Inside the bank, Malone was at his gregarious best. He likes people in general and he especially likes people who like trucks. He sat at a receptionist's table along with his teammate/sidekick Isaac Austin and signed anything thrust in front of him as long as it wasn't a loan application or a picture of George Karl. He looked up to talk whenever possible, or to respond to comments. One lady wanted to know if he'd ever seen so many white people gathering in his behalf.
The Mailman laughed out loud.
"It's fine in the daytime," he said.
The banter continued on down the line. It isn't every day the most famous athlete in your state parks in your parking lot and comes inside to sign his name. It's become the traveling event of the offseason. If that's Karl's truck outside, then this must be Zions.