The morning after he added a key sentence to his very own chapter in basketball history, a reflective Karl Malone bemoaned the woes of the game.
Malone believes the NBA is ailing, and it pains him to see it suffer. Its malady, in his mind: declining interest among the masses, evidenced by empty seats seen at arenas in cities throughout the league.
Utah recently returned from a sparsely attended road trip in which crowds numbered fewer than 14,000 in four of five games.
Then Tuesday, on the night Malone passed Wilt Chamberlain and became the NBA's second-leading scorer behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Jazz could not even sell out the Delta Center.
Announced attendance: 19,288.
While he was moved by those who were there, Malone admitted it hurt and frustrated him to see more than 600 empty seats — in his own arena — on such a momentous evening.
"Yeah," he said, "it did."
"But the fans there (Tuesday) night, I know what they were there for. . . . Every shot I took, they wanted me to make it. So I appreciate them for being there," said Malone, who has played in front of just one sold-out crowd in nine home games so far this season. "I just hope we as a team, we as players, we as owners, say that we do have a problem, and stop trying to play it off like it's not a problem. And what's that gonna take? H---, I don't know. But I'm open to pretty much anything."
Maybe even reaching into his own pocket and buying some seats himself.
"I have so many great memories of us selling our arena out that if it takes two or three hundred thousand (dollars) for me to put back into it, I'll go on the record right now to say I'll do it," said Malone, adding he may talk with Jazz owner Larry H. Miller about exploring possibilities for keeping the 19,911-seat Delta Center full in the future. "Because (playing in a partly empty building) is not how I want to remember the fans when I'm leaving."
On Tuesday, after he passed Chamberlain with the eighth of his game-high 31 points in a 98-84 victory over the Toronto Raptors, Malone said he hoped what he had done would benefit a league he perceives to be in need of an image boost.
"Hopefully on a night like (Tuesday's)," he said, "where there were a lot of negative things about the game of basketball, hopefully I brought something positive to it, because I'm concerned about the state of the game."
By Wednesday morning, after he had celebrated at home by cooking up a gift to himself on his George Foreman grill ("Made me a burger, and it was over with"), Malone wasn't sure if his feat had made much of a difference.
On ESPN's popular SportsCenter late Tuesday night, what Malone had done wasn't even the first NBA news mentioned, let alone the lead sports story.
In USA Today, his move past Chamberlain was played on page 10C — of a 14-page newspaper section whose cover featured three other NBA stories, including the suspension of Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor for signing Joe Smith to secret contracts, and a mass-communication blunder by Dallas Mavericks owner and dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban that resulted in an e-mail logjam for hundreds of Internet users.
"I don't think it surprises me," he said of the national media snub.
But it did bother him — not because of what he did, but, rather, who else was involved.
"To pass Wilt, who gave so much for basketball — it seemed like that would have been . . . such a positive for sports in general," said Malone, who going into tonight's game against Vancouver (a team that struggles to attract big crowds itself) has 31,443 points, 24 more than the late Chamberlain. "But obviously it was like the fifth or sixth or seventh thing that was most important. But so be it. It's one of them things."
One of 'them things' Malone counts among the many, he suggests, that symbolize the NBA's ills.
"People can see the love of the game when you play it," he said. "(But) now, it's so much 'I' and 'me,' and not 'team' anymore, that people are not buying it. . . . People take their hundred bucks and go do something else."
And if things are bad today, Malone dreads thinking about how they may be a few seasons from now: "What happens when two or three of us certain guys leave? What's it gonna be like then?"
Malone hopes the NBA addresses the matter before then.
"I still don't see no sense of urgency by the league and the teams," he said, "to say, 'Okay, you know what? Let's stop hiding it. This is a problem.' "
E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com