INDIANAPOLIS — His NBA career may have fizzled fast, but his passion did not.
Selected No. 15 overall by the Jazz in the first round of the 1987 NBA draft, Jose Ortiz played all of 64 games for Utah in two seasons from 1988-90.
That was it.
Yet now, more than a decade later, Ortiz is a hero.
Not just for a night. And certainly not in Utah. Rather, in Puerto Rico, where the now 38-year-old Ortiz plays with Karl Malone-esque longevity and John Stockton-like intensity.
Ortiz would have it no other way.
"I love this sport, and it's my life, so that's why I'm here," Ortiz said earlier this week at the FIBA World Basketball Championship.
With three straight second-round pool play wins this week, the Puerto Ricans briefly flirted with becoming the Cinderella team of this 16-team tourney.
On Monday, they upset defending-champ Yugoslavia, a win Ortiz called "a very special reward for me." On Tuesday, another improbable win, this one over Spain. Then Wednesday Puerto Rico beat Angola 89-87, doing so with 25 points from Ortiz, including a game-winner from inside the lane with 0.9 seconds to go in double-overtime.
That lifted Puerto Rico into a Thursday quarterfinal game with New Zealand, which it lost 65-63 despite Ortiz's 13 points and 10 rebounds. With that, Puerto Rico fell into tonight's semifinal consolation game with the United States to help determine fifth place.
Despite Thursday's loss, the week ranks right up there in terms of international accomplishment for the small island nation with Puerto Rico's fourth-place finish at the 1990 World Championship in Argentina, and maybe even gold medals won at the 1991 Pan American Games in Cuba and the 1994 Goodwill Games in Russia.
Personally, the run marked sweet satisfaction against defeated opponents featuring players who toil in a league in which Ortiz did not last long.
"These things happen in this kind of tournament," said Ortiz, a three-time Olympian. "You cannot underestimate your opponent."
No one underestimated Ortiz coming out of college, where at Oregon State he was once Pac-10 Player of the Year.
But the Jazz, much to their chagrin, may have overestimated him.
After delaying his NBA debut one year, in part so he could represent Puerto Rico at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea, Ortiz finally arrived in Utah.
He would start 15 of those 64 games, but averaged only 6.1 minutes. Production was similarly low: 2.9 points per game, 1.1 rebounds.
Ortiz, many who remember him would argue, clearly was not cut out for the NBA.
Instead he embarked on a career in Spain (playing for Real Madrid, F.C. Barcelona, Festina Andorra and Unicaja Polti from 1990-94), Greece (B.C. Larissa, Iraklio Crete and Aris Thessaloniki from 1995-1997), Venezuela (Isla Margarita) and Puerto Rico, where Ortiz has led his current team, the Santurce Crabbers, to more Superior League titles than can be tallied on one hand.
Throughout, Ortiz also has played for the national team of Puerto Rico, where to this day he is considered something of an island treasure.
"He is without a doubt the best center in Latin America and probably one of the best ever in the world at the amateur level," Puerto Rico Basketball Federation president Hector Manuel Reyes said in an Ortiz bio posted on FIBA's web site. "Ortiz . . . has always represented our country with pride each time we've asked him to. He is a true patriot."
Effective as he has been in the World tourney, scoring 15 points including four big ones in the late going against Yugoslavia and nine with seven rebounds and six assists against Spain, Ortiz understands he is turning over Puerto Rican basketball reins to the likes of guard Carlos Arroyo, who had NBA stints in Toronto and Denver last season, and Daniel Santiago, a former Phoenix Suns center who has signed to play for Rome in the Italian League next season.
As for Ortiz — who at 6-foot-10 and 250 pounds is said to look much more chisled and meatier than when he was with the Jazz — he merely will continue to play.
Albeit not in the NBA. But, internationally, for however much longer he wills himself to do so.
Why? "Why not?" Ortiz said.
E-MAIL: tbuckley@desnews.com