Another View

It’s too bad they’ve got Bobby Knight minding his Ps and Qs these days.

Because it was a night when it might have helped to have somebody from Indiana throw a chair at Shaquille O’Neal.

Or a boulder. Or a ton of bricks. Or the kitchen sink. Or something. Anything.

He wears a Superman tattoo on his biceps and the Pacers will be the first to tell you that is hardly false advertising.

Not when Shaq went over them and through them and around them. Not after Shaq hit them with 43 points and 19 rebounds as the Lakers romped, 104-87.

So after Game 1 of the NBA finals is in the book, the question remains: Can any one person stop O’Neal?

“No,” said teammate Kobe Bryant, who is as brutally honest as he is precocious.

Shaq is merely brutal. As in the way he treated Indiana center Rik Smits before the fouling Dutchman was finally disqualified by picking up six fouls in only 20 minutes of action.

It is the question of the day, the question of the series and maybe the question of the millennium for the rest of the NBA that is faced with the task of preventing him from putting the entire league in his hip pocket.

Can anybody do anything to knock this runaway train off the track?

The answer, it would seem, is more difficult than trying to explain quantum physics on the back of a postcard.

Especially when you try to do it with one man guarding the mountain, which was the philosophy of Pacer Coach Larry Bird.

Unlike Portland, which pushed the Lakers to the seven-game limit in the Western Conference finals by consistently double-teaming O’Neal down in the low post, always using the long arms of Scottie Pippen or one of the big guards to harass him, the Pacers took him one-on-one.

And that is how they went down.

He whipped Smits. He gobbled up Dale Davis. He destroyed Sam Perkins. He danced on Austin Croshere’s head. He outscored all four of them combined.

The problem is that the Pacers have neither the size nor the speed of Portland in order to implement the Trail Blazers’ strategy.

Bird chose to play O’Neal straight up during the two regular-season meetings and O’Neal outscored Smits, 53-16.

If Indiana should choose to change now, you can practically see Bryant standing there licking his lips at the prospect of the openings it will create for him. The kid superstar scored only 14 points and barely breathed hard.

“You can sense when he’s going to have a big game and all you do then is get the ball to him,” Bryant said. “It’s easy, really.”

Unless you’re on the other end. That’s when you wish you had Bobby Knight and a chair.