Longtime San Antonio Spurs Reporter Reflects on Tim Duncan’s Career

On Halloween night in 1997 at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, I had a courtside seat for the beginning of the Tim Duncan era. Little did I know that despite leaving childhood almost four decades earlier, I was in store for a treat that lasted most of the next 20 years.

At the time, I was on the Denver Nuggets beat for the Denver Post, years before I moved to the San Antonio Express-News in February 2004. That required me to focus on Denver’s rookie point guard, Bobby Jackson, and two other 1997 first-round picks on the Nuggets roster: Tony Battie (No. 5) and Danny Fortson (No. 10, traded to Denver from Milwaukee).

Long-suffering Nuggets fans were anxious to see how they would handle their first games for a team that had won only 21 games the previous season.

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The San Antonio Spurs scored the first of their 56 regular-season wins, 107-96, but Jackson became one of basketball’s all-time great trivia questions: Name the rookie who outscored Tim Duncan in his first game.

Jackson had 27 that night; Duncan only had 15, the same as Battie. The only rookie Duncan outscored that night was Fortson, who had seven.

By the time the Duncan era ended this past spring, courtside press-row seats had become as scarce as hen’s teeth. On May 12 this year, I was in the second row at Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City, eyes locked on Duncan as he walked off the court after a Game 6 113-99 playoff-eliminating loss. That spoiled the best regular season in Spurs history, a 67-15 campaign that had most of the basketball world excited about a Western Conference Finals matchup with the 73-9 Golden State Warriors.

After a long hug with Kevin Durant at midcourt and shorter displays of respect from other Thunder players, Duncan walked into the vomitory that led to the visitors’ locker room. With fans on their feet, applauding and calling his name, Duncan thrust his right arm upward, forefinger in the air.

And then he was gone.

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Those of us who often had seen Duncan limping to his car or to the team bus after games knew it was the end. If any of us had doubts, they disappeared late in that Game 6 when Serge Ibaka blocked a Duncan layup attempt that could have sliced a Thunder lead that had once been 28 points to single digits. Instead, knocked to the floor, Duncan watched a Thunder fast break culminate with a Durant lay-in that ended any hope of a Spurs comeback.

The look on Duncan’s face at that moment spoke volumes.

“He kind of got up and looked, and he was, like, ‘That was me,'” TV analyst and former teammate Sean Elliott said before Wednesday’s game at AT&T Center against the Boston Celtics. …

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