Late November.
It was a night that would still make Kevin Garnett grimace when he thought back on it years later.
The Boston Celtics were at home against the Utah Jazz.
Before the game, Thibodeau pulled Garnett aside and pointed to a name on the opposing roster. "Karl Malone. Watch out for him tonight."
Garnett grinned, unconcerned. "The Mailman! I know. Don't worry, Coach. Tonight, I'll..."
"Tonight," Thibodeau interrupted, "keep your mouth shut."
Garnett curled his lip and paid it no mind.
During warm-ups, he made a point of glancing at Malone across the court.
The thirty-two-year-old "Mailman" wore the plainest of Salt Lake City navy-blue warm-ups. He had a buzz cut, and the muscular contours of his face looked hewn with an axe, utterly expressionless. He exuded that quintessential, rock-solid nineties roughness, like a farmhand who had spent years out in the wind and sun in rural Louisiana and driven his tractor into town.
Malone hardly cared to engage with anyone on the court. Amid the home crowd's deafening boos, he simply kept his head down and repeated his basic drills over and over... midrange shots, catch-and-shuttle drills, heavy little steps in the low post. Everything was precise, without a single unnecessary movement.
This was the league's best power forward?
He looked like some country uncle who drove a truck.
Garnett did not know it then, but Malone really did like driving trucks.
One of the Mailman's most famous off-court hobbies was collecting all kinds of heavy trucks and driving them all over the state whenever he had nothing else to do.
And as soon as the game began, this high school kid who did not know his own limits took the hardest sucker punch of his career.
Barely a minute into the first quarter, Stockton's textbook pick-and-roll found Malone precisely as he sank into the low post.
Relying on his six-foot-eleven height and monstrous wingspan, Garnett stepped up and pressed his chest hard against him. He was desperate to test this "country uncle's" mettle in front of twenty thousand home fans.
The next second.
The instant Malone caught the ball and turned, his right elbow, attached to an arm thicker than Garnett's thigh, came up behind him as naturally as could be.
Bang!
It struck Garnett squarely, fitting perfectly into the barely protected space between his throat and chin.
Garnett felt a buzzing explode inside his head, and half his vision instantly went black.
It was the dull pain of taking a heavy hammer head-on. That elbow, hard as cast iron, knocked him backward with his neck craning, and his defensive footwork instantly tangled into a complete mess.
Before his vision could clear, Malone had already moved like a finely calibrated heavy tank: shoulder down, turn, jump. Rising to the textbook height, he smoothly sank his signature turnaround midrange jumper.
Swish.
The net fluttered. Malone landed effortlessly, did not even adjust his arm sleeve, and turned straight back on defense.
This was not merely the art of battling inside in the nineties.
This was sheer, utterly unreasonable physical domination on another level. Strength, positioning, mastery of contact-with every spot Malone took near the edge of the paint, every probe of the defense with his back, those iron elbows feared throughout the league were like two solid-steel crowbars ready to shatter a rookie's bones.
Garnett's frame had not even filled out yet. Against that monstrous body forged by grueling Louisiana farmwork and ten years of hellish professional training, throwing his pitiful weight into it was like a half-grown child running headfirst into a fast-moving redbrick wall.
But the stubborn streak Garnett had forged playing on Chicago's streets among Black players surged straight to his head.
He rubbed his burning chin. Ever since he was little, he had survived on concrete courts through that very ferocity... The harder you beat me down, the tougher I talk.
On the next possession, Garnett scrambled into position behind Malone. He brought his head close to those enormous, fanlike ears and opened the floodgates at the top of his lungs. "That's it? Old man! Did your elbows miss dinner tonight? If you've got the balls, come right here..."
Before he could finish, a thick hand covered in black hair swept in, sweaty and whooshing through the air, and clamped brutally over his mouth.
It was Sam Mitchell who had rushed over.
The team's veteran elder brother, also thirty-two, who had seen his share of broken legs and brawls in the league, had come charging in from the side at a hundred-meter sprint sometime during all this. He hooked an arm around Garnett's neck, clamped his mouth shut, and forcibly hauled the troublemaker out beyond the three-point line.
Garnett turned his head and discovered that Mitchell's dark, weathered face had actually gone faintly pale with fright.
Mitchell kept his voice low. With extreme fear and anger, he sounded as though he were suppressing a roar. "Shut your goddamn mouth! You fucking idiot! Are you crazy?! That's Karl Malone!"
"Do you want him to beat us to death on our home court tonight?!"
"Who the hell do you think you're talking to? Piss him off, and those elbows can fucking dismantle our entire Celtics frontcourt tonight!"
"You goddamn brat, you want all five of us carried off this court tonight?!"
The veteran's yelling left Garnett completely stunned.
He turned his head blankly and saw Sam Cassell, Murray, and the others on his own bench clutching their towels, their shoulders shaking wildly as they struggled not to laugh.
Garnett stiffened his neck, but seeing Mitchell's terrified expression, as though he were facing a formidable enemy and the world might end the next second, the supremely arrogant high school kid ultimately did not dare spit out the rest of his curse.
At that moment, with the crowd's frenzied boos ringing in his ears and Malone's massive, steady back before him as he retreated on defense, the nineteen-year-old began to vaguely realize for the first time...
This taciturn "country uncle," who looked like a cold stone sculpture on the court, was, in the eyes of these battle-hardened veterans, such a terrifying hard case that even trash talk was strictly off-limits.
But what truly beat Garnett into submission over the course of that game was not Malone's iron elbows that could break a man's ribs.
It was his terrifying, inhuman stamina.
Growing up, Garnett had always believed that no big man on this planet could match his endurance or his speed running up and down the court. Those tireless, antelope-like long legs were his greatest asset in challenging this old era.
But that night, in Boston's new arena, he ran smack into an industrial-grade steel machine.
From midway through the second quarter to the end of the third.
Within Utah's tightly organized pick-and-roll offense, Malone dragged Garnett into an endless exchange of attacks and all-out physical combat.
Back and forth, sprinting at full speed.
Fighting for position, muscles colliding.
Back and forth again, sprinting at full speed again.
The wooden court trembled violently beneath the thunder of their enormous bodies. Both sides moved through their offense at a blistering pace, with almost no time to stop.
Garnett was so exhausted that his lungs felt as though two fires were raging inside them, and every breath tasted of blood. As he dragged his heavy feet forward, he thought through gritted teeth...
This old bastard was fucking thirty-two and had played ten years in the NBA. Surely it was time for him to catch his breath and slow down?
Yet when he turned his head, what flashed into view was once again Malone's enormous body, with barely any visible body fat.
That Louisiana heavy truck launched another full-speed sprint into the frontcourt without the slightest warning.
Malone thundered all the way from the backcourt into the paint at the other end, extended one massive hand, and firmly sealed off Garnett's defensive position, like a tireless northwestern ox.
Finally, a battle for position in the frontcourt resulted in a dead ball, and the referee's shrill whistle at last sounded for a timeout.
The instant he heard it, Garnett felt an immense relief. Unable to hold himself up any longer, he braced both hands hard on his knees, his entire back bent like a shrimp, and stood there gasping in enormous, thunderous gulps.
Beads of sweat pattered from his dark chin, quickly soaking a small, glistening patch into the floor he had just stepped on.
As he panted, Garnett habitually glanced out of the corner of his eye toward the Utah Jazz's half of the court.
That single glance froze him where he stood.
Malone was standing at the edge of the visitors' bench area.
His back was straight as a spear, his hands on his hips. While everyone else was frantically gulping water and working up saliva, Malone had not even touched his water bottle.
He was not even breathing hard.
During the timeout, the Jazz's assistant coaches and substitutes were all shouting, but Malone merely stood there expressionlessly. Those cold eyes, utterly devoid of warmth, stared down fixedly at Garnett as he bent over and gasped.
Inside the well-heated arena, a cold sweat inexplicably broke out across Garnett's back.
At that instant, a primal fear filled his mind, leaving only one thought circling endlessly:
What the fuck was this guy made of?
Didn't he need lungs to breathe?
Was that even human blood running through his veins, or was it cold industrial machine oil?
At that moment, the ignorant arrogance of believing his stamina was the best in the world, built up in Wisconsin and high school basketball, was utterly smashed to pieces by this man whose very sweat smelled of rust.