I wish the battery in my camera phone had some life. Because if it wasn’t all but dead I could snap some photos and reveal a rarely seen side of Tim Duncan during a postgame interview: animated, laughing, engaging in a hilarious back-and-forth.
We are standing in a hallway outside the Spurs locker room, away from the crush of media chronicling another Spurs triumph, and there’s not a hint of calm or deadpan cool in that famously expressionless face.
I suppose Duncan is “up” because I’m not here to talk basketball per se, and because his best friend -- actor Marc Blucas of USA’s “Necessary Roughness” -- is giving him good material.
Blucas left the Atlanta set of his TV show Tuesday morning and flew into San Antonio for Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals wearing a bulky black brace on his left leg. Duncan begins to giggle -- “He’s trying to look like me,” No. 21 says -- because the brace is no Hollywood prop.
While shooting a recent episode that called for him to dunk a basketball, Blucas showed that, at 40-years-old and 6-foot-1, he’s got no hops and tore a knee tendon. Duncan had fun with that, and next thing you know, two Wake Forest teammates from the mid-90s are cutting up like kids in college.
Blucas says Duncan can’t jump over a phone book -- “Not a thick one with Yellow Pages, a thin one” -- and Duncan says “yes, that’s true,” but Blucas can’t jump at all, and it’s no wonder he got hurt.
Did Blucas ever dunk at Wake Forest, I ask. Duncan says “once.” I ask, “when,” and he and Blucas answer in near comedic unison: “Rhode Island!” Must have been some throw-down.
Memories fly. Playful insults, too. They recall a game in which Blucas took an elbow to the face and suffered a concussion. Dazed, Blucas got up, his vision blurring, and approached coach David Odom. Duncan tells the story like a wide-eyed kid describing a teacher slipping on a banana peel, hands moving all over the place: “He says, ‘Coach, don’t take me out but I can’t see.’ Then he runs right back into the game.”
They burst into laughter.
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