Rapture of the Raptors wrecked

You can subtract all the hype and pare away all the money and sometimes a sport will still boil down to what you dreamed it was when you were a kid and knew no better. In its naked essence it will reveal itself as the same thing it was when you played with a grudge on a playground, or had something to prove on a slanted pitch many years ago.

Take last Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden. The New York Knicks were playing host to the Toronto Raptors in the second game of a five-game play-off series.

A little prologue by way of context is necessary. The Knicks play ugly, in-your-face, smashmouth basketball. Nobody likes them and they like it that way. Their ventures into the play-offs are as tranquil as Viking pillages. Their new totem is Latrell Sprewell, the tattooed and gangsta rappin' bad boy who found work in New York after his last job ended badly. He tried to choke the coach.

The Raptors, despite their silly name, are one of the NBA's pet projects. An expansion team planted north of the border in Canada, in the heart of ice hockey country. The Raptors employ the kid whom the NBA is currently selling as the new Michael Jordan. His name is Vince Carter.

Being the new Michael Jordan is an onerous responsibility. Since Jordan's departure, interest in the NBA has dipped sharply. Basketball suddenly needs a showcase rivalry or a matinee idol to revive its fortunes.

Anyway, this is Game Two. Carter's first experience of play-off basketball has happened a couple of nights earlier in the Garden. Vince never got to open his bag of tricks. The Knicks mugged him, roughed him up a bit and discarded him. Welcome to New York, Vince.

Tonight, less than an hour before game time, he stands at his locker and gets his game face on. He speaks like a PR person's fantasy. He has perspective, modesty and a knack for treating every dumb question as if it's the most interesting thing he's ever heard.

Carter's full-time business manager is his mother, Michelle Carter-Robinson, who deals in a motherly way with the incessant Jordan comparisons.

"On one hand, it's very flattering," she says. "You can't overlook the similarities. By the same token, it gets a little old, too. Vince gets tired of hearing it."

Dean Smith was often said to be the only coach who could contain Jordan, with a structured programme at North Carolina that de-emphasised individual theatrics.

The Raptors rule the night, getting their spindly arms and bodies in the way of the Knicks often enough to break the home team's rhythm. The short-tempered Madison Square Garden crowd start booing their boys in the second quarter. By the end of the third quarter, with Toronto well ahead, a lot of people are heading toward the exits.

"Don't do my ulcers no good to look at that."

Carter is plenty busy for most of the night. He leads the Raptors in scoring, and a couple of times, when he darts to the basket like a fish breaking for the shadows, he even draws the grudging applause of New Yorkers. For defensive duties he is one-on-one with Latrell Sprewell. As the game goes into the final quarter, Sprewell steps up and decides that he will write the ending to this game.

The scores narrow as the Knicks haul back a deficit which has been as large as 15 points. With five minutes left here it is, what we paid for: the game boils down to a war between two guys, Carter and Sprewell. The NBA's dreamboat versus its wreck of the Hesperus.

You lean forward in your seat. Last year Vince Carter scored a basket having rotated 360 degrees through the air while hovering above the rim. Another night he jack-knifed in mid air, changed direction, changed the hand he held the ball in and dropped it gently through the hoop before anyone quite realised what he was doing. He has the tricks, but has he got the game?

The Jordan cult was built on personality, not aesthetics. Jordan finished his college career (like Carter, at North Carolina) with a shot on the buzzer which won a national championship. He finished his pro career in precisely the same way. He was the guy. When the world moved faster for everyone else he saw things with slow-motion clarity.

Here is Vince Carter with the clock ticking down and the roof lifting off the house. Four times in the closing minutes he lets Sprewell go past him on his left hand side. Sprewell is hardly bothering to sell feints anymore, he's just driving and Carter is just flailing.

Latrell gets the score which finally gives the Knicks the lead. Sprewell handles the moment with a bullfighter's panache. He has become the guy through whom all things must pass. He takes the ball wide on the left. Carter confronts him. He and Carter stand frozen, Pompeii-style, for five seconds. Sprewell-Carter. Carter-Sprewell. A dropping pin would sound like thunder. The tension is unbearable. Then Sprewell moves. He darts to his right, gets a yard of space and drops a jump shot through the hoop. The Garden erupts. Hey hey rock and roll.

Seven seconds left. Toronto have the ball. It's scarcely fair to make comparisons now. The Garden is seething with excitement. Carter has never known a moment like this.

Vince Carter has the ball. The Knicks flap around him, careful not to give him the foul, the seconds tick down, suddenly Carter flings the ball violently to his left into the hands of one Dee Brown. As he will explain later, Brown has just joined the game, and hasn't had a shot all night. He has no clue as to the range. Gamely he launches one, but its telltale arc has the Garden cheering a microsecond before the ball bounces high off the rim.

Knicks win. Vince Carter lies flat on his back in the centre of Madison Square Garden.

Half an hour later he will talk about pressure. He'll say that pressure is for bicycle tyres, that pressure is being hungry or being poor. You'll look at him and know what every kid who ever played sport knows: Vince Carter bottled it. Not even the NBA can sell that.