Shaq & awesome

Okay, let me tell you how crow tastes. It’s tough, to begin with, and the taste of the meat goes beyond game-y, rather recalls a deflated basketball stewed for hours with no success at stripping off the sweat of a hundred palms that never knew the benefits of talc before tip-off.

Then, in the process of determined mastication, somehow the image of bad game, bad black game, attended by aural echoes of caw-caw-caw as trash talk, passing for sky hooks, makes mincemeat of your gustatory imagination.

It’s a terrible meal, one that shouldn’t be tried again. So the next time the NBA Playoffs swing around the corner, The Chastised One should just button the lip and hope that crossed fingers can do the trick in handing the Cleveland Cavaliers a crown. 

Chewing crow is particularly unappetizing when the companion plate has nothing but humble pie. That, too, is entirely unsavory — a kitchen offering perhaps fit only for royalty headed for the guillotine, after having uttered famous last words like “Let them drink Coke!” in the face of a drought.

Peasants (sometimes synonymous with die-hard Celtics and Lakers fans) can be forgiven for taking collectively to a national oven and baking the pie to end all pies in the pursuit of enforced humility.

So okay, I’ve eaten both, and burped both ways. So I was wrong, and feisty arrogance passing for prescience made it worse.

Now that I’ve paid my dues, swallowed the sanctions, been beheaded at my own invitation, you think I’ll shut up about LeBron James and my darling Cavs!?

Think again. Hey, to add to the awe, now we have LeShaq!

I’m reminded of a Mad magazine spoof strip where The Lone Ranger and Tonto are shown surrounded by a determined band of ferocious Comanches, and it’s no petty scalping party but a whole legion of tomahawk-brandishing restless natives.

The masked man turns to his Man Friday and says, “Looks like we’re done, Tonto.” And the naked one with a feather in his head strap ripostes with a devilish grin, “What you mean ‘we’?”

Ah, now the Cavs have a tandem for the ages, if they can stay loyal to one another. Robinson Crusoe and Tonto, The Lone Ranger and Friday, Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, Ishmael and Queequeeg, Batman and Robin, Jordan and Pippen, Stockton-to-Malone have nothing on us. We have King James and The Big Diesel, The Chosen One and The Big Aristotle, the 2009 MVP and the erstwhile Big Cactus!

Winner of four giant rings for the fat fingers of his foul-shooting hand, Shaq Daddy now says he wants to be “First to the fifth!” This is of course in reference to an imagined race with his former partner, Kobe Bryant, 2009 Finals MVP, who just earned his fourth as coeval Lord of the Rings — his first time with no help from O’Neil.

Think June 2010. Tanks are out on the streets, EDSA’s filling up with enraged... Oops. Wait, wait, that’s a different scenario, let’s stick to games we’d like to see played, like NBA hoops.

June 2010 at Staples Center, Hell-A, where the middle three games of the best-of-seven Finals are about to tip off, with the defending champs down 0-2 after twin shellac-ings at The Q in the soon-to-be-orgasmic state of Ohio...  

Shaq and Kobe meet at center court, the huge one with a lopsided mocking grin plastered on his humongous mug, the Black Mamba intense as always, frowning and scowling. And Shaq says to him, “Kobe, Baby, what’d I say? First to five, that’s no jive.”

And Kobe erupts for 90 points! But the Fakers still lose the game (and Jack Nicholson goes to the nuthouse) because LeBron James explodes for a hundred!

Y’all see? That’s the kind of scenario that might take our minds off EDSA whatevah-edition. But I won’t paint it further. I can’t give away the ending, since I’ve only recently partaken of humble pie, with crow as tapa a la Pau Gasol.

But of course there’s the downside. Purists already cavil that it takes away from the fairy tale, this desperate, cynical off-season pick-up that seems addressed to only one objective: give LeBron the biggest help he can have, think of it as the last piece of the puzzle, and milk “Got Shaq” for what it’s worth. Get past KG and the Celtics and Howard & the Magic in the second season, and have a tank full of diesel against the Fakers’ big frontline ... and win a championship now!

I suppose Cavs management thinks it’s the only way to keep James homebound. Give him a veteran All-Star with equal media and entertainment clout, and never mind if it’s said in retrospect that, like Kobe and Dwyane Wade, LeBron couldn’t win his first championship ring without The Big Rapper.

No guarantee either that it’ll work. The NBA is unscripted and doesn’t exactly lend itself to the brightest formulae.

Murphy’s Law could take over. Shaq could go down while winding up the first long road trip, and stay down. Delonte West could go bipolar and start sinking baskets in the wrong goal. LBJ could get bored of chalking up 20 assists a game by simply dumping it to the hands of the big fella, who’s an excellent catcher. And The King loses his own shooting touch other than for the patented freight-train drives.

Yes, anything can go wrong. Thank God there’s Ricky Rubio for alternative allegiance. Why, I could start all over again, like, “When he was just eighteen...” Now if only that state by the Canadian border can apply for a tag change. Should be easier to go root for the Wolverines!