How a Spurs Finals loss became an NBA origin story for Mavericks coach Dusty May

Sometimes a story comes to you. Sometimes it’s right under your feet. And sometimes it’s a full floor below them, at the bottom of a staircase.

Then you just have to wait a few months for the story to catch up with you.

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Inside Madison Square Garden in New York, there are banks of escalators stacked on top of Penn Station. They take fans (and media) from one concourse to the next, and on Knicks game nights they tend to get crowded more than an hour before tipoff.

But early on the evening of June 10, as a San Antonio columnist rode the stairs up toward the mezzanine for a concession-stand meal, he happened to look down at the landing below him and caught sight of a man getting off an escalator alone.

It was a quick glimpse, mostly of the top of the guy’s head. Still, the columnist couldn’t shake the idea that he recognized him from somewhere, maybe from TV. Could it have been Dusty May?

The more the columnist pondered this possibility, the less likely it seemed. Why would the head men’s basketball coach of the Michigan Wolverines, who’d just won a national championship, be at Game 4 of the NBA Finals? And why would he be there by himself?

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May had no former players in action that night. And it’s not like the NBA playoffs are a known networking event for college coaches. This wasn’t the Final Four, after all.

So with a sandwich to eat and a pretty big game to cover, the columnist mostly forgot about it. He watched the Spurs build a 29-point halftime lead. He watched them blow it. He watched one of the craziest endings he’d ever seen, and then he stayed up most of the night writing about it.

He didn’t think about the guy from the escalator again. Until, that is, two weeks later, when he saw the news that the Dallas Mavericks were hiring May to be their new head coach. As the basketball world buzzed about the unconventional move, with all kinds of speculation about why May would leave a championship program behind, the columnist kept seeing his photo and wondering:

Might that solitary figure at Game 4 have been May, after all? Was there some kind of connection between going to an NBA game that night, and then taking an NBA job?

With all of that in mind, the columnist walked into Frost Bank Center on Wednesday evening, more than four months later, deciding that a visit from the Mavericks provided an opportunity for an answer.

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Before the customary pregame media availability, he’d asked his colleagues from Dallas if they’d ever heard May mention attending a Finals game. They said he had not. So there was a chance that if the columnist grabbed the microphone and asked about something that never happened during a press conference, he would look and sound like an idiot.

Fortunately, the columnist already was accustomed to that. So after May walked into the interview room and provided all his standard team updates, he was asked by a would-be fool if he’d gone to a Knicks-Spurs game last June.

The coach grinned.

“How’d you know, if you don’t mind me asking?” May said.

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His answer was delightful. The way he told the story, ending up on that escalator in that arena on that night had been an accident of happenstance.

First of all, May hadn’t planned to be in New York at all. He wanted to stick around at a recruiting event in South Carolina, where he had his eyes on prospects he hoped would be future Wolverines. But in the middle of that trip, he received a phone call from Warde Manuel, Michigan’s athletic director, insisting that he attend an alumni function in the Big Apple.

“We really need you here,” Manuel said, per May. “We’re celebrating the national championship. These are some of our biggest donors and whatnot. They want to host, and it’s really important that you get here. … We’ll have a plane in Spartanburg (S.C.) ready to go.”

Not wanting to disobey his boss, May headed for the plane. And just on a lark, he punched NBA.com into his phone to see if there was a Finals game that night. There was.

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“So I started making calls just hoping that somebody had a ticket,” May said. “And it’s a long story, but I found one because of a guy, he’s on vacation, that I had a connection to and this and that.

“And so yeah, I actually sat right behind the Knicks bench.”

He said he noticed a photographers snapping shots of his row, but that was because he happened to be sitting next to Kit Harington, the Knicks fan who played Jon Snow on Game of Thrones (“I’m not a fanboy, but that was cool,” May said).

Meanwhile, he got an up-close view of an NBA comeback for the ages. He watched the coaches trying to mount a huge rally, and he watched the coaches trying to stave it off. He didn’t think the Spurs made any obvious mistakes, necessarily.

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“A lot of times it comes down to making shots,” May said.

He stayed through the end, standing a few dozen feet from the spot where OG Anunoby soared toward the rim for a tip-in that made the Garden erupt in a sound as thunderous as any arena ever has made.

In that moment, May had no idea that it would be part of his NBA origin story. Or that the next team he coached would the Mavericks.

“But that was a game where I thought, as I was sitting there watching, ‘Wow, this would be an unbelievable challenge,'” May said. “‘And if I ever had an opportunity, man, I would love to be able to do what they’re doing now.'”

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As for the columnist? He’ll never look at that escalator the same way again.

There’s no telling where the people riding it might be going.

Or what stories they’re bringing with them.

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This article originally published at How a Spurs Finals loss became an NBA origin story for Mavericks coach Dusty May.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com