NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
    "Alon-zo sucks!"
He's at the foul line. People rise from their seats, and with just 35 seconds left in the game, they fill Washington's squeaky-new MCI Center with this December night's first unanimous jolt of fan voltage: a cascade of boos, snarls, chants.
     "Alonz-zo sucks!"

IT'S AS if he never left. Seven months have passed since Alonzo Mourning, the 6'10" Miami Heat center, last played an NBA game, but the Wizards have gotten the usual dose of Mourning glory: four blocked shots, nine rebounds and 24 points; the flailing of his Robocop arms and the shoving of Washington forward-center Terry Davis and the contorting of Mourning's face into a mask of puzzled fury. "That boy is wild," Davis will say later. No one cares that the game is Mourning's first since surgery repaired a partially torn tendon in his left knee in September. No one cares that he played for four years at nearby Georgetown.
     "Alon-zo sucks!"
     Mourning misses the first shot and stares at the rim with an expression of profound sadness. He hits the second.
     "Alon-zo sucks!"
     "He's kind of a hated man," says Heat power forward P.J. Brown. Kind of? Mourning is arguably the most hated man in the NBA. His on-court demeanor--defensive, dour, the purest distillation of Georgetown coach John Thompson's Hoya Paranoia--makes Mourning an instant villain, but for much of his career he has worn the black hat with relish. Word has gotten around: Mourning refused autograph requests as a rookie with the Charlotte Hornets in 1992-93, brushing off kids like lint. He wanted a woman reporter to be kicked out of the Hornets' home locker room before a game. Last April (1997), after being outplayed by Danny Schayes in Game 4 of a first-round playoff series between Miami and the Orlando Magic, Mourning snapped at reporters gathered around his locker, "Why don't y'all get the f--- out?" After hitting a victory-sealing three-pointer against the New York Knicks in Game 6 of last year's Eastern Conference semifinals, Mourning screamed nationally televised curses at the Madison Square Garden crowd.
     Fans and reporters are not the only ones whom Mourning has left with a sour taste. Point guard Tim Hardaway, who joined the Heat from the Golden State Warriors in 1996, says no other player in the NBA is bad-mouthed by his peers as much as Mourning is. "Nobody," he says. "Until I played with him, I thought he was an a------."
     Brown, too, disliked Mourning as an opponent. "He was a little dirty and went out of his way with officials--acting surprised, crying," says Brown, who played for the New Jersey Nets before coming to Miami in 1996. Now that he's with the Heat, Brown says, players on other teams ask him about Mourning constantly. "They think he's arrogant, they think he's conceited," Brown says. "I say he's not like that. They don't believe me."
     Andre Napier deals with this all the time. Napier, a concert promoter who is one of Mourning's best friends and organizes Mourning's annual three-day charity event, Zo's Summer Groove, doesn't hesitate when asked to name the most prevalent popular misconception about Mourning. "That he's an a------," Napier says. "That's what they say; Alonzo's an a------."
     For his part, Mourning says what his friends and teammates say: Get to know him as a man and you won't be sorry. "The only thing they can all go by is what they see on television, and in a way that's unfair," Mourning says. "But I can't control that. I can't change the way I play. My intensity is part of my game: It gets me up and ready to play. I've always been excited, anxious, and my emotions have been there ever since I picked up a basketball. You can't just turn that off overnight."
     Tracy Wilson Mourning has learned. Since she and Alonzo started dating as college freshmen, she has seen all his different sides. She has seen him frightened by a mouse, emotionally drained when she once broke up with him, and giggling and telling bad jokes like a 10-year-old. They married last year (1997), and she still loves telling how romantically he proposed, down on one knee. But when it comes to basketball, he knows only one way to act. If she asks him to be nicer on the court, he looks at her as if she's insane. "But that's me," he tells her, and if his attitude offends some opponent or some reporter, so be it. One thing else she has learned, the hard way: Alonzo is nothing if not consistent.
     Tracy is a reporter. In 1994, when Alonzo traveled with Patrick Ewing and Dikembe Mutombo to South Africa. She went along as a trainee for The George Michael Sports Machine. Interview a guy who's in love with you--easy assignment, right? "He was just so rude," Tracy says smiling. "I asked a question similar to one the reporter before me had asked, and he said, 'I just answered that.' "
     Last summer Tracy interviewed Alonzo again, for a Florida cable network. He was a little better. Still, she says, "I felt so small. If I ask a question, he'll be so sharp, and people won't know I'm his wife, and they'll be like, 'Damn, what'd you say to him?' He's very short with me. He's supportive, and he wants me to go out and do what I want to do. But when it comes to interviewing him, I hate it. I just hate talking to him. It's the worst."



HE CAN still see the hallways, see himself 13 years old and already 6'4", craning over the other kids, his teachers, his principal. Pants cuffs drifting above his ankles, hands dangling like skillets, Alonzo Mourning was the clumsiest thing, a body at war with itself. He felt like a freak. Who would believe that now? His frame is well proportioned and thick, and he strides with an athlete's cool grace. There's no trace of who he was, not until he says that he can still feel the other kids watching him, tearing him down. "I was laughed at," he says. "And the people who laughed at me don't realize the impact they had."
     He leans back from the cafe table, eyes roaming. This is the impact: No one is laughing, not here. It's another molten day at the core of Miami's Coconut Grove--one step out of the shade and your shirt is soaked--but Mourning is the coolest man in the place. Women gingerly ask for his autograph; men do double takes and whisper. Upstairs a store sells jerseys emblazoned with his name. Across the courtyard, in a plate-glass window at Dan Marino's American Sports Bar & Grill,hangs a huge poster of him. Mourning is 28 and in the second season of a seven-year contract worth \$105 million. He's barely sweating.
     But he takes no joy in any of this. No, as always in public, Mourning is stony, his face as somber as a pharaoh's death mask. This expression has served him well, he tells you; it has kept scam artists and autograph hounds at bay. It has also imbued Mourning with a gravity that few NBA players possess. Around the league he's commonly described as a warrior, because his dedication to the game is absolute. Few doubt Mourning when he says of his season-opening 22-game stint on the injured list, "Just sitting on the side was torture." Few doubt that when he dubbed a yuletide showdown with the Chicago Bulls "war on Christmas Day," mad visions of Braveheart charge through a manger danced in his head. Mourning is not ironic. He says nothing with a wink.
     "He's up, he's down, he's frustrated, he's joyous, he's deep, he's reflective--he's all those things, and he wears the emotions right on his sleeve," says Heat president and coach Pat Riley. "He embodies the soul of this team. Sometimes he looks bad and gets beat up for it publicly, but his spirit is sincere. That's where I think his greatness is."
     Of course Riley, the master motivator who presents every game as a life challenge, loves Mourning. There's no other player whose every move trumpets the same message: This is no game! This is important! Mourning does not chat with fans; he's not here to entertain. Every loss leaves him blank-eyed, mulling over the shots he didn't block, the free throws he didn't make. "He doesn't let it go," Tracy says. Last year, surrounded by relatives and friends at dinner after one galling defeat, Alonzo sat silently until he erupted at Tracy, who was four months pregnant: "Why haven't you had that baby yet? If that baby was here, I wouldn't have my mind on the game!"
     On Jan. 2, after a game at Charlotte in which Miami made a maddening turnover in the final seconds of regulation and lost in overtime, Mourning got home after midnight. Tracy took one look at him and fled. The two burrowed at opposite ends of the house. But the solitude didn't help Alonzo. He went to the weight room in the garage and, in the wee hours, pumped and sweated through a few sets. That didn't help either. "I couldn't go to sleep, just replaying situations where I could've done better," he says. "I just want to help us win. Winning makes all the discomforts in my body feel better. I can't explain it, but when I lose, my pains hurt more."
     Through Sunday (March 29, 1998) he had averaged 21.1 points, 10.1 rebounds and 2.96 blocks in his six-year career. He has been named an All-Star four times. Becuase of his defensive prowess, he has been compared to Bill Russell. Mourning doesn't care. He hears only that his Heat were easily shoved out of the playoffs by the Chicago Bulls again last season, that he has never come up big against the only team that matters, that he is a second-tier center--a BMW, as Shaquille O'Neal once put it, to Shaq's Mercedes-Benz. Mourning responds the same way he did when he was 13 and heard everyone laugh: "They are pushing me to work that much harder. His postpractice workouts are legendary. He will shoot long after everyone else is dressed.
     "He's there early, and he's the last one to leave," says Miami small forward Jamal Mashburn. "A lot of All-Stars talk about doing that, but he does it. You see a lot of players say, Screw it, I make all this money, I do what I want. But 'Zo's special." Mourning, of course, wants to be a champion. "You can make only so much money," he says. "There's just so many suits you can buy, so many cars or boats. After a while it gets old. What else is there? I'm at the point where I've got all the things I want: a beautiful family, material things. I want to win. I want a ring now." There's nothing rare in this, except with Mourning it's not just a want. It's a need, and it's becoming a burden.
     "It's totally unnecessary, but for him to believe he's a winner, he must believe he has the world on his shoulders," says Bill Lassiter, Mourning's coach at Indian River High in Chesapeake, Va., and a guiding force in his life since the seventh grade. "He will carry everything right there. It won't crumble until he wins a championship."
     The question is, Does Mourning have what it takes? Riley, who made Mourning his franchise player by signing him to that seven-year deal in 1996, has no choice but to believe Mourning has it. But unlike his onetime hero and close friend Ewing, Mourning didn't win an NCAA championship at Georgetown. And aside from one time last year, when he guaranteed a win against Chicago in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals and backed it up with an 18-point, 14-rebound performance, he has rarely dominated in the postseason, getting outplayed not only by Schayes but also by the Bulls' Luc Longley. In the Heat's two playoff showdowns with Chicago since Mourning joined the team, he has been rendered all but irrelevant, and Miami has gone 1-7.
     Experts nevertheless have pegged the Heat as one of the Bulls' main challengers this season (1998), but so far Mourning's impact against Chicago has been slight. On Christmas Day he fouled out with 3:34 left, after scoring 16 points, in a 90-80 loss. He glowered on the bench while Dennis Rodman mocked him from the foul line. On Jan. 7 Mourning, playing with seven stitches in his left hand, got 16 points and eight rebounds in a Miami blowout win marked by yet another in a long line of tussles with the Worm.
     It's an article of faith that Rodman's taunting and grabbing have unhinged Mourning, made him think more of retaliation than of winning. Last yeat's Game 4 presented a sweet image of Mourning with his fingers up Rodman's nose, looking to disassemble his face. "Before his career's over, he's going to hurt somebody seriously," Mourning says of Rodman. "I just don't want it to be me."
     Rodman's response: "He's immature. Just being smart about the game--that's what I'm doing. Being smart."
     Rodman knows he's an affront to much about the game that Mourning holds dear. Worse, the Bulls have figured out exactly where Mourning is most vulnerable. For years he has worked to erase his awkwardness and make himself a great player. But against Chicago he often resembles a tormented bull lunging at a cape.
     Riley has lectured Mourning endlessly about playing with a clearer head, and since the All-Star break the center has been on model behavior, keeping silent on iffy calls, patting refs on the butt, channeling his fury solely into his play. Still, even Mourning's 21-point, 13-rebound effort against Chicago in the teams' final regular-season meeting, on March 10, will be remembered for only two things: Mourning throwing wild elbows--at one point spearing Michael Jordan with a shot to the head--and Miami losing by 15 points. Too often, it's as if the Bulls are playing a game Mouring never considered.
     "It's more than athletic ability," says Jordan. "There's that mental strength you need, and he doesn't have it. If you can be taken out of your game by another player, the way he is by Dennis, then there's something missing."
     Nothing devastates a serious man more than ridicule, and with that weapon Chicago has been merciless. Two years ago in the playoffs, Longley derided Mourning's offensive game as one-dimensional. Last year, before Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals, Mourning approached Jordan and held out his hand. Jordan rolled his eyes and looked away. Earlier this season Rodman said that Mourning is no leader and will neve win a ring. Jordan didn't even bother to show up at the captains' meeting before each of this year's Bulls-Heat games. Every time Mourning plays Chicago, he can hear the laughing all over again.
     "It took me by surprise," he says of Jordan's rebuff in the playoffs. He pretends that it didn't bother him. Then he pauses and begins again, and suddenly all the cool is gone. He leans forward in his chair. "I respect Michael as a player," he says slowly. "To tell the truth, I respect him so much that I hate him. He's standing in the way of my accomplishing one of my goals. I respect him so much that I want to beat him. So I hate him."   (Continue...)