A Karl Malone Story, because Why Not?
This is not the best Karl Malone story, which you can find here, but it's one that I can tell because I was there.
But back before he was hunting for little Mexican girls, he was the Lakers' locker room searching for a needle and thread. Karl Malone was an extremely superstitious player and one incarnation of that was that he wore the same pair socks -- the ones he received on the first day of training camp -- for every game. Through the course of an NBA season socks tend to obtain holes. So one morning he sat there repairing them and holding court with the reporters present. This being a late season game between two teams already locked into the playoffs, "Karl Malone Sews," was good enough to fill our notebooks.
Malone explained that his mother had taught him how to sew and it was just something he had always done. So he talked about that for awhile.
Someone, who I seem to remember as being LA Times columnist J.A. Adande asked, "Do you knit, too?"
"Nah, man," Malone said, suddenly serious. "There's a difference."
Here's a postscript to that story. The Lakers change from white socks to black in the postseason, which meant that Malone did have to change socks. L.A. lost in the finals to a little team I like to call, the Detroit Pistons. Because that is their name.
But back before he was hunting for little Mexican girls, he was the Lakers' locker room searching for a needle and thread. Karl Malone was an extremely superstitious player and one incarnation of that was that he wore the same pair socks -- the ones he received on the first day of training camp -- for every game. Through the course of an NBA season socks tend to obtain holes. So one morning he sat there repairing them and holding court with the reporters present. This being a late season game between two teams already locked into the playoffs, "Karl Malone Sews," was good enough to fill our notebooks.
Malone explained that his mother had taught him how to sew and it was just something he had always done. So he talked about that for awhile.
Someone, who I seem to remember as being LA Times columnist J.A. Adande asked, "Do you knit, too?"
"Nah, man," Malone said, suddenly serious. "There's a difference."
Here's a postscript to that story. The Lakers change from white socks to black in the postseason, which meant that Malone did have to change socks. L.A. lost in the finals to a little team I like to call, the Detroit Pistons. Because that is their name.
1 Comment(s):
- Posted by
BrooklynDodger at January 06, 2007 5:49 AM |
Permanent Link to this Comment
The preferred method for mending socks is called "darning." The darner is better served using knitting yarn [what's generally called "thread" is, I believe, a subset of yarn. the product of a cotton mill is called yarn]. My technique was to stitch with yarn around the hole, then go warping and woofing across the hole.
[having wrote that, I confirmed almost wfw in wikipedia]
I believe Karl Malone is the only NBA player after whom a school of public health was named. At Columbia.
Fritz
