LA JOLLA, Calif. — The last thing Nuggets coach Michael Malone did before taking a charge from a 4,500-pound truck was curse. After dedicating his adult life to the pursuit of an NBA championship, the basketball gods were going to let Malone's dream die this way?
"It's rush hour. Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway, So I come to a stop, look up to check the rearview mirror. And I see this frickin' blue-and-white old Ford pickup truck, barreling down on me," Malone said.
"The guy never hit his brakes. I have just enough time to say: 'Bleep!' And then … boom!"
On the next to last day of summer, exactly one week before Malone opened training camp as coach of the Nuggets for the eighth time, he walked out of Ball Arena and hopped in his Chevy Silverado, with assistant Ryan "Ry-Bo" Bowen riding shotgun. They headed south down the highway so both coaches could be home in time for dinner.
Checking a traffic app on his cellphone, Bowen directed Malone to take the off-ramp from Interstate 25 to Santa Fe Boulevard, where they quickly came to an abrupt stop.
"Next thing I know, I hear Coach yelling, 'Ry-Bo, bleep!' Then I glance over to the passenger side mirror. Oh my god," Bowen recalled. "The guy plowed into us; we rammed into the car in front of us. It all happened so quick. It was like a NASCAR pile-up."
When the airbags pop, there's a flash of white light. For an anxious heartbeat, amid the heavy-metal sounds of destruction, there can be reason to wonder if the basketball gods have ended the game and sent you to the showers.
"You know how scary it is?" Malone told me. "The whole thing happened in a blink of an eye. But it felt like an eternity. You see this truck coming, you brace for impact and …"
When you get plowed by a pick-up truck, is it a block or charge?
Malone and Bowen have worked together for nearly a decade, back to the time when they were both employed by the Sacramento Kings. In Denver, they have endured everything from 83 days of isolation in the NBA bubble to shouldering the agony of Jamal Murray when the point guard tore up his knee.
They've come too far together in pursuit of a championship ring to have the journey ended by a runaway pick-up truck.
"Sometimes, I think about buying a nice sedan. But I'm sitting in bed the night of the accident and realize: 'Thank God I was in that big pick-up truck, with all that steel wrapped around me to absorb the crash," said Malone, showing me a photo of his Silverado, which looks as if stick of dynamite exploded in its tailpipe, resulting in more than $20,000 in damage.
"If I was in a smaller car, with the speed he came at me, never hitting the brakes? It could've been a lot worse. We got whiplash, a possible concussion. Nothing more. I'll take that. But it was scary, man."
After Malone and Bowen exchanged glances and determined all their essential body parts were still intact, fear gave way to human comedy.
"The guy that hit me, I don't know if he was drunk, high or driving a stolen truck," Malone said. "But he immediately tried to drive off and get away. The problem was his truck was so jacked up and smoking that he wasn't going anywhere in bumper-to-bumper traffic."
Malone and Bowen watched the man bolt from his wrecked blue Ford, carrying a small dog like a football in the crook of his arm. Man and dog quickly approached the innocent driver of the vehicle that took the brunt of the bumper-car impact from Malone's truck and implored a startled stranger: "Hey, buddy. We've gotta get out of here. Can you give me a lift?"
Bowen couldn't believe what happened next. "Next thing I know," Bowen said, "this guy is running 100 yards down the highway, with a dog under his arm, hops the guardrail and is gone."
A hit-and-run accident has seldom been defined more literally.
"You can't make this stuff up," Malone said.
Standing on the hardwood of a spacious basketball facility on the University of California-San Diego campus, Malone felt grateful to be here, then pointed at his left leg.
"I'm leaking," Malone said.
Water from ice bags dripped from a knee that required repair after a pickleball injury during the offseason.
Knee surgery. Hit-and-run accident. "They say bad things happen in 3's," added Malone, laughing as he looked to the sky, just to make sure there wasn't a meteor about the land on his head.
Are the Nuggets cursed? No way.
The road to a championship is fraught with peril, but Malone is living proof this team is too tough to quit.
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