By MARC BERMAN
PHOENIX – I thought my greatest thrill this All-Star weekend would be working with Lois Lane on the Krypto-Nate story. It wasn’t.
Meeting U.S. Senator John McCain courtside at U.S. Airways Arena and talking basketball with him tonight takes the cake. McCain is a Suns season-ticketholder and admitted to missing Mike D’Antoni.
At the end of our meeting, McCain said to me, “You’ve got a great newspaper.”
McCain has a long memory. The Post gave McCain one of his few endorsements. McCain said he may post on The Post’s Knicks blog in support of D’Antoni.
“Obviously, we’re not winning the games we hoped to win, ” McCain told me at halftime of the Western Conference’s rout. “(Mike’s) a great coach and a great guy. I love him. I had lunch with him one day last summer (in Las Vegas) before the Olympics when.I spoke to the team before they went off. Yeah, I’m sure we do (miss him). Everyone loved him. But Terry Porter is a fine person.”
It was ironic that Mr. Basketball, President Obama did not attend the All-Star Game but McCain did.
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The Shaq-Kobe co-MVP vote reeked of another NBA conspiracy. But Tim Frank of the NBA was saying in the hotel hospitality suite in Tempe, Ariz. tonight that it came about because of a relative split among the nine writers (5-4, Shaq) before the fan vote, which came up Kobe. Made for a nice storyline but Shaq played just 11 minutes. Phil seemed to be trying to get Kobe to win it solo. Ken Berger, of CBS Sportsline and one of the most hard-hitting NBA writers there is, gave the league a pass. With all the rotten stuff going on with the Suns and some of the league’s downtrodden franchises, it was good to have a feel-good story, Berger says.
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The game turned out to be a boring mess and the fans were subdued and had to be begged to give the great Bill Russell an ovation. The Valley of the Sun is going through tough basketball times, with D’Antoni’s successor about to be fired and their star player, Stoudemire, about to be traded. It was an awful time for Phoenix to host this and even the weather stunk. I’m told Stern made sure owner Robert Sarver did not pull the trigger over the weekend to add to the muck.
