They all came back to toast Ben Wallace. Tayshaun Prince, in the middle of his NBA season. Larry Brown, in the middle of his college season. Chauncey Billups, whose jersey goes to The Palace rafters next. Rip Hamilton and Rasheed Wallace, of course.
On PalaceVision, video tributes were offered by the likes of Kobe Bryant, Pat Riley and Gregg Popovich. Ex-teammates Jerry Stackhouse and Corliss Williamson also pitched in. Seated right behind Wallace, Wallace, Billups, Hamilton and Prince were the core of the bench that Brown used in their run to the 2004 NBA title: Lindsey Hunter, Mike James and Mehmet Okur.
“I go all over the country and I watch high school kids play and try to find somebody just like you,” said Brown, now the coach at 15-0 SMU. “You broke the mold. There’ll never be another like you. They said we didn’t have any superstars on that 2004 team – they didn’t know what they were talking about. You were the best defensive player at your size I’ve ever seen. There’ll never be another one like you.”
Pistons announcer George Blaha emceed the halftime ceremony, which concluded with Wallace unveiling his Pistons No. 3 jersey that was raised to The Palace rafters. Wallace appeared to tear up a little as Blaha recited Wallace’s litany of achievement, including becoming the first undrafted player to finish his career with more than 10,000 rebounds.
“We’re honoring one of the fiercest competitors to ever wear Pistons blue and one of the most popular Pistons of all time,” Blaha said. “The greatest players in the world play in our league and they all learned to ‘Fear the ’Fro.’ ”
Pistons owner Tom Gores took the microphone first from Blaha and told Wallace, “You embody what we’re trying to create. … You earned this.”
Rasheed Wallace, the last of the starting five who bonded like brothers to join the team in February 2004, spoke for his teammates.
“To be able to play with you, good brother, the way we connected mentally, never be nothing else like it,” he said. “I’m glad that I played with you and I’m glad we played right here in front of these people. This is your night. I love you, my brother.”
Ben Wallace had his hair neatly trimmed, but said he had a billowing Afro two days ago.
“The ’fro still grows big and fluffy,” he said, “but very, very white.”
It meant everything to him to have those teammates – and Brown, a coach he deeply respected and admired – who meant so much to him surrounding him, along with Gores and Arn Tellem, once Wallace’s agent and now vice chairman of Palace Sports & Entertainment.
“I don’t think there’ll ever be a team like that,” he said. “We were a group put together and jelled together, not just as a team but as brothers. There’s not a holiday or birthday that goes by that those guys don’t pick up the phone and call me or I don’t call them. We were close as basketball players, but we’re even closer as men.”
The jersey retirement confirms what Pistons fans with any sense of the franchise’s history already knew: He’s easily one of the 10 most significant players to ever don the uniform, taking his place there as the first representative of the Goin’ to Work Pistons and alongside the legends of the Bad Boys, from Isiah Thomas to Joe Dumars to Bill Laimbeer to Dennis Rodman to Vinnie Johnson.
“It means a lot, man. It means a lot,” Wallace said. “Not to just be the first one out of that group, just to have your jersey retired period. To have my jersey retired, it symbolizes the hard work that I put in, the dedication I had for the game, the love I had for the game.”
A jersey raised to the rafters should always be for a player whose memory was never in any danger of fading. Raising it merely confims the extraordinary status their performance merited. Ben Wallace made it to the NBA – and then made it to stardom and championship status – because he never took anything for granted. That’s his nature. So it figures that he doesn’t assume his legacy would have been preserved even without Saturday’s ceremony and the permanence a jersey retirement signifies.
So asked how he’d like to be remembered, Big Ben seemed slightly taken aback. He’ll just be pleased to be remembered, period.
“I don’t really have one or two things I want people to remember, but just the fact that now I know they’re going to have to remember me. All fans that come to arenas look up there and if it’s there first time or their fifth time, they want to know how those numbers get up there. ‘Who are those people?’ So I just feel honored that I’ll be one of those people that 20, 30 years from now, somebody is going to come to the arena and see that jersey and be like, ‘Who’s that guy? What’s his story?’ For me, I hope somebody remembers the story so they can help that fan out.”
Oh, they’ll remember the story, all right. And they’ll remember it all the more fondly because on the night the Pistons retired his jersey, the new generation of Pistons logged a performance to make him proud, holding the NBA’s hottest offense to 95 points and just 36 percent shooting.