Predictability Is Out the Window

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. —  First of all, Kobe Bryant didn’t make a guarantee, he made an assertion. And even if it had been a guarantee, it wasn’t “the guarantee.”

There has only been one guarantee in sports, 35 years ago. Everything else since then has just been words.

Bryant’s are the latest.

“We’ll win Tuesday,” Bryant said Sunday night after the Lakers had dropped their third NBA Finals game in four tries against the Detroit Pistons.

What else should he say? Bryant and the Lakers had better expect to win today, or else they can save us all a lot of time and just hop the charter back to L.A. right now.

His statement had nowhere near the bravado, the swagger, the future-altering air of Joe Namath’s bold prediction before Super Bowl III in 1969. His New York Jets were 19-point underdogs against the Baltimore Colts. His American Football League was supposed to be inferior to the big, bad NFL.

On the Thursday before the big game, Namath went to the Miami Touchdown Club to receive a player-of-the-year award, and when a heckler bothered him, Namath said, “We’re going to win this game. I guarantee it!”

The lasting images of Super Bowl III: Jets 16, Colts 7. Namath running off the field at the Orange Bowl, index finger waving over his head.

That meant something. That was a brash quarterback sticking it in the face of the by-the-rules NFL, where no one spoke out of turn.

Nothing else since then has even been close. People guarantee this or that. They never say what they’ll do for us should they lose. That would constitute wagering. There are rules against that.

But we’ve become accustomed to such a bland, continuous loop of packaged sound bites that any time anyone actually takes a stand, people take notice. Rasheed Wallace said his Pistons would win Game 2 of their conference finals series against the Indiana Pacers, and ESPN hauled out every assertion made in the last three decades. All of the crazy things that come out of Wallace’s mouth and this is treated with the seriousness of a State of the Union address.

Bryant, by contrast, wasn’t ready to concede that he’d made a promise on Monday.

“I promised?” he said when it was put to him.

Yeah.

“I’ll go with that, man,” he said. “It’s fine with me. We don’t have a choice. We’ve got to win. We’ve got to get it done.”

So he’s saying what he has to say. If he promised to get the ball to Shaquille O’Neal, that would be newsworthy.

The words I found myself noticing, savoring and clinging to on Monday were those of ESPN.com’s Ralph Wiley. Wiley was a mentor for me and many others who followed the path he’d helped clear for African American sportswriters. He died of a heart attack Sunday night while watching Game 4. Wiley was 52.

I’ll miss his insight, his humor and, most of all, his advice. Among the memorable things he told me was that once you work for a major organization such as the Los Angeles Times or, in his case, Sports Illustrated, that never leaves you. Oh, was he ever right on that one. There was Sports Illustrated in the very first line of his obituary.

One of his final columns is looking just as prescient. While most were crowning the Lakers after their dethroning of the San Antonio Spurs, Wiley picked the Lakers apart during their conference finals matchup with the Minnesota Timberwolves and predicted their downfall.

“Whether or not the Wolves or the Pistons actually do it is almost a moot point,” he wrote. “One of them should, and one of them just might -- that one being the Pistons.”

Wiley broke it down this way: “The question, in the NBA and in life, is not whether or not you can shoot. The question is whether or not you can get your shot.”

Right now, no Laker besides Bryant and O’Neal can find a way to get his own shot, one of the reasons the Pistons are on the verge of beating the Lakers.

Wiley’s words ring true. It hurts deeply to know he won’t be writing any more of them.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.