Mark Eaton did not connect with Rudy Gobert because they were both big men from a small-market franchise known for their immense shot-blocking presence. Not exclusively, anyway.
Eaton and Gobert, paint protectors past and present for the Utah Jazz, bonded over a love of bike-riding, too.
In August 2016 in Las Vegas, at a National Basketball Retired Players Association function, Eaton was introduced to a Frenchman named David Folch who specialized in making custom bicycles for tall riders and had already secured Hall of Famer Bill Walton as a client. Eaton was so excited that he hopped right onto Folch’s sample bike and began pedaling through the corridors of the hotel.
“He had a big smile on his face as he’s coming back and, with that deep voice, he’s telling me, ‘I feel like a kid — I haven’t felt like this since I was 10,’ " Folch said in a telephone interview.
Within a year, Eaton had arranged for Gobert to meet the 6-foot-6 Folch to get a DirtySixer bike of his own, outfitted with 36-inch wheels for a frame that, as Folch described it, comes with “everything oversized and everything proportionate” for NBA-sized cycling enthusiasts. Gobert was quickly hooked and would soon have his own custom bike to join Eaton for occasional rides. He later ordered 15 bikes from Folch as presents for his Jazz teammates.
I recently wrote about Gobert’s trying year in the spotlight after he became the first NBA player known to test positive for the coronavirus. The piece included a passage about how Eaton had become a mentor to Gobert. Eaton shared the story of their first 7-footers-only bike ride and a subsequent tour of Eaton’s Park City home, where Gobert spotted Eaton’s Defensive Player of the Year Award trophies from 1984-85 and 1988-89. Gobert vowed that day to win one, too.
“Now he has two of his own,” Eaton said in our March conversation.
Gobert is widely expected to soon be named the winner of the award for the third time, but Eaton sadly won’t be here to see it. Friday, on his second bike ride of the day, Eaton was found lying unconscious on a roadway after a suspected crash near his home in Summit County. Eaton was taken to a hospital, where he died that night. The state’s medical examiner’s office has yet to announce an official cause of death.
Sorrow spread quickly around the league Saturday because Eaton, just 64, was a beloved figure in NBA circles, as much for the way he campaigned for retired players as for his own unlikely rise from the community college ranks to an 11-year career with the Jazz that peaked with one All-Star selection (1988-89). It was also the latest in a string of devastating bike accidents involving NBA figures, adding to the anguish felt in October, when longtime Houston Rockets scout BJ Johnson was killed on a ride in Houston. In March, Shawn Bradley, the 12-year veteran center, announced through the Dallas Mavericks that he had been paralyzed in January after a vehicle struck him during a ride in St. George.
Gobert dedicated the Jazz’s Game 3 victory in Memphis on Saturday night to Eaton. The 7-foot-4 Eaton often told the story of his struggles at UCLA, where he barely played in two seasons, until the iconic Wilt Chamberlain watched him in a few practices and told him to focus on dominating around the rim instead of trying to match the mobility of faster opponents. Eaton repeatedly passed the same message on to the 7-foot-1 Gobert, who, like Eaton, was not an instant force in the NBA, after Denver selected him with the 27th overall pick in the 2013 draft on Utah’s behalf.
“I feel his presence,” Gobert said after the Game 3 win, adding that he could imagine receiving his customary postgame text message from Eaton that read, “Way to protect the paint, big guy.”
My personal memories of Eaton are equally fond. As a basketball-loving resident of Orange County, California, it was impossible for me not to be schooled on the Eaton fairy tale — how he had been spotted by a coach from Cypress College while working as a mechanic and had been talked into joining the community college team, at age 20, after he had given up the sport. Eaton was earning an annual salary of $20,000 at Mark C. Bloome Tires, but he showed enough promise at Cypress to be drafted by the Phoenix Suns with the 107th overall pick in the fifth round of the 1979 draft, before deciding it would be wiser to transfer to UCLA rather than trying to go directly to the pros.
The Jazz selected Eaton in the fourth round of the 1982 draft at No. 72 overall after his virtually nonexistent Bruins career. In his third NBA season, he blocked 5.6 shots per game to set a single-season league record that still stands. His last season as an active player with the Jazz (1992-93) narrowly preceded my first season as an NBA beat writer (1993-94), but Eaton also holds a distinction found in only one record book — mine. He was the first NBA player I ever interviewed.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A small memorial for former Jazz player Mark Eaton is erected on the Jazz note in front of Vivint Smart Home Arena on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, before the start of Game 5 of an NBA basketball first-round playoff series against the Memphis Grizzlies in Salt Lake City, UT.
During the summer of 1989, as a part-time correspondent for The Orange County Register while attending Cal State Fullerton, I was dispatched to cover the NBA’s annual summer league at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I had spent months pestering an assigning editor, Robin Romano, who graciously put up with my badgering. Summer league in those days was nothing at all like the monster enterprise we see now, with big crowds in Las Vegas and cameras everywhere. Established NBA writers rarely covered it — especially those based in Southern California accustomed to long playoff runs reporting on the Showtime Lakers.
Romano fought for me to get the assignment, partly because I had besieged her with reminders that, thanks to my overseas ties and full-fledged NBA nerdity, I was already well-acquainted with the Lakers’ little-known first-round draft pick from Europe: Vlade Divac. Yet it was Eaton I encountered first in the LMU hallway as I entered the gym, and I approached him, terrified, for an interview — and without any good questions or even a story angle.
Eaton had just made his lone All-Star appearance five months earlier and, if I remember right, was not even playing that day as one of the veterans known, in that anything-goes era, to drop in unannounced to get some run. As a 20-year-old neophyte, I just figured I better interview an NBA All-Star because I saw one. To my relief, Eaton couldn’t have been nicer about my lack of preparation or know-how as I held my tape recorder as high as my meager, trembling wingspan could manage.
He got me through it. I recounted the tale for him more than once in recent years and, when we last spoke nearly three months ago for the Gobert piece, Eaton made sure to remind me: “I love your story about Loyola.”
Video of that interaction, had it existed, wouldn’t be nearly as compelling as the footage of Eaton pedaling in the halls of a Vegas hotel, or the great clip that has been circulating of Eaton smothering a drive to the basket by former NBA player Rex Chapman with his right palm without jumping. Yet Eaton’s compliment, coming from the gentle giant who had one of the best backstories in NBA history, is one I plan to hang onto.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
