Deron Williams was sitting there, and I walked up. ``Hey man,'' he said, ``How you doing?'' He leaned over to shake hands, but I didn't want to interrupt. Some young man was next to Williams with his arm around his shoulder.
Technically, the man's arm wasn't touching Williams. It was around him, but with about two inches of air between it and Williams' shoulder.
Behind me, a young woman was taking a picture of them.
Williams looked up at me, closed his eyes halfway and shook his head. The man behind him left, and some woman came up, putting her face close to his while someone else took a picture.
``They never stop,'' Williams said, never looking at these people or seeming to notice that they were there.
He looked like a statue in a park. And these people? They were the pigeons.
This was the strangest press conference I've been to. The men's U.S. basketball team, the biggest rock stars of the Beijing Olympics, just finished talking in an auditorium packed with reporters and Olympic volunteers.
The way it works, they spread the players around to all different parts of the room. That way, we reporters can get to them to ask questions one-on-one, or in small groups.
So I went to talk to Williams, the former Illini player now with Utah in the NBA. And people kept coming up to him for pictures. I don't who these people were, but theoretically, they weren't media.
They were doing the same thing to Carmelo Anthony, one after another, while he took questions. They did it to all the players they could get close to, and that meant most of them. Only Kobe Bryant and LeBron James spoke behind a table up on a stage.
``You should see when we were eating lunch,'' Williams said. ``They come up and stand behind us.''
They put their faces up to behind the players and smile. I have to say it was disconcerting the way these people never said a word to Williams, never asked him for a picture, never asked him to smile. Never thanked him. Nothing. There was zero interaction.
It was a non-relationship, relationship. And Williams was talking about them but they didn't seem to notice.
They just approached him as if he were a site on a vacation. Or maybe like one of those cardboard cutouts that make it look like you're standing next to something when you had your picture taken.
In this case, they really were standing next to something, behind him, around him.
``Yesterday,'' Williams said, ``I'm sitting like this.''
He put his hands into his team jacket pockets by his side. His fingers were in the pockets, but the bottoms of his hands were sticking out.
``Some guy comes up and tries to put a marker in my hand. He's just trying to stick it in there for an autograph.
``I'm like: `No.' ''
