O'Donnell: Bob Logan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and an unexpected meeting of Hall of Fame minds

IN THE MOMENT, NO ONE knew it.

But two basketball legends were about to collide.

Or at least, intersect.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sat in front of his locker. His back was to all. His unspoken message was, "Stay away."

The visiting Los Angeles media knew to comply. The homies downstairs at Chicago Stadium on this February night quickly understood.

Abdul-Jabbar wasn't being nasty. He just preferred to be left alone with his thoughts and whatever pregame antsiness might have remained 15 years into his long NBA career. This was, after all, just another tipoff, another Tuesday.

Besides, young Magic Johnson was regaling all who wished to be regaled a few lockers away. He was the effervescent point pilot making the Lakers prime time again. The Bulls - their final edition before the entrance of Michael Jordan - were merely road rubble.

Suddenly, a voice - assertive and touching basso profundo - boomed from the entrance door to the locker room:

"Hey Kareem, did you get the book?"

Abdul-Jabbar, startled, looked over. So did everyone else.

The big fellow's mask dropped ever so slightly. He actually almost smiled. His eyes widened.

"'Lefty' I did," Abdul-Jabbar said. "Where did you possibly find it?"

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"LEFTY" WAS BOB LOGAN - then in his 18th and final season as Bulls beat writer for the Chicago Tribune.

He wasn't just another Bulls beat writer. He was the best ever and to this day, remains the best ever.

On Monday in Houston, at a luncheon hours before the NCAA men's championship game, he will be posthumously inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers Association's Hall of Fame.

"Lefty" will go in along with Seth Davis of CBS and The Athletic, the pioneering Lesley Visser of The Boston Globe and later CBS, Kevin Scarbinsky (Birmingham News) and Grant Wahl, the Sports Illustrated comet who died so sadly at age 49 last December while covering the World Cup in Qatar.

Logan died in 2006 at the age of 74. He completed his 28-year run at the Tribune in 1988 and then, in a masterstroke of hiring by Dan Baumann, Doug Ray, Bob Frisk and Jim Cook, spent the next 13 years covering college sports for The Daily Herald.

There is more than passing irony in Logan going into a college writers hall of fame while having yet to receive the Curt Gowdy Award from the Naismith Hall in Springfield, Mass.

The list of Gowdy honorees - which encompasses both broadcast and written word, all mainly with NBA roots - includes the clearly worthy, the sort of worthy and a few "I'm droppin' 'em" house-mouse toadies.

But no Logan.

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THAT VOID IS NOT LOST on Malcolm Moran, the executive director of the USBWA and the man who steered a 10-year campaign to get Logan into his group's most charmed circle.

"Bob was such a professional," said Moran, who now serves as a professor and director of the Sports Capital Journalism program at IUPUI in Indianapolis. He gained national respect as a mainstay on the sports staffs of The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today.

"He knew everybody. But he was also such a good person, a gracious man. If you were covering something alongside him, he made you feel like you were part of a team, that you could ask him anything. He was such a talent."

But the Gowdy Award?

"The problem becomes that as new generations take over, past greats like Bob are forgotten," Moran said. "And that's unfortunate, but that's reality. It would take quite an unusual new movement to get him into Springfield."

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THAT FACT IS REGRETTABLE to those whose first exposure to all of the underdog uncertainty and magical nuttiness of the startup Bulls was gleaned through Logan's ceaseless dig, sparkle and spank for The Trib.

He was there on day one when first head coach Johnny Kerr and assistant Al Bianchi rolled out the basketballs for the 1966 rookie camp at Wheaton College.

He was there in St. Louis when Guy Rodgers, Jerry Sloan and all somehow beat Richie Guerin's Hawks in their first regular-season game ever, on a Saturday night in October 1966.

Most memorably, Logan was there for all of the knee burns and ego scrapes when Dick Motta's ferocious upstreamers - Sloan, Norm Van Lier, Bob Love, Chet Walker, Tom Boerwinkle - battled, bled and ultimately busted out against more talented teams at the top of the NBA's pre-disco vertical.

"Dick was a power guy and Lefty was just a very consistent, thorough, honest reporter," Bob Weiss once said in a 1998 interview. (Weiss lived for almost all of 1968-74 run with the Bulls in the upscale Stonegate neighborhood of Arlington Heights.)

"We all had problems with Dick, especially after he also became G.M. and negotiated our contracts. Lefty would never violate confidences but he had a way of letting us know which way the winds were blowing. He was that wired in."

Decades after the frays, Motta - from his cozy fishing resort in southern Idaho - grudgingly told a bearded Sun-Timesman: "Logan never backed down, even when he was wrong. With his attitude, he probably could have played for me ... at least for a while."

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AND ABOUT KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR and that book.

Later that evening, in the hockey press box - the postgame writing press box at Chicago Stadium - the Daily Herald's NBA apprentice couldn't resist. He asked Logan what was with the book.

"It's an old book about Kareem's primary tribe back in Nigeria," the Hall of Famer said, with his signature drollness. "I said 'tribe in Nigeria' so you don't think I'm talking about the Cleveland Indians. Kareem eats that stuff up. I found it in a used book store in Philly and I knew he'd love it. So I sent it to him."

People sometimes wonder how eager young sports writers get slightly less stupid.

Occasionally, through the grace of the kings, the moon and planets and stars improbably align.

And all that then has to be done is to just stay quiet and watch legends intersect.

• Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears Sunday and Thursday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.